Strengthening Arms Control

International security and the conduct of war have changed dramatically during the last hundred years, perhaps more than in any previous century. One constant in the second half of this century, however, has been the relationship between international security and nuclear weapons. Throughout the Cold War and since, nuclear weapons and arms control have been central components of security discourse and are likely to remain so for the foreseeable future.

While for much of the Cold War, arms control ¹ was principally focused on managing the bilateral superpower relationship and capping the arms race, the actors involved and the focus of arms control efforts have broadened to include an increasing number of states and nonstate actors. This article examines the continuing relevance as well as the multilateralization of arms control by exploring the prevailing trends in arms control and analyzing its current condition.

Baby Steps in the Cold War

Preliminary nuclear-arms-control efforts focused on proposals that placed all atomic energy under international control and offered states access to nuclear technologies for peaceful purposes under international safeguards. Initially the key nuclear states agreed to place atomic energy under the control of the United Nations (UN), which ultimately led to the June 1946 Baruch Plan, a U.S. proposal to transfer to the UN exclusive ownership and management of the entire fuel cycle. The Plan was never implemented, but it set the stage for President Dwight Eisenhower's 1953 Atoms for Peace proposal, which similarly relied on international control of atomic materials and technology to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons. Both efforts assumed that offering states access to the benefits of peaceful nuclear energy under international supervision would prevent them from pursuing research into military applications. Superpower agreement on these and similar proposals proved elusive. Nuclear weapons began to play an even greater role in defense policies, and the focus of arms control began to shift from the internationalist nature of Atoms for Peace and the Baruch Plan to the bipolar process that would characterize arms control for much of the Cold War.

Efforts by Eisenhower later in the 1950s to reduce the U.S. defense budget and at the same time protect the European allies from Soviet aggression helped make proposals for international control of nuclear technology impractical. During this period, it became U.S. policy 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" posture. 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." 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 rapidly expanded their strategic nuclear arsenals during this period, prompting an arms race. By the end of the decade each country had more than 20,000 warheads and sufficient delivery systems to destroy the other's military facilities and industrial infrastructures many times over.

Off and Running

Arms control efforts in the 1970s succeeded in stabilizing the U.S.-Soviet nuclear arms race. The 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty prohibited the deployment of a nationwide missile defense by either the United States or the Soviet Union and, as amended in 1974, limited each side to one ABM deployment...