ABSTRACT
The choices facing US policymakers vividly demonstrate that strategy in the nuclear era depends on judgments that cannot be fully grounded in prior historical experience. Far more than in the pre-nuclear age, decision-makers must base policy on hypothetical strategic theories and uncertain judgments about the theories' likely consequence. Given the intellectual complexity and grave implications of such decisions, it is hard to envy the persons who must make them, and modesty befits outside observers no less than high officials. It is not too much to insist, however, that a wise US policy toward strategic weapons must rest on a rigorous examination of Soviet policies, views, and options with regard to ballistic missile defense. In the 1970s one of the principal US criticisms of the salt agreements was that US negotiators had naively assumed they could convince Soviet military planners to adopt the US concept of mutual assured destruction.
