First of all, it is not the case that the Arms Control Agency is a sacrificial lamb to congressional critics. Senator Jackson says that the trouble is with the Administration’s policy, not ACDA. The Agency will continue to play a large role, but it is only sensible to separate the negotiation process from the policy planning process.

It is awesome to consider nightmare scenarios such as Mr. Perle has proposed. The overriding aim of our strategic nuclear policy must be to see that they never become reality. No one likes the idea that our defense rests on the threat of genocide. But no one has yet devised a more effective deterrent. Mr. Perle’s suggestions ultimately rest on technological breakthroughs which may or may not happen. However, I do agree that the lessons of SALT I should be borne in mind when making predictions about the outcome of SALT II.

The adoption of the “Comprehensive Programme for the Further Extension and Improvement of Cooperation and the Development of Socialist Economic Integration by the CMEA Member-Countries,” to quote the document’s full title, opens a new chapter in the history of the self-styled “Socialist Commonwealth.” Two years on the drawing board, the 25,000-word encyclical is a strange mixture of ideological clichés, abstract formulations of political, economic, and juridical desiderata, projections of distant ends, references to proximate objectives, and elaborations of the concrete ways and means by which the next plateau on the road to the Communist millenium shall be reached. Approved at the 26th session of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA) which met July 27-29, 1971, and subsequently ratified by the top political organs of the member states, the program enjoys locally the formal status of a multilateral treaty whose principles validly bind the CMEA partners to a general code of conduct aimed at achieving certain select goals by various designated methods. At the same time it represents a theoretical blueprint of how the leaderships of the countries concerned would like the region’s economic organism to perform in an optimal setting and how they propose to bring that situation about.

Comecon has achieved a goal long sought by the West: putting into effect a broad unification of international trade law. In 1958 each Comecon country adopted the Comecon General Conditions for the Delivery of Goods. Since then the General Conditions have regulated with the force of law every contract for the sale of goods between the Comecon countries. These General Conditions are a broad unification of both substantive law and conflict of laws rules.