ABSTRACT
Many observers have remarked that President Ronald Reagan's national security bureaucracy did not rush to invent and polish a new-sounding nuclear strategy concept or slogan. The Reagan Administration, in large part, is conducting the implementation of a strategic vision already substantially delineated by officials in the last years of the Carter Administration. The Reagan election story was to the effect that the United States needed more military power of all kinds, ergo, the problem was to rebuild America's military power, rather than to design clever-sounding policy. In 1961-62 the US Government decided that it required a far greater degree of flexibility in its strategic nuclear war planning. The Reagan Administration inherited a strategic policy, in a conceptual sense, with which it found little fault. Political and strategic processes are inherently dynamic. It follows that policy in all its aspects similarly must be adjusted in detail, though preferably not in principle, as the problems that it addresses change their form.
