ABSTRACT
Although its roots can be traced much further back, arms control did not become a major issue in international politics until the 1960s. But in the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis, when it seemed that nuclear war had been narrowly averted, arms control became a very appealing idea. Arms control proposals that the superpowers could agree on started to appear, supporting organisations and structures became established, and inspection procedures developed. Cynics did not fail to note, however, that almost equal effort went into figuring out how to circumvent arms control, or undermine it. As later developments in the Cold War made clear, the success or failure of arms control is determined by the decisions of the participants, and these decisions reflect their values and motivations. Precisely because of these features, the academic study of arms control came to rely on game theory.
