CONGRESSIONAL DEFENSE POLICY-MAKING AND THE ARMS CONTROL COMMUNITY: THE CASE OF THE ANTI-BALLISTIC MISSILE

From 1945 until the key ABM debates in 1969, the Congress of the United States had largely relinquished oversight responsibility on national security matters to the executive branch, particularly on arms control issues. Certainly there were some outstanding exceptions to the pattern of Congressional support for Presidential defense policy; however, it was the exceptions that proved the rule. The ABM debates demonstrated to many members of Congress that they could have a significantly more active role to play in formulating arms control and defense policies. During the course of the ABM debates and following them, many private organizations in the arms control community were created, activated, or expanded to supply members of Congress with detailed information about strategic nuclear doctrine and weapons policy.;Part One of this dissertation describes the central research objectives and methodologies of this study. It also provides a detailed examination of the Ripley-Franklin model and focuses on the model's predictive assumptions regarding the role of Congress, outside lobbies, and executive branch institutions in the determination of structural-distributive and strategic-regulatory defense policies. Lastly, this part of the dissertation includes brief background information about five arms control and disarmament organizations which were deeply involved in the ABM controversy and which were representative of the broad range of political opinions extant in the arms control community in the late 1960's.;Part Two of the study describes several major components of the ABM debates from the perspectives of the campaigns of education and persuasion of the non-governmental arms control community. The first component briefly describes the long political and bureaucratic history of ABM systems in the United States from 1955-1967. The historical review is followed by the second component, a description of the strong public reaction to the deployment of ABM systems near population centers. The many public protests against ABM in cities across the nation led to a number of Congressional hearings on the issue in 1969 and 1970 which are discussed in the third component of this section. Lastly, the detailed lobbying effort of the five arms control groups, and other associated individuals and organizations, is described and analyzed in the fourth and fifth components which focus separately on the strategies and tactics employed inside and outside of the Congress respectively.;In Part Three, the concluding section of the dissertation, the policy impact of the arms control lobbies on Congressional ABM decisions is carefully evaluated. The results of that evaluation are compared to the theoretical policy characteristics predicted by the Ripley-Franklin model. The model is shown to be unable to predict accurately the patterns and relative importance of relationships that were developed by the non-governmental arms control groups. Therefore, a prescriptive analysis for the role of Congress in defense policy-making is offered to assess the permanence and quality of the changes that have occurred as a result of the anti-ballistic missile debates and to determine the part played by the arms control community in any new Congressional defense policy-making system.;The purpose of this study is to describe and analyze the role of the non-governmental arms control community in the ABM debates and to assess how the participation of the community in the ABM controversy may have contributed to producing a permanent change in Congressional defense policy-making procedures. In this analysis, the relevant policy model employed was the one developed by Randall Ripley and Grace Franklin. It sets forth the patterns existent in the Congressional-Executive relationship for three types of foreign and defense policies.