List of arms control treaties and their details.(Knight Ridder Newspapers)

1969 _ Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT I) begin between the United States and the Soviet Union. Negotiations involve limits on both offensive nuclear weapons and defenses against missile attack.

1972 _ Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev and President Richard Nixon sign the two SALT 1 documents. The first limited strategic offensive weapons. The second was the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, which limited each side to two anti-missile sites of 100 interceptors each, to protect one offensive missile site and each nation's capital. The ABM Treaty enshrined the doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD), which held that because neither superpower could defend against a nuclear attack, neither would risk launching one.

1974 _ The ABM treaty is modified by a protocol reducing the number of ABM launchers and interceptors to 100, and the deployment area to only one.

1979 _ Brezhnev and President Jimmy Carter agree on a SALT II agreement calling for further reductions in both sides' nuclear arsenals. It was never ratified by the U.S. Senate, but President Ronald Reagan agreed to abide by its limits until May 26, 1986, when he said the United States would shape its nuclear forces based on the strategic threat posed by the Soviet Union.

1983 _ President Ronald Reagan announces a multibillion-dollar research program to study new defenses against ballistic missile attacks, which becomes known as the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). Critics label ...