aiprospects.substack.com/p/security-without-dystopia-new-options
1 correction found
Allow each other to fly surveillance aircraft over their military facilities, subject to constraints on rates, time windows, and (through restrictions on cameras and sensors) query types.
The U.S. and Soviet Union did not actually reach that agreement. Eisenhower proposed reciprocal overflights in 1955, but the Soviet Union rejected it; the Open Skies Treaty enabling such flights was signed in 1992 by a larger group of states after the Cold War.
Full reasoning
This bullet is presented as an example of something the US and Soviet Union agreed to, but the historical record does not support that.
The closest antecedent is President Eisenhower's 1955 "open skies" proposal for mutual aerial inspection. The U.S. Department of State's Office of the Historian says Eisenhower proposed that each country be allowed to overfly the other for mutual inspections, and that "Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev refused the proposal." So the US and Soviet Union did not agree to reciprocal surveillance flights at that time.
The later treaty that actually created a regime of observation flights was the Treaty on Open Skies, but that was signed in Helsinki on 24 March 1992 as a multilateral post-Cold War agreement. OSCE materials describe it as being signed by 26 member states of the Atlantic Alliance and the former Warsaw Pact, not as a bilateral US-Soviet agreement. In other words, the practice described in the bullet corresponds to the later Open Skies framework, not to an agreement actually reached by the US and Soviet Union as such.
So the article conflates (1) a 1955 US proposal that the Soviet Union rejected with (2) a later 1992 multilateral treaty that came after the Cold War.
3 sources
- Milestones in the History of U.S. Foreign Relations - Office of the Historian
At a conference in Geneva in 1955, U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower proposed an "open skies" plan... Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev refused the proposal, continuing the established Soviet policy of rejecting international inspections in any form.
- Open Skies: successes and uncertainties of an iconic post-Cold War instrument | Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe
The Treaty on Open Skies was signed on 24 March 1992 in Helsinki... by 26 member states of the Atlantic Alliance and the former Warsaw Pact. The genesis of Open Skies goes back to the year 1955 when Dwight Eisenhower... proposed to the Soviet Union the principle of free mutual over-flights...
- Signing of Treaty on Open Skies | Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe
24 March 1992: The Treaty on Open Skies, setting out the framework for a regime of observation flights over the territory of participating States, is signed in Helsinki.