This volume appears at a time when the prospects for banishing the threat of nuclear annihilation are brighter than at any time since the first atomic device exploded over the desert at Alamogordo. The last few years have seen an ex traordinary change in the climate of East-West relations. The programme of political and economic reform which President Gorbachev initiated in the Soviet Union and which is now spreading throughout most of Eastern Europe has been parallelled by serious efforts to reach agreement on measures for conventional and nuclear disarmament. This has led to new hope that...