The 1960s was a decade of administrative reform. Popular and concerned opinion was focused on the operation and organization of government, the content of its programmes and the impact that they had and might have had. In retrospect there seem to have been few generally acclaimed successes. The achievement of the POLARIS Executive, in procuring a squadron of POLARIS armed nuclear submarines to act as Britain's nuclear deterrent into the 1980s, was an exception. In its organization and operation, the POLARIS Executive appeared to validate the prescriptions for programmatic and managerial success in government which contemporary preoccupations in the study of policy-making have generated. Current policy studies are dominated by a productive process model of organizational behaviour and political activity - termed here the Programmatic approach. The sources of this approach, its impact on and reflection in the administrative reforms of the last decade, are analysed here in detail. The programmatic approach is rejected as a means of analysing the operation and success of the POLARIS Executive. Instead an alternative conception of organizational behaviour and policy-making more akin to "paradigmatic" activity is developed.