Negotiating Arms Control: Missed Opportunities and Limited Successes

This is a book of contrasts. Its contributors include both arms control negotiators and their critics. Its content spans questions about the need for nuclear weapons and the urgency of arms limitation. The authors are Republicans and Democrats. One group emphasizes successes in the unending task of limiting weaponry, while another points to the continuing use of nuclear weapons in establishing strategic stability and nuclear deterrence. The virtue of a multi-authored volume such as this one is that it helps readers understand, apart from the misconceptions that partisan politics and thirty-second sound bites foster, the realities of the arms control process and negotiations leading to such agreements. The analysis of differing approaches to negotiations-Soviet and American - is one of the interesting aspects of this collection of essays. The intent of the contributors is to help fill the void in these aspects of the arms limitation literature.