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Conclusion While for much of the Cold War, arms control appeared to focus exclusively on managing the bilateral superpower relationship and capping the arms race, arms control efforts have always been global in nature.The treaties addressed in this text tell the story of how, over many decades, a cohesive and integrated system to promote world stability and to reduce the dangers posed by weapons of mass destruction was established. In helping prevent conflict between the superpowers and preventing the destabilizing proliferation of weapons to regions in conflict around the world, the international arms control treaty regime has served its purpose well, albeit against a challenging backdrop. In the late 1950s, efforts by President Dwight D. Eisenhower to reduce the U.S. defense budget and at the same time protect the European allies from aggression by the Soviet Union conspired to help make proposals for international control of nuclear technology impractical. It became the policy of the United States during this period to use the overwhelming nuclear advantage it enjoyed over the Soviet Union to deter conventional attack. In a January 1954 speech to the Council on Foreign Relations, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles enunciated what would become known as the “massive retaliation” doctrine.1 He stated that, in the event of a new Communist aggression, the United States would “respond vigorously by means and at places of our choosing” and that that retaliation would be undertaken “instantly” and “massively” against the centers of Communist power. Soviet advancements in nuclear and missile capabilities prompted a shift in Western policy to a flexible response posture in the 1960s. In 1974, Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger described flexible response as “a series of measured responses to aggression which bear some relation to the provocation, have prospects of terminating hostilities before general nuclear war breaks out, and leave some possibility for restoring deterrence.”2 Flexible response required the development of new types of weapons and larger arsenals. Coupled with the need to maintain an effective nuclear deterrent, this meant that both sides during this period rapidly expanded their strategic nuclear arsenals, prompting a vast nuclear arms race.At their peak, each nation had more than 25,000 warheads and sufficient delivery systems to destroy the other’s military facilities and industrial infrastructures many times over. It was arms control agreements that reversed the tide. Beginning in the 1970s the arms control process succeeded in stabilizing the U.S.-Soviet nuclear arms race, with the AntiBallistic Missile (ABM)Treaty prohibiting the deployment of a nationwide missile defense,the StrategicArms LimitationTalks (SALT) agreements placing limits on the numbers of deployed delivery systems, the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Force (INF) Treaty eliminating intermediate -range missiles, and the Strategic Arms Reduction (START) treaty reducing the number of each side’s deployed strategic warheads to levels far below Cold War peak amounts.The Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) and the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) constrained the proliferation of chemical and biological weapons, while the Nuclear NonProliferation Treaty (NPT) reined in the proliferation of nuclear weapons and the 1 “John Foster Dulles on Massive Retaliation,” January 12, 1954, in “The Evolution of Foreign Policy,” Department of State Bulletin 30 (January 25, 1962): 107–10. 2 Timothy Gordon, Can Deterrence Last: PeaceThrough a Nuclear Strategy (London: Buchan and Emight, 1984), Chapter 2. nuclear-weapon-free zone (NWFZ) agreements placed large portions of the globe off limits to nuclear weapons.Agreements codifying confidence-building measures reduced the chance of major wars by making catastrophic miscalculations by states less likely. All together, the agreements in this manuscript tell a story of how the international community came together to build an arms control regime that has helped make the world a safer place. The end of the Cold War, however, shifted dramatically the conceptual framework for national and international security and placed new strains on the regime.The bipolar world order, dominated by two superpowers, was replaced with a new, less understood world filled with shifting strategic interests, different and more diffuse threats, and uncertainty about the proper means of confronting them.The roles of arms control and of negotiated reductions in strategic nuclear arsenals remain central to international security, and are likely to for the foreseeable future, but new actors are playing increasingly vital roles. In a word, arms control is becoming increasingly multilateral.The new model for nuclear arms control in the twentyfirst century is one of cooperation among many governments, intergovernmental organizations, and nongovernmental organizations. Of course, multilateral arms control is...

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