Politics Over Promise: Domestic Impediments to Arms Control

Disappointment with negotiated arms control as it has been practiced over the past two decades is widespread and is found as much among proponents as among critics. This disappointment, caused largely by the decade-long failure to achieve telling limitations on strategic offensive nuclear forces, has spawned a veritable cottage industry of writings on the future of arms control, writings which seek new, more fruitful approaches to arms control or new recipes for success in given negotiations. Lavish attention has been given to the problem of rethinking, restructuring, restarting, fixing, or otherwise improving the prospects for and the effectiveness of negotiated arms control. Serious debate has erupted over whether the problem has been that arms control has been asked to do too much or too little. Analysts have struggled for new formulae that might permit the arms control impasse to be broken. A public movement has rallied around the idea that a comprehensive nuclear freeze is the most effective means of imposing restraint on the nuclear arms competition.

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