The Cold War’s most famous arms treaty banned an entire class of nuclear weapons — and was not the deal its negotiators had originally been working toward. The INF Treaty, signed in Washington on December 8, 1987 by President Ronald Reagan and General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev, eliminated ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles with ranges of 500 to 5,500 kilometers. By the treaty’s deadline of June 1, 1991, roughly 2,700 missiles had been physically destroyed: 1,846 Soviet (SS-4, SS-5, SS-12, SS-20, and SS-23) and 846 American (Pershing II and Ground-Launched Cruise Missile).
The INF Treaty was the most concrete accomplishment of the Reagan-Gorbachev relationship. It also established a verification regime — on-site inspections, continuous monitoring of production facilities, data exchanges — that went further than any previous agreement and became the model for START I, signed in July 1991, and for the chemical and biological weapons agreements that followed.
The Long Road to Zero
The negotiations had begun in 1981, with the Reagan administration’s “Zero Option” proposal: the elimination of all intermediate-range nuclear forces on both sides, with no offsetting Soviet deployments of shorter-range systems. The Soviet Union, then under Brezhnev and Andropov, called the proposal a propaganda ploy and walked away. The negotiations were suspended in November 1983, after the Soviet shootdown of Korean Air Lines Flight 007 in September and the deployment of Pershing II missiles to Western Europe in response.
The resumption came with Gorbachev. He had become General Secretary in March 1985, and by the Geneva summit in November 1985 the two leaders had agreed to restart the talks. The October 1986 Reykjavik summit produced a near-breakthrough. Reagan and Gorbachev came close to an agreement on the total elimination of nuclear weapons, but the talks foundered on the question of the Strategic Defense Initiative — Reagan’s proposed missile defense, which the Soviet side wanted included in any deal. The INF framework survived the failure.
The breakthrough came in 1987. The two sides traded positions through the autumn, with Gorbachev making a critical concession in late September to separate intermediate-range from strategic weapons. The treaty was initialed on September 17 and signed on December 8 in a White House ceremony. Reagan and Gorbachev exchanged remarks that the elder George Shultz, the American secretary of state, would later cite as a vindication of the negotiations.
The Weapons Eliminated
The treaty covered ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles with ranges of 500 to 5,500 kilometers. Three categories were banned: existing systems (to be destroyed), launchers, and support structures. The Soviet weapons affected were the SS-4 (a 1960s-vintage medium-range ballistic missile), the SS-5 (a longer-range ballistic missile from the same period), the SS-12 (a shorter-range tactical system), the SS-20 (a modern solid-fuel intermediate-range ballistic missile deployed in 1977 and the subject of much of the European anxiety of the early 1980s), and the SS-23. The American weapons were the Pershing II ballistic missile, a two-stage solid-fuel system with a range of 1,800 kilometers that could reach Soviet targets in less than ten minutes — the Ground-Launched Cruise Missile (GLCM), a smaller system designed for forward deployment in Western Europe.
Both sides destroyed the launchers and support facilities, not just the missiles. The 846 U.S. missiles were destroyed at sites in the United States and one at a site on Greenham Common in the United Kingdom. The Soviet destruction was carried out at Sary Shagan, Surovatikha, and other sites, with American inspectors present.
The Verification Regime
The verification provisions were unprecedented. The treaty allowed on-site inspections of declared missile facilities, including short-notice inspections of 20 percent of the declared sites. Continuous monitoring of the major assembly plants was established — the Votkinsk Machine Building Plant in Russia and the Magna, Utah plant of Thiokol in the United States. The sides exchanged detailed data on the numbers, types, and locations of missiles and launchers. The verification provisions have been used as the model for the START I Treaty (1991) and the Chemical Weapons Convention (1993). The verification regime was the most important non-proliferation institution of the 1990s.
The Collapse of the Treaty
The INF Treaty remained in force for thirty-one years. In August 2019 the United States withdrew, citing Russian development of a ground-launched cruise missile (the 9M729, also called the SSC-8) that the United States judged to be in violation. Russia had earlier accused the United States of violating the treaty by deploying missile-defense launchers in Romania that could be used to fire offensive cruise missiles — a charge the United States denied. The collapse of the INF Treaty was a serious blow to arms control. The 2010 New START Treaty, the last strategic-arms agreement between the two sides, is set to expire in February 2026 and has not been extended.
Why It Mattered
The INF Treaty mattered for three reasons. It removed a class of nuclear weapons that had been a serious source of European anxiety in the early 1980s. It demonstrated that the two superpowers could negotiate seriously on arms control. It established a verification regime that became the foundation for later agreements. The collapse of the treaty has not reversed the original elimination — the missiles are still gone — but it has removed the principal constraint on intermediate-range arms, and it has produced new questions about the architecture of European security that were, in 1987, thought to have been settled.