ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that Graham Allison may underestimate the significance of two aspects of his paradigms: the role of laws and regulations in Model II and, in Model III, the role of interpersonal initiative by people who are not leaders. It may enable us to speculate on ways in which one of the models may possess relatively greater explanatory power as the decisions under examination move down the ladder from crises and other "major" events to more routine national security concerns. The legal restraints on the governments reaction to the Natural Resources Defense Council project confined its policy-making at least as much as the informal bureaucratic routines, and they had no greater relationship to the particular issues posed by the seismic monitoring exchange.
