The Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START) began 1982 and were arms control negotiations between the United States and the Soviet Union (and, later, Russia) that were aimed at reducing those two countries’ arsenals of nuclear warheads and of the missiles and bombers capable of delivering such weapons.
The START negotiations were successors to the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks of the 1970s. In resuming strategic-arms negotiations with the Soviet Union in 1982, U.S. President Ronald Reagan renamed the talks START and proposed radical reductions, rather than merely limitations, in each superpower’s existing stocks of missiles and warheads.