Lynn Davis was a staff member on the Senate intelligence committee and the National Security Council before serving as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Policy Plans under the Carter administration. In the latter position she focused on NATO, nuclear and arms control issues. She begins by recalling the Helmut Schmidt speech that initiated the Euromissiles debate, and the U.S. reaction. Describing the High Level Group, she recounts the range of European concerns that dominated politics at the time, such as the reliability of the U.S. nuclear umbrella. What began as narrowly focused concerns broadened into discussions of the future of NATO nuclear strategy, a process she goes into in some depth. Along the way she gives her views of the dual track decision, explaining how it came to be adopted. She then discusses the time period from a personal perspective, including how it felt to be a woman, rare at her level, making high-level decisions about weapons. She explains the differences in view between those who saw nuclear weapons as war-fighting means and those who looked at them as deterrents. This is followed by her response to the critique that Pershings showed that the U.S. wanted to keep the war zone centered in Europe, away from the United States. She also describes the shift in views over time in the West about the SS-20 and the threat it posed.
