THE RIGHT BOOKS

Here is a superb book: The Arms Control Delusion (Institute for Contemporary Studies Press, 243 Kearny Street, San Francisco, Calif. 94108; $16.95), by Senator Malcolm Wallop and Angelo Codevilla. It is a triumph of research, synthesis, argumentation, and plain good writing by two men eminently qualified for the job. Senator Wallop, the Senior (Republican) Senator from Wyoming, served from 1977 to 1985 as either chairman or ranking minority member of the Senate subcommittee in charge of the U.S. intelligence budget, and from 1979 to the present as an official Senate observer of the arms-control talks between the United States and the Soviet Union; during the period 1979-1982 he was a chief sponsor of the antimissile defense program that President Reagan discovered and announced to the world as the Strategic Defense Initiative in 1983. Angelo Codevilla, currently a Senior Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, has been a U.S. naval officer, senior staff member of the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, and a member of the President’s transition teams for the State Department and the CIA. The American arms-control community, which in its glacial omniscience makes the New England Transcendentalists appear forthcoming by comparison, will no doubt either snootily ignore or disdainfully reject the book; which nevertheless is likely to have what the First Amendment gang would call a “chilling effect” in Washington circles where such arcane matters are discussed.

The Wallop-Codevilla thesis, as stated resoundingly in the Introduction and skillfully reinforced on nearly every page, is that the arms-control process is a solipsistic one, “something we do to ourselves, largely by ourselves. . . . The ‘process’ is our process, in which some among us restrain others among us, citing the necessity of dealing with the Soviets as yet one more reason for doing so. . . . The treaties are our treaties—‘salient’ for us, not for them. It is for us to explain to ourselves both the Soviets’ activities and our own in terms of the treaties”—the Soviet Union being merely “there to help.”

CW

About the Author

Chilton Williamson Jr.

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Here is a superb book: The Arms Control Delusion (Institute for Contemporary Studies Press, 243 Kearny Street, San Francisco, Calif. 94108; $16.95), by Senator Malcolm Wallop and Angelo Codevilla. It is a triumph of research, synthesis, argumentation, and plain good writing by two men eminently qualified for the job. Senator Wallop, the Senior (Republican) Senator from Wyoming, served from 1977 to 1985 as either chairman or ranking minority member of the Senate subcommittee in charge of the U.S. intelligence budget, and from 1979 to the present as an official Senate observer of the arms-control talks between the United States and the Soviet Union; during the period 1979-1982 he was a chief sponsor of the antimissile defense program that President Reagan discovered and announced to the world as the Strategic Defense Initiative in 1983. Angelo Codevilla, currently a Senior Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, has been a U.S. naval officer, senior staff member of the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, and a member of the President’s transition teams for the State Department and the CIA. The American arms-control community, which in its glacial omniscience makes the New England Transcendentalists appear forthcoming by comparison, will no doubt either snootily ignore or disdainfully reject the book; which nevertheless is likely to have what the First Amendment gang would call a “chilling effect” in Washington circles where such arcane matters are discussed.

The Wallop-Codevilla thesis, as stated resoundingly in the Introduction and skillfully reinforced on nearly every page, is that the arms-control process is a solipsistic one, “something we do to ourselves, largely by ourselves. . . . The ‘process’ is our process, in which some among us restrain others among us, citing the necessity of dealing with the Soviets as yet one more reason for doing so. . . . The treaties are our treaties—‘salient’ for us, not for them. It is for us to explain to ourselves both the Soviets’ activities and our own in terms of the treaties”—the Soviet Union being merely “there to help.”