ABSTRACT
Unavoidably, any discussion of negotiations on strategic offensive arms will include a fair amount of specifics about numbers and mixes of weapons systems. Intuitively, the min-max proposition is not a startling one, and an objective observer might even be inclined to suppose that the same proposition would hold for the negotiating behavior of any party to strategic nuclear arms talks, including the United States. In fact, Soviet officials seemed distracted by the attractive possibility that popular opposition in Western Europe to the planned NATO deployments could unilaterally reduce a military threat to the USSR and could weaken the NATO alliance. For purposes of establishing a baseline for decision making in nuclear arms negotiations against which actual negotiating behavior can be measured, the proposition assumes that each side seeks to minimize the limits on its own forces and to maximize the constraints on the threatening forces of the adversary.
