ABSTRACT
North Atlantic Treaty Organization is one of the most successful alliances in history. This chapter deals with three issues: The perennial nuclear problem—especially the growing trend toward the no-first-use doctrine, Intermediate-Range Nuclear Force negotiations, and East-West relations. Technology tended toward equality at least in the sense that a strategic exchange was certain to produce casualties on both sides such that any additional capacity to cause damage would lose all relationship to conceivable objectives. Arms control is being asked to banish the danger of nuclear war and to reverse the trend in East-West relations. Indeed, it almost surely supplied an incentive for the Soviets to procrastinate in the negotiations to test the resolve of the Western governments. The Soviet chief of staff, Ogarkov, has repeatedly warned that the use of European-based intermediate-range weapons could trigger an immediate Soviet retaliatory blow against the United States.
