A serious, oddly literate and heavily footnoted history of the disarmament idea, running from Erasmus to the present - the best argued of the Soviet volumes on militarism, and the one that states most explicitly why its own argument may not be applied to the state that commissioned it.
Usachev takes the question historically: the humanist and pacifist traditions, the Hague conferences, the interwar disarmament negotiations and their failure, the postwar United Nations machinery, the test ban, non-proliferation, SALT, and the proposals then on the table in Geneva and Vienna. As a survey of how the idea of general disarmament has actually been argued over five centuries, it has few competitors in English.
The date can be fixed almost to the month, and the months are the sharpest of the decade. The latest event anywhere in the text is Andropov's reply to questions put in May 1983 by several Finnish organisations, with a Warsaw Pact proposal of February 1983 behind it. Andropov is quoted ten times and is alive throughout.
So the manuscript closes around the middle of 1983 and reached English readers a year later - before the Korean airliner was shot down that September, before the first Pershing IIs arrived in West Germany in November, before the Soviet delegation walked out at Geneva, and before Andropov's death in February 1984.
New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.
