APUSH Russia Speech Extra Credit

Joe Springer Hr. 2

Dr. Irina Bystrova brought up many interesting points Tuesday night relating
to the military relationship between America and Russia, yet in the end she failed to
state a call to action as to how any of these problems could be fixed. Dr. Bystrova
mentioned many treaties over the past few years that have shaped our nuclear
relationship with Russia. The START II treaty in 1996 was the start of peaceful
negations yet failed to establish itself official as US congress voted against renewing
it in 1997, thus rendering the act useless thereafter. It was replaced with the SORT
treaty, a treaty that while thought to be similar, contained a much different set of
rules. The SORT treaty did not call for an elimination of nuclear devices as the
START II treaty did, but rather to set a limit on how much each country may
produce. Both countries at this time were highly against banning all nuclear
weapons as a terrorist group may possibly get their hands on one and then have
complete domination of the nuclear field market, leaving the US and Russia
defenseless. The SORT treaty is set to renew in December of this year. Another key
treaty mentioned was the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. The treaty allowed two fixed,
ground-based defense units of 100 missiles each. One would act to guard each
nation’s capitol (Moscow and Washington D.C.) , and another that would guard the
general ICBM field to protect the rest of the country. These units were built by each
country in 1976, and since then, America has taken both of its units out of
operation while Russia has only taken one out. While Dr. Bystrova does a good job
at reading the paragraphs of information off of her slides, she fails to really educate
the audience further into what should happen next. I failed to really understand the
stance she took. Were these treaties a good thing? Should we simply renew the
SORT treaty in December and live on as usual? Or does action need to be taken?
Are these Nuclear Treaties only a bigger threat to our planet? Even during the
question and answer portion of the lecture, Dr. Bystrova failed to go any further
then the general scope of her poorly made PowerPoint. Overall, I would say that Dr.
Bystrova presentment good information, yet failed to go into any sort of real
analysis. Where did she stand? What should we do next? Although I’m sure any
Russian buff would have been happy to hear the plethora of facts she emitted, one
can defiantly concluded that Dr. Bystrova created wonderful pieces of rich, meaty
chicken and thick noodles, yet failed to dump them all in a chicken broth worth
entertaining the room.