The concept of non-offensive defense (NOD) originated in Europe as a means of defusing the East-West conflict. In this volume, some of the founders and leading proponents of NOD show how alternative regimes could be modified and applied in conflict areas around the world - among the former Warsaw Pact countries and in the former Soviet Union, as well as in the Middle East, Asia, and elsewhere.

The contributors also assess the effects that an increased role for the United Nations might have on future national defense restructuring initiatives. Demands for reformulating defense strategies, born at the end of the Cold War and fed by nuclear arms limitation agreements and public insistence on lower defense expenditures, have continued to grow. The contributors argue that opting for more offensive postures would make war more rather than less likely; opting for a strategy centered on defensive armed forces would be far more likely to prevent future wars and to facilitate broader arms control and disarmament agreements. The discussions offer workable guidelines for restructuring the armed forces to eliminate their offensive - mutually threatening - features and to preserve or increase their more beneficial defensive capabilities.