This article deals with the domestic political discussion of arms and arms control in West Germany prompted by the December 1987 US-Soviet treaty on medium-range missiles. It focuses on Chancellor Helmut Kohl's Christian Democratic Union-Christian Social Union coalition, and deals with the party's traditional security policy, its reaction tothe INF treaty and the Gorbachev initiatives on arms control, the schools of thought discernible within the alliance, and the direction CDU-CSU policy is likely to take on a range of issues that will be of significance to West European security up to the early 1990s. The article concludes that despite the considerable impact of recent events on CDU-CSU attitudes, ambivalence and internal divisions remain a major obstacle to the coherence of the Union's policies; and that it will thus continue seeking to link NATO decisions on arms and on arms control, and put off definitive decisions on either, in a fashion reminiscent of Bonn's approach to NATO's original 'two track' policy on intermediate-range missiles.