ABSTRACT
A remarkable military—as opposed to a political—stability between East arid West characterizes international security. This balance shows its familiar robustness in the nuclear strategic field. The conventional balance in the defined areas of East-West deterrence in Europe and the Far East favors the Soviet Union on most indicators, but the risk of any conflict becoming nuclear continues to be a major deterrent. The ambiguities have produced concepts that are essentially open ended. The most obvious example is the concept of limited nuclear options. Nuclear arms control has other problems, of course, and the instrument, which was hailed with so much genuine hope in the 1960s, has witnessed growing difficulties: of verification, of preventing circumvention, of catching up with the dynamics of technological change. Making deterrence respectable again means to be less ambiguous about what nuclear deterrence can actually achieve. The European Security Conference has become too much of an open forum to hold much promise for discrete crisis communication.
