In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

The Washington Quarterly 23.2 (2000) 219-232



[Access article in PDF]

The Road Ahead for Arms Control

Brad Roberts

Is Arms Control Dead?

How is arms control likely to evolve? Will arms control grow more important to the national security of the United States or less so? Will growing numbers of states seek arms control to enhance international stability or reject it as unreliable? These are perennial questions. They are gaining new currency at the end of the 1990s as major elections loom in the United States, Russia, and elsewhere. 1

The first post-Cold War decade seems to have raised more questions than it has answered about the future of arms control. Its purpose has drifted in U.S. policy circles while the international community has been uncertain about where it might be headed. Its process over the last decade has been determined largely by momentum, a momentum that appears to be dissipating. That decade began in promising fashion for arms control. The long-running U.S. debate between its advocates and opponents had given way to broad consensus about the utility of arms control to manage the end of the U.S.-Soviet confrontation. The 1990s also brought a host of possibilities for arms control in the new bilateral U.S.-Russian relationship. Additionally, the end of the Cold War led to a new, nearly global consensus that proliferation challenges required substantial improvements to the nuclear, biological, and chemical (NBC) weapons control regimes.

But the promise of arms control so evident at the beginning of the decade is not so evident today. Some of the most important possibilities for deep nuclear reductions have proven difficult to capture. Waiting for Russian ratification of the second Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START II) is [End Page 219] like "waiting for Godot," and the Clinton administration's decision not to pursue further agreements until START II was ratified has meant that the 1990s passed without formal negotiations on new measures. At the same time that bilateral approaches have receded in importance, multilateral approaches have multiplied and gained international prominence. But it has also proven difficult to turn the desire for a stronger global treaty regime on NBC weapons into reality.

Moreover, the political energy in Washington devoted to arms control has receded almost as quickly and dramatically as the Soviet threat. A large measure of the available energy has been spent on what might politely be called "reengineering" of the arms control process within the U.S. government, as both the Departments of State and Defense have reorganized to deal with the arms control agenda. Arms controllers have been asked to do more with less (some would even prefer that they do less with less). The broad centrist commitment to arms control so evident a decade ago has been replaced by something more familiar: a replay of the old debate between the two extremes, between those who believe arms control is not in the national interest and those who see it as an unalloyed good, as the right and necessary work of any decent nation. Political gridlock in Washington has deepened, with the Senate holding a growing number of treaties hostage--or killing them outright, as in the case of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). Not surprisingly, congressional involvement in the arms control process has brought partisanship with it and a growing willingness to exploit national security issues for domestic political gain.

So what next? In speculating about the role of arms control over the next decade, most experts in the arms control community anticipate that momentum will continue. By and large, they tend to predict an expanding writ for arms control, through the broader and more effective implementation of existing regimes and the accretion of new instruments. The future they envision is a fairly linear projection of the past, though with some bumps along the way to be sure. But the future may prove rather different from this caricature. Momentum alone may not propel the process much further. The bumps may turn out to be rather severe and the writ of arms control may well contract...

pdf

Share