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During my visit to Moscow in March, Brezhnev proposed banning underground tests of nuclear weapons above a certain yield (later set at 150 kilotons). This opened up discussions on verification that represented a major advance. If we were to verify that tests were below the threshold, the Soviets would have to reveal their test sites. This—surprisingly—they agreed to do. The question of "peaceful nuclear explosions" then arose. We asked for on-site inspection, and after prolonged wrangling the Soviets agreed. Never before had they done so. But by then detente had been engulfed in controversy in America and doubt in Moscow. At home, the threshold test ban failed not by attracting bitter animosity, as with SALT, but by indifference. Most liberals, preferring a comprehensive test ban, fought the agreement and killed the first breakthrough toward on-site inspection. Conservatives saw no reason to rescue causes liberals had abandoned.
SALT was the most difficult issue at the 1974 summit. It had become a whipping boy in a deeper struggle over the entire nature of U.S.-Soviet relations and even over Nixon's fitness to govern. Even so, after meetings near Yalta in the Crimea, where Brezhnev had taken our whole party for a few days, it was decided that I would not accompany Nixon on a visit to Minsk but would return to Moscow to see whether progress could be made.
Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko and I met on July 1, 1974. We had been talking about extremes: either a permanent agreement that caused everyone to protect against every conceivable contingency, or a two-to three-year extension of the 1972 interim agreement, too short a period. Perhaps we should aim for a new agreement that would run for, say, ten years, from 1975 to 1985. Gromyko accepted and the negotiations were placed in a different framework. Nixon and Brezhnev agreed to meet during the winter to implement the new approach.
The strange thing was that by all normal criteria, the summit was a success. Significant agreements had been signed—not so fundamental as on previous occasions, but the sort of accords that showed that the two superpowers took progress in their relationship seriously. Even in SALT we had come much closer to an understanding of each other's position than was generally realized; otherwise it would not have been possible for a new President to conclude the negotiations within four months of entering office as Ford did at Vladivostok—an agreement that has yet to be improved in more than seven years of further negotiations.