ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on strategic nuclear arms control— control over the intercontinental weapons that might be exchanged by the United States and the Soviet Union. Discussions of strategic arms control ignore the connections to other aspects of military and international political policy. The chapter examines the relationship of arms control to its context. The resolution of the missile crisis made possible the first significant arms control agreement between the United States and the Soviet Union, the Atmospheric Test Ban Treaty. Without voluntarily abandoning the plans or the weapons of nuclear control, the administration shifted the emphasis to the arms controls favored by the Limiters. One measure of the nuclear emphasis is that in addition to benefiting from a defense budget that more than doubled from fiscal 1982 to fiscal 1989, strategic forces went up as a percentage of the whole from 7.7 percent to 8.0 percent.
