This book was begun during the year I spent as a Research Associate at the International Institute for Strategic Studies. I therefore owe a large debt of gratitude to the directorial staff of the Institute (at that time Francois Duchêne, Kenneth Hunt, Christoph Bertram and Ian Smart) who, collectively and individually, encouraged me in my efforts, increased my understanding and constructively criticized my successive drafts. I owe an equal debt, if of a different nature, to the administrative staff: most notably to Meryl Eady, who helped locate and acquire essential material; to Vera Sands, who transformed my recorded speech into intelligible English; to Patricia Evans, who arranged for the retyping, reproduction and distribution of my initial draft; and to John Wheelwright, who edited it. And to my fellow Research Associates, notably Robert Kleiman and Hannes Adomeit, I owe thanks for both their professional and their personal contributions, as I also do to Christopher D. Carr, who assisted with research; without them, my year in England would have been duller, my work harder.

That year was made possible by a sabbatical leave from the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs of the University of Pittsburgh, and my research was aided by a grant from the University Center for International Studies. My continuing work on the book was also aided by my long-suffering students, a number of whom spent a term assessing the problems of arms control and security in Europe (and my draft manuscript on the subject) and three of whom (Artis Francis Allen, Richard Asplund and Richard Herrmann) sought out the information needed to keep that manuscript more or less up to date. In that task they were abetted by Mary Ellen Bayuk, who incorporated into the several versions the numerous changes necessitated by a changing world.

Finally, I should like to thank all those—Russian as well as American and Canadian, East European as well as West European—who answered my questions, set forth their own views and challenged mine; if I do not list them all by name it is only because their number is too great. Although I cannot claim that I have reflected their (some-times divergent) opinions on European security and ways in which arms control could affect it, I can truly say that my book is the better for their contributions. If, after all this, the product has shortcomings, I have no one to blame but myself !

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
October 1976

J. I. Coffey