ABSTRACT
Arms control has become less of a component of national strategic military planning and more of an alternative; negotiating propositions have become an escape from the dilemmas of long-term programming. The problems of orchestrating defense policy and arms control were illustrated in the early years of the Nixon administration. Despite some back-channel maneuvering by the White House under Henry Kissinger, the major Strategic Arms Limitation Talks and defense-policy decisions in the early 1970s were made within the framework of the new centralized bodies within the National Security Council: the Verification Panel and the Defense Review Committee. Two rough organizational models of arms control-defense integration have emerged in practice. The first model appeared during the Kennedy-Johnson era and featured lower-level coordinating committees and informal but high-level decision-making groups. The second model, from the Kissinger period under both Nixon and Ford imposed a more structured process, with permanent institutions, that gradually gained more influence and power.
