Volume 35, Number 9 · June 2, 1988
The World Without INF
By Lord Zuckerman
Stemming the Tide: Arms Control in the Johnson Years
by Glenn T. Seaborg, with Benjamin S. Loeb
Lexington Books/D.C. Heath, 495 pp., $24.95
What will historians say when they start writing about the 1987 INF Treaty, and about the disarray into which it threw the Western alliance? Continuing dissent over the treaty is either genuinely designed to clarify certain issues about verification or, as some commentators suggest, to delay or even frustrate ratification by the Senate. NATO, too, has not as yet resolved its problems about the post-INF 'restructuring' of its remaining and vast arsenal. But however these matters are sorted out, and whatever aspect of the story on which historians may choose to concentrate, the signing of the treaty will emerge as a watershed in international relations and a moment when the nuclear strategies of both East and West were exposed in all their nakedness. My guess is that most scholars will conclude that the specific provisions President Reagan and General Secretary Gorbachev agreed upon—to dismantle and destroy costly nuclear rockets—were the least important outcome of the long negotiations in which the two had been engaged. Some will judge that what was more significant was that agreement was reached despite the powerfully nurtured belief that the Russians can never be trusted, that they would never allow a sufficient measure of intrusive on-site inspection to satisfy the critics that they could be trusted—not that people such as Senator Jesse Helms could ever be satisfied. No doubt there will be a few who consequently ask whether the issue of 'verification,' of which so much has been made in the arms-control negotiations of the postwar years, has not been exposed for what it has sometimes seemed—a political smoke-screen to hide the fact that one or the other side never wanted the negotiations to succeed.
Review, 5951 words
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