ABSTRACT
As the last decade of this century began it looked as though a major agreement on conventional armed forces in Europe would soon be reached with surprising ease. The negotiators in Vienna were scrambling to resolve the remaining hard issues about such points as numbers of combat aircraft and definitions of main battle tanks, but it was expected that these would soon be settled and that during 1990 a great new force reductions agreement would be established that would entail the removal and elimination of tens of thousands of pieces of military equipment from the inventories of NATO and the Warsaw Pact countries. Not only that: the first agreement, CFE I, would pave the way to further rounds of negotiation on the reduction of conventional armed forces in Europe, and a new era of mutual security and positive co-operation would dawn in the old continent.
