New Prospects for Arms Control

The history of arms control over the past seven years has been an astounding and lurid tale, full of unexpected twists, cynical betrayals, palace maneuverings, popular insurrections, and ironic turns of the dialectic. Through it all has stumbled the extraordinary figure of Ronald Reagan, as innocent of knowledge as he is of guile, his Manichaean vision of good vs. evil offset by his faith in the redemptive power of his own niceness, his ignorance and rigidity offset by his amazing luck. And as the last reel begins, he is rescued from himself by a deus-ex-Moscow.

At both ends of the period, like novelty-store bookends, are two episodes of what responsible moderates in the arms-control priesthood deplored as “loose talk.”...