INF Treaty (1987): Eliminating Intermediate-Range Missiles

The INF Treaty, formally the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, was an arms-control agreement signed by US President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in Washington on 8 December 1987. It required both countries to destroy all their land-based nuclear and conventional missiles with ranges of 500 to 5,500 kilometres. It was the first treaty to abolish an entire category of nuclear weapons and to allow intrusive inspections on each other’s territory, and it helped bring the Cold War to an end.

Background: the Euromissile crisis

Earlier agreements such as the SALT I Treaty had limited long-range strategic weapons but left intermediate-range missiles untouched. In 1976 the Soviet Union began deploying a new mobile missile, the SS-20, which carried three warheads and could strike targets anywhere in Western Europe within minutes. West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt warned publicly in 1977 that this created a dangerous imbalance in Europe.

On 12 December 1979 NATO adopted its “double-track decision”. It would deploy 108 Pershing II ballistic missiles and 464 ground-launched cruise missiles in Western Europe from 1983, while offering to negotiate limits with Moscow. The plan provoked some of the largest protests in post-war European history, with hundreds of thousands marching in Bonn, London, Rome, Amsterdam and other cities, and women’s peace camps outside bases such as Greenham Common in England.

Failed talks and deployment

In November 1981 Reagan proposed the “zero option”: the United States would cancel its deployment if the Soviet Union dismantled its SS-20s and older SS-4 and SS-5 missiles. Moscow rejected the idea as one-sided. Negotiations opened in Geneva at the end of 1981, and in July 1982 the negotiators Paul Nitze and Yuli Kvitsinsky worked out an informal compromise during their famous “walk in the woods”, but both governments rejected it.

When the West German Bundestag approved deployment in November 1983 and the first Pershing II missiles arrived, the Soviet delegation walked out of the talks. The episode came during one of the tensest periods of the Cold War, the autumn of the Able Archer 83 exercise. Talks did not resume until March 1985, the month Gorbachev came to power.

The road to the treaty

Gorbachev wanted to cut military spending and improve relations with the West. At the Reykjavik Summit in October 1986 the two leaders agreed in principle to eliminate intermediate-range missiles in Europe, but the package collapsed over Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative. On 28 February 1987 Gorbachev announced that the Soviet Union would negotiate an INF agreement separately from missile defence.

Several obstacles remained. The Soviet side agreed to a “global double zero”, eliminating both intermediate-range missiles and shorter-range missiles of 500 to 1,000 kilometres, not only in Europe but also in Asia, removing a concern of Japan and China. The status of 72 older West German Pershing IA missiles, whose warheads were under US control, was resolved when Chancellor Helmut Kohl announced in August 1987 that they would be dismantled. Foreign ministers George Shultz and Eduard Shevardnadze settled the final details in the autumn.

One concession later became controversial in Moscow. The Soviet negotiators agreed to include the SS-23 Oka missile, whose range the Soviet military put at about 400 kilometres, below the treaty threshold. Some Soviet officers regarded this as a needless sacrifice, and the episode fed resentment within the armed forces against Gorbachev’s foreign policy.

The signing and the terms

Reagan and Gorbachev signed the treaty on the afternoon of 8 December 1987 in the East Room of the White House, during Gorbachev’s first visit to the United States. Reagan used the occasion to quote the Russian proverb “trust, but verify”, to which Gorbachev replied that the president repeated it at every meeting.

The treaty covered ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles with ranges of 500 to 5,500 kilometres, whether armed with nuclear or conventional warheads. All such missiles and their launchers were to be destroyed within three years. On the American side this meant the Pershing II, the Pershing IA and the BGM-109G cruise missile; on the Soviet side the SS-20, SS-4, SS-5, SS-12 and SS-23, among others.

Verification was the treaty’s most innovative feature. Each side could carry out short-notice inspections at the other’s missile bases and factories. American inspectors monitored the exits of the missile plant at Votkinsk in the Urals around the clock, while Soviet inspectors did the same at a plant in Magna, Utah. The inspection regime ran for 13 years, until 31 May 2001.

By the numbers

Consequences and end

The US Senate ratified the treaty on 27 May 1988, and Reagan and Gorbachev exchanged the instruments of ratification at the Moscow summit on 1 June 1988. Missiles were blown up, crushed or launched to destruction under the eyes of foreign inspectors, a striking image of change at the time. The treaty’s methods of verification served as a model for the START I Treaty of 1991. After the Soviet collapse in 1991, its obligations passed to the successor states with relevant sites, chiefly Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan, and the treaty became in practice a multilateral agreement.

Ratification in Washington was not automatic. Some conservative senators argued that the treaty weakened NATO’s ability to deter a Soviet attack on Western Europe, and the Senate debated for weeks how the treaty applied to future weapons based on new technologies. These questions were settled with a condition attached to ratification, and the final vote was overwhelming. In Western Europe, where the missile controversy had dominated politics for almost a decade, the treaty was greeted with relief, although some defence experts worried about weakening the American nuclear guarantee.

The treaty did not remove the warheads themselves, which could be reused, and the weapons it covered made up only a small share, often estimated at about 4 per cent, of the superpowers’ nuclear arsenals. Its political importance was much greater than its military effect, because it showed that deep cuts and intrusive inspection were possible.

From 2014 the United States accused Russia of violating the treaty by developing a ground-launched cruise missile, the 9M729 (NATO designation SSC-8). Russia denied the charge and made counter-accusations about US missile-defence launchers in Europe. The United States suspended its participation in February 2019 and withdrew on 2 August 2019, and the treaty lapsed.

Timeline

• 1976: The Soviet Union begins deploying SS-20 missiles.
• 1979, 12 December: NATO adopts the double-track decision.
• 1981, 18 November: Reagan proposes the zero option.
• 1983, 23 November: Soviet negotiators walk out after the first Pershing II deployments.
• 1986, 11–12 October: Reykjavik Summit.
• 1987, 8 December: Reagan and Gorbachev sign the INF Treaty in Washington.
• 1988, 1 June: The treaty enters into force.
• 1991, 1 June: Deadline for eliminating all covered missiles is met.
• 2019, 2 August: The United States withdraws and the treaty ends.

Why it matters

The INF Treaty was a turning point in arms control. For the first time, the superpowers agreed not just to limit the growth of their arsenals but to destroy an entire class of weapons, under inspection on each other’s soil. The treaty also built habits of cooperation, as hundreds of inspectors from each country lived and worked on the other’s territory for more than a decade. Its demise in 2019 has revived debates in Europe about intermediate-range missiles that many thought had been settled in 1987.