Dean, a former U.S. conventional arms control negotiator, knows his subject better than anyone; his historical chapters and appendices provide a wealth of useful background. His call for a sharp conventional arms build-down, cast against the rush of events since his writing, raises sharply the question of whether the bloc-to-bloc arms control format that seemed promising when the Russian bear was strong still makes sense when the bear is weak, the Warsaw Pact crumbling and East European states eager to be rid of Soviet forces.