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The Washington Quarterly 23.2 (2000) 179-182



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The Demise of Arms Control?

James Schlesinger

Is Arms Control Dead?

Is arms control dead?--certainly not if its proponents recognize and adapt to the altered world in which we now live. Alternatively, if we fail to adapt and instead pursue arms control objectives derived from a bipolar world or reflecting naïve, universalist assumptions, arms control will be useless and, at times, counterproductive.

The proper objective for arms control is to increase international stability and, more directly, the security of the United States and its allies. It should not be, as its most eager supporters advocate, simply to reduce armaments.

The central feature of classic arms control agreements was that the United States and the Soviet Union could enhance mutual stability and thus their own security by agreeing to limit certain categories of (destabilizing) armaments, providing such agreements could be verified. Thus, overall international stability would be enhanced. The risk, of course, was that achieving or preserving the agreement might become an end in itself and that such painful questions as compliance or whether the agreement actually enhanced stability would be overlooked.

Even during the Cold War, the presupposition of bipolarity was pressed by some further than it should have been, as if the United States and the Soviet Union were alone in the world. Some advocates, for example, tended to forget the simple fact that U.S. forces provided extended deterrence for U.S. allies in Europe--and, in a somewhat more benign context, in northeast Asia. Thus, the generally bipolar world was complicated by the need to take third parties into account. In that bipolar world, many arms control issues could be viewed in terms of duopoly--in that only the United States and [End Page 179] the Soviet Union had significant capabilities, and thus the task was one of negotiating with, and scrutinizing the behavior of, one's principal adversary.

But the Cold War is now over; the Soviet Union is gone. Advanced weapons capabilities have spread and will further spread to other parties. Thus, the analogy for arms control has now shifted from duopoly to cartel--in which the behavior of numerous other parties must be watched and preferably controlled. This is a far more demanding task. History teaches us that smaller participants in cartel agreements frequently enter those agreements with no intention to comply in the long run (and frequently not even in the short run). They enter into the cartel agreement to restrict the behavior of others, to draw advantages for themselves, and with every intention, to put it bluntly, to cheat early. In the history of cartels, incidentally, it has normally been the leader that has born the principal burden of complying with the agreement. For that reason, it is particularly incumbent upon the leader to be wary at the outset regarding the details of the agreement.

Consider the goal of nonproliferation. What we have seen in the last half-century is that proliferation cannot be prevented--but it can successfully be slowed. Indeed, compared with the fears expressed in the 1950s and 1960s, the spread of nuclear weapons has been remarkably slow. (It might have been even slower if the United States, priding itself on its openness and its eagerness for declassification, had not so generously spread around information on how to design and produce nuclear weapons).

Given the metaphor of the cartel, the necessary target for arms control is to constrain those who desire to acquire nuclear weapons. A Luxembourg or even a Germany may have no inclination to exploit an arms control agreement as a cover for cheating, but others will have that simple objective. A general agreement imposes no restraint on a North Korea or an Iraq. They will be constrained by direct pressure or by direct action, if they are to be constrained at all. For rather different reasons, an India or an Israel is not going to be constrained by a general agreement. To believe otherwise is to embrace the quixotic notions of the Kellogg-Briand Pact.

Thus the question of...

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