| This study examines U.S. strategic nuclear arms control efforts from the early 1960s to 2000. It seeks to understand why this arms control process yielded only moderate results after some 40 years. The U.S. and Russia retain sizable nuclear forces despite the end of the superpower competition. These large strategic nuclear forces remain a matter of concern. The goal is to learn from these past efforts in order to assess the possibilities for further strategic nuclear arms reductions.; The negotiations for the SALT I, SALT II, START I and START II treaties provide four historical cases studies to examine how consecutive domestic political windows of opportunity for strategic arms control have opened and closed. To analyze the political process, the significant factors that determine political outcomes in the U.S. political system are examined: the President, his administration, the Congress, the important federal bureaucracies, the public, and the media. Relevant international events are incorporated into this framework: Soviet actions, international crises, etc.; A variety of sources-from historical archives, recently declassified documents and those released under the Freedom of Information Act, presidential papers, official histories, oral histories, memoirs, congressional hearings and reports, contemporary media accounts, specialist publications, interviews, and important secondary scholarship—are used to investigate the cases.; Most analyses of strategic nuclear arms control were completed during the Cold War. Few were done in the 1990s and none have examined the four treaty cases. One conclusion is that previous analyses underestimated the difficulties of advancing any major piece of public policy, including arms control, in the face of the crowded political agenda. The problems strategic nuclear arms control have faced are not intrinsic to it per se, but result from many outside circumstances or political opponents' deliberate interference. No easy public policy solution exists to these problems. Students of the president's domestic political agenda have noted, however, the likelihood of the success of any major policy initiative is greater if it is launched earlier in a presidential administration and pursued consistently without too much competition from other initiatives. The same applies for strategic nuclear arms control. |
