ABSTRACT
The two projects on arms control organized in Cambridge during 1960 brought together a wealth of ideas, many of which are accurately and inspiringly preserved in the rapporteur’s reports and collected papers of the Summer Study of Arms Control. The participants were generally well known to each other, even though some were relatively new to the emerging field of security studies. The lack of attention to the problem of designing an arms control approach sensitive to democratic requirements and processes was one of the critical failings of the Cambridge Approach. Though ultimately damaging to the viability of the theory, this oversight was perhaps understandable. The public’s general interest in disarmament was evident, indeed pressing. A detailed critique of the Cambridge Approach or even a description of the evolution of its features through the 1960s is beyond the scope of the present analysis. It remains simply to summarize the findings regarding its intellectual ancestry.
