INF Treaty Signed

In December 1987, United States President Ronald Reagan and Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty in Washington. It was the first agreement of the nuclear age to eliminate an entire class of weapons rather than merely cap their growth. The treaty banned all land-based ballistic and cruise missiles with ranges between roughly 500 and 5,500 kilometers, and it marked a turning point in the easing of Cold War tensions.

The roots of the treaty lay in a European crisis of the late 1970s. The Soviet Union began deploying the SS-20, a mobile, multi-warhead intermediate-range missile that could strike Western European capitals within minutes. NATO responded in 1979 with a "dual-track" decision: it would deploy American Pershing II and ground-launched cruise missiles in Western Europe while offering to negotiate limits. The deployments, which began in 1983, triggered large protests across Western Europe and left many people feeling that their continent had become the likely battlefield of a nuclear war. Early negotiations in Geneva stalled, and the Soviets walked out in 1983.

Talks resumed in 1985 after Gorbachev took power and began pursuing domestic reform and a less confrontational foreign policy. Reagan, long a vocal critic of Soviet communism, had also come to favor deep reductions in nuclear arms. The two leaders met at Geneva in 1985 and at Reykjavik in 1986, where they discussed sweeping arms cuts but failed to agree, largely over Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative. Progress came when Gorbachev agreed to treat intermediate-range missiles separately and accepted unusually intrusive verification, including on-site inspections. Reagan's "trust, but verify" approach, borrowed from a Russian proverb, became closely associated with the deal.

The treaty was ratified by the US Senate in 1988 and entered into force that year. Over the following three years, the two sides destroyed nearly 2,700 missiles, with inspectors from each country observing the process at the other's facilities. Historians still debate how much credit belongs to Reagan's military buildup and pressure, to Gorbachev's reforms and economic constraints, or to the European protest movements, and most see a combination of these factors.

The treaty helped build the trust that made the later Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty possible and contributed to the peaceful end of the Cold War. Its legacy proved fragile, however. In the late 2010s, the United States accused Russia of violating the agreement by developing a banned cruise missile, which Russia denied, and the United States withdrew in 2019. Russia followed, and the treaty ended, leaving a once-banned category of weapons open to development again.