Strategic Arms Control And U S National Security Policy

In this closely reasoned and lucid analysis, an important thinker on American strategy surveys weapons technology and its military and political implications for the 1970s. J. I. Coffey refutes the argument that American national security requires “superior” strategic offensive forces or extensive air and missile defenses. In so doing he assesses in simple terms the various factors involved in this complex and difficult subject. While many books on strategy deal only with a single area or a particular weapons system, this work synthesizes technical and non-technical considerations across the whole range of national security issues affected by strategic power-war-fighting, deterrence, Communist behavior, alliance relationships, nuclear proliferation, and arms control. Its orderly and authoritative marshaling of tabulated data, its citations from Department of Defense documents and congressional hearings, and its classifications of the alternative options which strategy makers can now pursue, are all invaluable to both the student of national security and the professional strategist.

These essays, collected to commemorate the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency's 25th anniversary, span not only ACDA's lifetime, but the four decades of the nuclear era. The articles provide a sampling of the arms-control-related speculation and controversy that has existed during those years. Since many of the authors are either current members of the U.S. Government or have strongly influenced its policy over the years, these essays on the formulation of U.S. arms control and national security policies have almost assumed the status of classics. The authors represented include Fred Ikle, Henry Rowen, Paul Nitze, George Kennan, Robert McNamara, Thomas Schelling, Albert Wohlstetter, and James Schlesinger. S/N 044-000-02164-1: $12.00.

For more than forty years, the United States has maintained a public commitment to nuclear disarmament, and every president from Ronald Reagan to Barack Obama has gradually reduced the size of America's nuclear forces. Yet even now, over two decades after the end of the Cold War, the United States maintains a huge nuclear arsenal on high alert and ready for war. The Americans, like the Russians, the Chinese, and other major nuclear powers, continue to retain a deep faith in the political and military value of nuclear force, and this belief remains enshrined at the center of U.S. defense policy regardless of the radical changes that have taken place in international politics. In No Use, national security scholar Thomas M. Nichols offers a lucid, accessible reexamination of the role of nuclear weapons and their prominence in U.S. security strategy. Nichols explains why strategies built for the Cold War have survived into the twenty-first century, and he illustrates how America's nearly unshakable belief in the utility of nuclear arms has hindered U.S. and international attempts to slow the nuclear programs of volatile regimes in North Korea and Iran. From a solid historical foundation, Nichols makes the compelling argument that to end the danger of worldwide nuclear holocaust, the United States must take the lead in abandoning unrealistic threats of nuclear force and then create a new and more stable approach to deterrence for the twenty-first century.

This benchmark study in the field of national security and weapons control was first published in 1961. Republished with a new preface providing the perspectives of 1985, it focuses on the world's military environment and analyzes how that environment may or may not be improved through political arms control efforts. The authors begin with a framework for understanding security, defense and arms control relationships. They also provide a framework for evaluating arms control proposals and for determining whether these proposals are in the security interests of the United States. ISBN 0-08-032391-X : $14.95 ; ISBN 0-08-032390-1 (pbk.) : $9.95.