Lessons from Failure: Vienna One and What We Can Learn from It

Abstract

After fifteen years of fruitless negotiation, the NATO/Warsaw Pact talks on the “Mutual Reduction of Forces and Armaments and Associated Measures in Central Europe,” referred to in the West as the “Mutual and Balanced Force Reduction” or M.B.F.R. talks, were closed down quietly and without recrimination on February 2, 1989, to make way for the expanded C.F.E. force-reduction talks, which began the following month. The M.B.F.R. talks will probably come to be considered the most resounding failure in the history of postwar arms control.