A Quiet Success for Arms Control: Preventing Incidents at Sea

Preventing Incidents at Sea I T h e 1972 Agreement on the Prevention of Incidents at Sea between the United States and the Soviet Union' is a virtually forgottenremnant of an era that produced dozens of U.S.-Soviet accords. Although it was almost ignored in both the American and Soviet announcements of the various agreements that emerged from the May 1972 Moscow summit, the agreement has helped to avert potentially dangerous incidents between the U.S. and Sovietnavies. Most of the achievements of detente have lost their luster with the passage of time, but the agreement's effectivenessappears to have survived the deterioration of U.S.Soviet relations. The agreement deserves to be considered more closely, not only because it has reduced the oft-overlooked dangers of naval incidents, but also because of its potential utility as a model for other agreements to govern incidents in the air or in space. More generally, the success of the agreement demonstrates that confidence-buildingmeasures-constraints on military activities and improvements in communicationsthat are intended to reduce the risk of inadvertent war or surprise attack-represent a workable alternative to traditional arms control proposals that impose quantitative or qualitative limits on weapons. The 1972 agreement has reduced the number of dangerous incidents and cases of harassment at sea. Before the agreement, encounters between U.S. and Soviet warships on the high seas frequently led to tense situations as opposing vessels maneuvered to disrupt one another's formations or haThe author would like to thank Joseph s.Nye, Eliot A. Cohen, and members of the Avoiding Nuclear War working group for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article. For support during the research and writing of this article, he thanks the Avoiding Nuclear War Project and the Josephine de Karman Fellowship Trust. Sean M . Lynn-Jones is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Government at Harvard Universityand a member of the Kennedy School of Government's Project on Avoiding Nuclear War. 1. The full title is: Agreement Between the Government of the United States of America and the Government of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics on the Prevention of Incidents on and over the High Seas, May 25, 1972. The complete text of the English and Russian versions appears in U.S. Department of State, United States Treaties and Other International Agreements, Vol. 23, Pt. 1, 1972 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1973), pp. 1168-1180. lnternational Security, Spring 1985 (Vol. 9, No. 4) 0162-28891851040154-31 $02.5010 0 1985 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 154 Quiet Success for Arms Control 1 155 rassed each other with searchlights and low-flying aircraft. These incidents became particularly intense in the late 1960s when the Soviet navy asserted itself on the worlds oceans. Since the agreement was signed, fewer serious naval confrontations have occurred, and those that take place have not generated dangers of escalation or political crises. In the wake of the failure to ratify the SALT I1 treaty, the breakdown of other arms control negotiations, and the slow progress of arms controlduring the Reagan Administration, several observers have suggested that the Incidents at Sea Agreement exemplifies an alternative approach. In their examination of possible U.S.-Soviet procedures for nuclear crisis control, William Ury and Richard Smoke note the success of the agreement and argue that it could serve as a model for further steps to control superpower crises.2An assistant secretary of state in the Reagan Administration has also identified the agreement as an example of the manner in which U.S.-Soviet relations could be made safer.3Although much of the literature on confidence-building measures has concentrated on their potential applications in Europe, the Incidents at Sea Agreement provides an important example of how such measures can work in other areas. Neither the effectiveness of the agreement nor the general utility of confidence-buildingmeasures should be overstated; improved communications and constraints on threatening military activities can rarely prevent the deliberate initiation of war. But they can reduce the dangers of inadvertent war and, in some’cases,contribute to the prevention of crises...