Introduction

Ambiguous outcomes of past efforts aimed at limiting weapons, difficulties encountered by competing proposals for arms reductions, and freezes, increasing demands upon verification, and doubts about compliance with existing agreements have all cast, at best, an unsettling shadow on the, future of negotiated force limitations. War arising by surprise attack has become a greater concern at both the conventional and the strategic nuclear level. By the late 1970s, the Soviets had acquired a "standing-start" conventional offensive option in Central Europe that threatens rapid victory over NATO and, in the context of the demise in the credibility of flexible response, effective denial of NATO's explicit threat of early resort to nuclear weapons to thwart a Pact conventional onslaught. The "crisis instability," in turn, not only enhances opportunities for political coercion and nuclear blackmail, but magnifies the risk of what may be the most likely avenue to war—miscalculation. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.