Americans can be thankful for their many wise and articulate analysts in such places as the Brookings Institution and Time's Washington bureau, as well as in the State Department and other branches of the U.S. Government. Leon V. Sigal, for example, was a visiting scholar at' Brookings when he wrote Nuclear Forces in Europe. His already wide reading knowledge had been enriched by experience as assistant director of the Bureau of Politico-Military Affairs in 1970-80 and by discussions with others at Brookings (for instance, Raymond L. Garthoff, former executive secretary of the SALT I delegation). Strobe Talbott has written two previous books on arms control and foreign policy while working in Washington as Time's diplomatic correspondent. Trained at Yale and Oxford, he has served also in the London and Moscow offices of Time. Talbott has read widely and seems to have easy access to many U.S. policymakers on arms control. Sigal and Talbott display not only a powerful mastery of the relevant facts, but also an ability to present complexities with elegant clarity. They have additional gifts of empathy, wisdom, and cautious realism concerning what can and should be done about arms limitation.