| Summary/Abstract |
Arms control helped maintain strategic stability during the Cold War. However, after the end of the Cold War, the concept of strategic stability has ceased to be a hostage to the Soviet-U.S. confrontation and the nuclear arms race between the two countries. This concept now includes additional international players and security threats. As a result, Russia and the U.S. have different views on factors that affect strategic stability, and the boundaries of this concept have become blurred. Gone is a common understanding of strategic stability, along with a general understanding of the need for arms control as a factor for this stability. In Russian-U.S. relations stability should be reset at several tactical levels, or at least the parties should implement the idea of "tactical stability" as a new conceptual basis for bilateral arms control.
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