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The Strategic Balance, 1972 (Washington Papers, Bk 3)
The Strategic Balance 1972 - Washington Papers, Bk 3 Author:Edward Luttwak The New Strategic Balance and its Implications: The ABM Treaty and SAL Interim Agreement — Unless one believes that strategic nuclear power matters only insofar as it can, or cannot, discourage a surprise attack, one must therefore accept that much of its political significance will derive directly or indirectly from vague perceptions of its dime... more »nsions, rather than from technical computations of relative capabilities...
While leaders of the two super-Powers can perhaps come to operate within the terms of some agreed metric based on their special knowledge of each others' forces and on the prolonged association of their technical delegates in venues such as SAL negotiations, others' perceptions of the strategic balance must derive from the complex of images evoked by the episodic estimates released by one or the other of the super-Powers, primarily the United States.« less