By January 1977, when President Jimmy Carter took office, détente was beginning to show unmistakable signs of wear. In both Washington and Moscow, opposition to further accommodations with the other side was on the rise. While Brezhnev had managed to force the hard-liners to "eat” the Vladivostok accords, the prevailing mood within the Soviet elite was that the United States was losing the arms race and that the correlation of forces had turned in favor of the Kremlin.1 Many in the West—including the Joint Chiefs—agreed that U.S. military credibility was at its lowest ebb since World War II and that the balance of power was in a precarious state. Never, it seemed, had America’s prestige been lower or its status as a superpower so uncertain.