Is Arms Control Dead?

On the evening of January 22, 1961, while snow still lay on the ground in Washington from a storm that had nearly disrupted the presidential inauguration two days earlier, a group met at the Metropolitan Club at the invitation of John J. McCloy, whom the newly inaugurated president had designated as his advisor on arms control and disarmament. After dinner, McCloy asked the advice of each of those present on how to organize the executive branch for those issues and, specifically, where to lodge the function of arms control and disarmament. Later that year, acting on McCloy's conclusions, President John Kennedy created an independent agency, instituted in 1962 as the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA). Nearly 40 years later, in 1999, that agency was dismantled and its functions incorporated into the Department of State.

Does the end of ACDA signal the demise of arms control? Certainly it could be argued that arms control is very sick. Last year the U.S. Senate rejected the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). The Russian Duma has failed to act favorably on the second Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START II) several times since it was signed in 1993. Russia cited its need for troop deployments in the Caucasus to crush the revolt in Chechnya as the basis for its violation of the treaty that limits conventional forces in Europe. The Clinton administration seeks a revision of the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty of 1972 on the basis of a looming missile threat from North Korea and a potential one from other rogue states. Congressional Republicans consider the administration's proposed ABM deployment and corresponding revisions in the treaty inadequate. Many urge complete withdrawal from the ABM Treaty on the basis that it was entered into with a now-defunct partner, the Soviet Union. India and Pakistan continue to develop nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles; they have not adhered to any agreement that would deny them this option. Compliance with the Missile Technology Control Regime by some U.S. allies is questionable. The Wassenaar agreement that succeeded the earlier Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls Agreement, directed at depriving Communist countries of Western military technology, has proven more difficult to enforce because it is aimed not only at the former Soviet states but also at states about whose threatening nature the industrialized signatories of Wassenaar disagree. Finally, China, an emerging military power (emerging more slowly than political and journalistic rhetoric suggests), is a participant in few arms control agreements.

Nonetheless, Russian and U.S. nuclear delivery systems continue to be dismantled under the original START. Chemical and biological warfare agreements do limit (though not eliminate) those threats. The parties to the Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty have worked to adapt it to changed borders. U.S. funding continues to buy surplus Russian fissionable material and to support nonweapons research by Russian scientists and engineers who might otherwise be producing weapons for rogue states. From this point of view, arms control is preferable to the alternatives and is making progress. But which assessment is correct?

The end of the Cold War has encouraged American political leaders, analysts, strategic-military thinkers, and pundits in general to conclude that the United States won the arms race against the Soviet Union. By extension, many conclude that it could win any future one that may develop in competition with an emerging China, a possible resurgent Russia, or any rogue state. They may be right, but there are dangers in a path that begins with the belief that arms control is therefore irrelevant. That suggests the utility of arms control has not disappeared.

For one thing, the pro-armaments rhetoric in the Congress has not been accompanied by a nearly commensurate increase in the level of funding and is even less likely to be so in the future. Our European and Japanese allies will not go along with a U.S. national security policy that does not include an arms control component. Although...