The

The So we recently had Dr. Anthony Eames to discuss the history of the presidency and nuclear weapons,

and we were able to get up to the 1980s with President Reagan. We covered a lot

of history. FDR's initiation of the Manhattan Project, which got the atomic bomb started. Truman's

development of the hydrogen bomb, of course, his use of atomic weapons at the end of World War II.

President Kennedy's work on the Test Ban Treaty, President Johnson's work on the non-proliferation treaty,

Nixon and Salt, Reagan and Start, and the INF Treaty. We covered the triad and other issues.

We covered a lot, but the story doesn't end there. Nuclear weapons have been around since then,

so we have had the subsequent four decades to cover. So Dr. Eames is, as we said earlier, the director of scholarly initiatives at the Reagan

Presidential Foundation and Institute. He is the author of a voice in their own destiny, Reagan, Thatcher,

and public diplomacy in the nuclear 1980s, and he's co-author with, along with John Bayliss,

of the book, Sharing Nuclear Secrets. So thanks for coming back.

Thanks, Richard. Glad to be here. So let's go through President Reagan's goal with Start and

INF specifically and how successful he was in achieving those two things. What were they and

how successful was he? Yeah, I'll start with start only because it doesn't end with Reagan and actually ends

with George H.W. Bush, right?

But to break it down in really simple terms, the Reagan administration's efforts and goals

in the strategic arms reduction talks was exactly that reduction.

So previously, arms control agreements between the Soviet Union and the United States

had focused on putting a cap on weapons deployed.

Reagan starts pushing forward for reductions as the key kind of target point, the launch of the

Strategic Defense Initiative, which was a kind of a defense against ballistic missiles,

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