ABSTRACT
The Reagan administration had come into office promising to be true to an overall and coherent security policy, even in the area of arms control. The judgment of history on the strategic concepts of the Reagan administration may well be that they reflected a clear, if debatable, view of the desirable backed up by an inadequate sense of the feasible. Following the November 1980 election, members of the Reagan administration insisted that arms control in the future would at last reflect a coherent overall security concept. In the early stages of the Reagan administration, for example, it was suggested that foreign policy, and indeed arms control, could be effective only if backed up by substantial military strength. The acute sense of crisis that surrounds arms control could already be sensed in the late 1970s. In practice, most analysts have found it easier to relate arms control to defense policy than to foreign policy.
