Renovating Arms Control through Reassurance

Security policy has traditionally focused on the threat of deliberate aggression with a clarity and emotional intensity that presumably derives from the far recesses of time. For most of history, it was appropriate to be primarily concerned with intentional aggression since the destruction human beings could inflict on one another had to be consciously organized if it was to occur on a major scale. It is increasingly evident, however, that advanced technology and the sheer magnitude of human activity are generating a different form of threat. Today, an unanticipated chain of spontaneous effects might rival or exceed the destructiveness of intentional war. This sort of accidental war might erupt, ironically, from the military operations designed to protect against the risk of classic aggression itself.

The danger of accidental war was demonstrated in World War I and was recognized in its aftermath. The experience of World War II, however, obscured the lesson and powerfully reinforced the traditional concern of intentional aggression. Over the ensuing decades, as the instruments of warfare acquired capacities for rapid and massive destruction, the military forces that wielded them were configured to deter or to defeat deliberate attack. Precautions were taken to assure that their enormously destructive power would not be employed without legitimate authorization, but those precautions were clearly subordinated to the purpose of deterrence. That effect was achieved and is plausibly credited with preventing at least the largest forms of deliberate aggression, but the accomplishment has enabled a massive accident to occur. Overwhelming deterrence entails some inherent risk of inadvertent catastrophe.

The political consciousness of the Cold War that inspired the commitment to overwhelming deterrence is distant history, but its major legacy has survived essentially intact and largely uncontested. The main protagonists--the United States and Russia--are now attempting to work out an amicable relationship, but each still maintains thousands of nuclear weapons continuously prepared to initiate a massive assault on the other within a few minutes. The destructive capacity of these forces poses the greatest physical threat to both societies and to the rest of the world. In the absence of an ideological quarrel, however, there is such abiding faith in deterrence that the risk of potential destruction is accepted as assuring protection rather than as presenting an imminent danger. There has been no serious attempt to terminate mass deterrent operations. Even reducing forces to levels that have been provisionally agreed upon will not remove the ability to inflict damage far beyond any historical experience.

By contrast, the arms control process designed to contain the capacity for destruction has been subjected to a barrage of querulous objection. The Russian Duma has not ratified the second Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START II), even though the ceilings it imposes are substantially higher than the deployment level Russia is likely to be able to sustain over the long term. The U.S. Senate has voted against ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) even though it would lock in a large technical advantage for the United States and is considered by much of the world to be an established obligation essential for the prevention of proliferation. In both instances, it appears overwhelmingly obvious that the two countries are far better off with the spurned treaties than without them, but vigorous arguments to the contrary have been advanced as an apparent extension of domestic politics.

In the case of the CTBT, U.S. opponents claimed that the treaty could not be verified. The range of plausible uncertainty, however, is well below the minimum explosive yield for any test that could be expected to produce useful weapons-design information. ¹ Similarly, opponents argued that the reliability of the U.S. weapons stockpile could not be assured over the longer term, even though all nonnuclear components of the weapons could and would be tested under the terms of the treaty. Any suspected problem with the fissionable material could be resolved by remanufacturing them to their original specifications. ² The...