ABSTRACT
Arms control has been a means of achieving US foreign policy objectives since the earliest days of the Republic. In 1817, the United States and Great Britain signed the Rush-Bagot agreement regulating naval forces on the Great Lakes. That agreement was one of the first freely negotiated arms control agreements and it is one of the oldest still in existence. Since that time, the United States, responding to an increasingly complex and interdependent world, has been actively engaged in seeking the regulation of armaments.
