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Introduction Arms Control and the Power of Belief The logic—or, rather, the illogic—of the U.S. approach to strategic nuclear arms control is featured in this book, which is written with a hint of irony. In negotiating the control of strategic nuclear weapons, U.S. officials weighed the numbers carefully to get a better deal, to split differences to close a deal, and to create offsets to sweeten a deal. Given the stakes, they could do no less: these weapons can travel intercontinental distances, from land, air, or sea, to destroy entire cities. But their sense of security derived not from objective readings of the numbers; instead it drew on underlying beliefs about U.S. benefits and costs under the proposed or accepted terms of an agreement. These beliefs provided a deficient understanding of whether, how, and when various arms control treaties with Russia worked to the U.S. advantage or disadvantage. Consequently, the terms of these treaties were never as good as U.S. proponents claimed—or as bad as opponents feared.1 By the 1960s, a major problem was that U.S. policymakers gave too little thought, in turn, to whether, how, and when Russia (given its goals) might be inclined to use nuclear weapons. Their thinking produced a perverse paradox: U.S. policymakers divided ideologically—as hawks and doves—on their assumptions about Russian goals yet ignored these same assumptions in developing their arguments . They concentrated, instead, on operational matters—preserving force structures (the U.S. triad of air, land, and sea capabilities), various balances and imbalances (which favored the United States or Russia), and “loopholes” in treaties for cheating—that were consequential only because of those assumptions. The logic of arms control suffered, accordingly, from two main deficiencies. First, it was incomplete: advocates for and against various treaty provisions took vague positions on key specifics or left basic questions unanswered. Whereas hawkish analysts highlighted unfavorable “imbalances” in numerical aggregates 2 Flawed Logics and in various types of weapons in various locations, their reasoning centered far more on the fact of an imbalance than on the actual utility of the weapons that were involved. They failed to ask, what benefits do the Soviets derive from the alleged advantages, and how will the Soviets realize or capitalize on them? It was one thing to claim that the Soviets could employ their silo-killing, land-based missiles in a disarming strike on U.S. land-based missiles; it was quite another to establish that the United States—given its formidable surviving assets (on the land, in the sea, and in the air)—had to address an underlying asymmetry in U.S. and Soviet land-based missile capabilities. Second, the logic was inconsistent : advocates supported or opposed treaty terms by employing contradictory arguments. For example, critics derided the 1972 Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) I Treaty for weakening the U.S. competitive position while conceding that the Soviets were in the stronger position without a treaty. Likewise, policymakers made their case for removing U.S. intermediate-range missiles in Europe under the “zero-zero” formula of the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty without reconciling it with the logic—of extending deterrence to Europe— that was used to justify placing missiles there in the first place. In consequence, neither Cold War nor post–Cold War policymakers could validly claim that the United States was actually better off with one set of treaty provisions than another—or that arms control “successes” and “failures” were all that they seemed. The United States made arms control concessions that could actually have compromised U.S. interests, and it failed, at times, to seize opportunities by making necessary concessions to achieve a useful agreement. These deficiencies in logic—on all sides of the policy debate—impugn realist assertions that states, trapped by a security dilemma, scale their arsenals to meet certain relative-capability standards. The Security Dilemma: A Questionable Basis for Policy The realist “security dilemma” has long shaped our understanding of why states arm and spurn disarmament even when conditions appear ripe for an international agreement that would limit or reduce national arsenals. The appeal of the logic stems largely from its compelling simplicity: in an anarchic international system, states must provide for their own security by attending first and foremost to their relative capabilities, that is, they must boost their capabilities to thwart the improvements of others (Jervis 1978). Because any gains for one state effectively amount to losses for...

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