ABSTRACT
Soviet political control over Eastern Europe is the essential fact of postwar European history. It required "unorganic relationships", that is it was based on military power. The Harmel report restored both as objectives of subsequent approaches toward the Soviet Union, yet without political content and without any strategy for their pursuit. Holding back on conventional arms control, while giving nuclear arms control a central role in political relations with the West, thus provided the USSR with a simple, sustainable political strategy that would put the West into an increasingly constrained position. By essentially confining the East-West agenda to nuclear arms control, a profoundly asymmetric situation arose. The Atlantic alliance has agreed on some kind of a conceptual framework for conventional arms control that avoids some of the more fundamental shortcomings of mutual and balanced force reductions. The opening of conventional arms control occurs with the West as demander and yet with the Soviet Union seizing the initiative.
