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Title: The great universal embrace: Arms summitry--a skeptic's account by Kenneth L Adelman ISBN: 0-671-67206-1 Publisher: Simon and Schuster Pub. Date: 1989 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $19.95

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Average Customer Rating: 4 (1 review)

Rating: 4
Summary: A witty and percipient account of Reagan's arms policies
Comment: Kenneth Adelman served as head of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency under President Reagan, and advised the President at the 1986 Reykjavik summit when the US almost agreed to total nuclear disarmament. Adelman's appointment roused the ire of the arms control establishment, because he frankly thought arms control a waste of effort. In this book, he explains his thinking lucidly and - to this reader, at least - convincingly.

Adelman maintains that the problem with arms control is that it focuses on the wrong issue: hardware, rather than the relations between states. For example, both the UK and France are nuclear-armed powers, yet the prospect of war between them is virtually nil. Why? Because war is a function of the political relations between those states - both liberal democracies - rather than of the precise 'military balance' between them. By extension, arms control throughout the Cold War was a largely forlorn cause, because the true determinant of peace was not the distribution of arms but the political defeat of Communism. Adelman's judgement was amply confirmed by the peaceful defeat of Communism after America had practised a policy of containment - and latterly one of roll-back - for forty years.

But this is not a book about international relations theory. It is also a fascinating account of decision-making within the Reagan administration, given that Reagan was - contrary to his bellicose public image - the only President during the Cold War to believe in the goal of total nuclear disarmament. Adelman is rightly scornful of this notion - a disarmed world would in reality be a constantly-about-to-be-armed world - and gives the most interesting evaluation of Reagan that I have read from one who served in his administration. He recounts appearing before a House of Commons Select Committee in Great Britain and being told by every Member of Parliament, across the political spectrum, that Reagan's aims were not supported on this side of the Atlantic. Adelman does his valiant best before this body, but is quite unable to dispute the logic of maintaining the importance of America's commitment to the defence of western Europe.

Ronald Reagan was among the most consistently under-rated Presidents in American history, and was also far the most dovish on the question of nuclear arms. This conclusion - obvious from his policies, but not from his press - has had scant explication in accounts of American policy in the 1980s (other than in an incisive account by Henry Kissinger in his major work Diplomacy). Adelman does a public service in presenting it in a witty, percipient, historically important and thought-provoking way.