The term "arms control" first came into use in the 1950s in the United
States among military planners and specialists interested in avoiding acci-
dental nuclear war through miscalculation and aware of the pitfalls involved
in Soviet proposals for "general and complete disarmament." Since the
failure of the Baruch Plan in 1946, international control of nuclear weapons
and disarmament had become utopian dreams amid the realities of a Soviet-
American arms race. The devastating power of thermonuclear weapons,
combined after 1957 with the rapid new delivery systems spawned by inter-
continental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), made arms control imperative. Talks
between Soviet and American scientists at businessman Cyrus Eaton's Nova
Scotia estate, Pugwash, initiated a new tradition of bilateral talks between
arms control experts on both sides of the Iron Curtain.

Neither the Soviet Union nor China accepted the concept of arms control
in public, on the grounds that it was a mere bourgeois ploy to continue the
arms race and that, in wartime, men and morale were of greater importance
than technology. Then, in October 1962, the Soviet Union installed
medium-range missiles in Cuba and precipitated a crisis that brought the
powers to the brink of nuclear war. Two arms control measures that quickly
resulted from the Cuban missile crisis were the partial ban on atmospheric
testing of 1963 and the establishment of a "hot line" communications link
between Moscow and Washington. In this way both powers sought to pro-
vide room for weapons development while avoiding misunderstandings that
could lead to war by accident.

Further arms control agreements followed in the 1970s, including non-
nuclear zones in Antarctica and Latin America. The key agreements were
bilateral between the Soviet Union and the United States: the strategic arms

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