ABSTRACT
Arms control and disarmament are considered dull but worthy by the Western media. Governments are expected by editorial writers to be committed to negotiating arms control and disarmament treaties and those like the Reagan administration which are openly sceptical of arms control have been harshly criticised as a consequence. But the media take little interest in the process of negotiation and the detailed issues at stake. Sometimes this is hardly surprising given the technical nature of the problems and the glacial pace of such negotiations. Ways of limiting chemical weapons were discussed for almost 100 years before real progress began to be made on banning their production in the 1990s. The talks on Mutual and Balanced Force Reductions (MBFR) in Europe continued for more than a decade without making any reductions. It would be hard for the media to make ‘news’ of such non-events.
