It has been said that when elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers most. During times of war, it is generally the most vulnerable members of society who are most affected. While the direct costs of war are often estimated in lives lost or disabilities incurred, the indirect costs of war can be just as destructive. Damaged infrastructures, disruption of health and other vital services, an increase in the prevalence of disease, and mental and emotional disturbances among participants and civilians are just some of the effects of war. Thus a failure to limit the proliferation of weapons of war and mass destruction has enormous public health consequences.

The tools of war, including land mines, bombs, grenades, and bullets, are all negative devices that maim and kill. Land mines, for example, kill or injure 28,000 men, women, and children a year. Those who survive often suffer lifelong disabilities.

Nuclear weapons are particularly destructive and pose an enormous threat to life. E. F. Frohlich has written that nuclear weapons "have the potential to destroy all civilization and the entire ecosystem of the planet…. The radiation released by anuclear explosion would affect health, agriculture, natural resources, and demography over a wide area. Further use of nuclear weapons would be a serious threat to future generations. Ionizing radiation has the potential to damage the future environment, food and marine ecosystem, and cause genetic defects and illnesses in future generations…. There are some forty thousand …nuclear weapons in storage in the world today, representing an unimaginable threat to people everywhere" (Frohlich 1997, p. 2). According to Frohlich, the major arguments for eliminating nuclear weapons are based on "their destructiveness, the risk of accidental and inadvertent use, and the threat to the security of all by the danger of proliferation" (Frohlich, p. 5).

The United Nations General Assembly and the International Court of Justice have unanimously agreed that the only guaranteed way of eliminating the threat of nuclear war is to rid the planet completely of these destructive devices. International law, however, cannot dictate whether it is lawful or not to threaten or to use nuclear weapons as a means of self-defense in the face of an impending enemy attack. The International Court of Justice cannot legislate to fill this void, as it is not mandated to do so. One possible way around this problem would be to introduce a joint non-first use undertaking between concerned parties. "China has taken a lead in this regard, by having reiterated its support of the goal of the elimination of nuclear weapons, and its undertaking not to be the first to use such weapons" (Frohlich, p. 5).

Nuclear weapons are not the only threat to the health and well-being of populations. Chemical and biological weapons also pose grave dangers, especially when they are in the hands of terrorist groups and aggressive regimes. The Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict has reported that "Sadam Hussein … used deadly gas to suppress the Iraqi Kurdish populations in 1998 and in 1995 the Japanese sect Aum Shinrikyo used sarin gas in a Tokyo subway. The desire for such inexpensive weapons of mass destruction has, according to some reports, prompted Libya to construct the largest chemical weapons factory in the world and the delivery systems to go with the weapons" (Holl 1996, p. 9).

Imposing sanctions are an effective way of making states realize that their actions can have consequences far beyond their own national boundaries. Sanctions can combine with military and diplomatic measures to limit a state's freedom and pressure it to correct inappropriate behavior. While sanctions can be very effective, they often cause innocent civilians to suffer. States under sanction "suffer economic hardship and fall behind in the increasingly competitive global economy, especially when important trading partners are not similarly constrained" (Holl, p. 12). Imposing more focused sanctions that directly target the malefactors would be one way of ensuring that only those directly responsible for the problem suffer.

Another effective means of combating violence is to work proactively to encourage peaceful, nonviolent solutions to tensions, conflicts, and potential threats. This is the core premise of preventive diplomacy. There is heartening evidence that "where sufficient political, economic, and military resources are properly mobilized for the task, conflict prevention can be successful…. Bestpractices of conflict prevention rely on well-developed systems of early warning, explicitly provide for resource pooling and burden sharing among a range of diverse actors and agencies, aim at redressing underlying structural problems as well as the proximate causes of conflict, and apply diplomatic and military leverage appropriate to the problem at hand" (Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict, p. 5). The effectiveness of any preventive action appears to rest on three essential elements: "Early reaction to signs of trouble, an extended effort to resolve underlying causes of violence ("root causes"), and a comprehensive, balanced approach to alleviating pressures ("risk factors") that can trigger violent conflict" (Holl, p. 6).

The lives of innocent people are continually threatened by war, and responsible governments and concerned citizens must continue to devise ways to combat violence. The means employed to deal with the problems posed by the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction will vary depending on the kinds of weapon involved, the geographic location in question, and the underlying reasons for the prevailing violence. "Adopting a policy of doing nothing simply defers the problem to a later date when the level of destruction and the costs of intervening are higher and the risks of action are even greater" (Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict, p. 5). Better frameworks for understanding the dynamics of complex violence and mass destruction are needed. Sanctions, the pooling of resources, invoking the international community, and employing preventive diplomacy measures and international conventions such as the Ottawa Convention for the elimination of landmines are some of the workable means of reaching peaceful solutions to these problems.

(SEE ALSO: Terrorism; Violence; War)

Bibliography

Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict (1997). Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict: Final Report. New York: Carnegie Corporation of New York.

—— (1999). Perspectives on Prevention Preventive Diplomacy, Preventive Defense, and Conflict Resolution: A Report of Two Conferences at Stanford University and Dichley Foundation. New York: Carnegie Corporation of New York.

CBR News (1999). "War on Children." In CBR News 32.

Frohlich, E. F. (1997). Towards a Nuclear Weapons Free World: The Next Step. Australia: Medical Association for Prevention of War.

Holl, J. E. (1996). Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict: Second Progress Report. New York: Carnegie Corporation of New York.

— PAMELA HARTIGAN; ELAINE LAMMAS

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The idea that war can be abolished, or its effects mitigated, by agreed measures of arms control and disarmament among states has a long history. Arms control involves measures of internationally agreed restraint in arms policy. It may involve two, more than two, or all countries. It may set limits on the level of arms, research and development, testing, manner of deployment, and use. Some arms control measures may not require any reduction or abolition of arms at all: rather they may involve opening them up to inspection, relocating them away from particular areas, or prohibiting certain forms of testing or use. Disarmament is the generic term for reduction or abolition of arms. It may be unilateral, bilateral, or multilateral; imposed or agreed; general or local; comprehensive or partial; formally verified or unverified. It encompasses much international practice, as well as proposals for ambitious and as yet unrealized schemes. It encompasses most of what is included in the category of ‘arms control’, but obviously does not encompass such measures as involve no reduction or abolition of arms.

Arms control and disarmament are distinct from the laws of war. Whereas the laws of war are concerned in part with limitations on use of weapons in the actual conduct of armed conflict, the arms control and disarmament approach is mainly concerned with the limitations on possession and deployment of weapons in peacetime (though the terms of any agreements may remain applicable in wartime as well). In practice there has been some natural degree of overlap between the two approaches.

Before the 19th century, most schemes for ambitious measures of disarmament had been the work, not of political leaders, but of philosophers: Jean Bodin in Six Livres de la République (1577), William Penn in An Essay toward the Present and Future Peace of Europe (1693-4), and Immanuel Kant in On Perpetual Peace (1795). However, throughout history there have been cases of limited measures of arms control and disarmament, whether agreed or imposed, formal or informal. For example, under the Treaty of Utrecht (1713) France agreed to demolish a fort at Dunkirk; and the Russo-Turkish Treaty of Kuchuk Kainarji (1774) prevented Turkey from fortifying the Crimean peninsula.

Ambitious political schemes for general limitations on arms by all states date from the 19th century. In 1816, directly after the final defeat of the Napoleonic empire, Tsar Alexander I of Russia proposed ‘a simultaneous reduction of armed forces of all kinds which the powers have brought into being to preserve the safety and independence of their peoples’. In reply the British foreign minister, Lord Castlereagh, expressed the realist critique of such ambitious schemes: ‘It is impossible not to perceive that the settlement of a scale of force for so many powers, under such different circumstances as to their relative means, frontiers, positions and faculties for rearming, presents a very complicated question for negotiation.’

When he convened the 1899 Hague Peace Conference, Tsar Nicholas II was concerned about the cost and dangers of arms competition, and also about Russia's technical inferiority. He wanted to bring about major reductions in arms, but actually this conference and its successor in 1907, while reaching agreement on some other matters, failed to achieve any significant arms reductions.

After WW I, the Covenant of the League of Nations called for ‘the reduction of national armaments to the lowest point consistent with national safety and the enforcement by common action of international obligations’. Some measures of arms restraint were achieved in the inter-war years, including the 1922 Washington Naval Treaty and the 1930 London Naval Treaty. However, the ambitious disarmament aims of the League were not translated into reality. In November 1927 Maxim Litvinov, head of the Soviet delegation to a League disarmament commission in Geneva, made the first-ever formal diplomatic proposal for ‘complete and general disarmament’—the ‘complete’ referring to all armaments, the ‘general’ to all countries. This proposal gained little support. Subsequently the League convened the much-heralded Conference for the Reduction and Limitation of Armaments: held in Geneva in 1932-4, at the very time of increasing challenge from Japan and Germany, this failed to achieve any significant results. Overall, the League's combination of high aspiration in the disarmament field and poor performance contributed to the perception of the organization as a failure.

On disarmament as on other matters, the UN was based on more realistic assumptions than the League. Articles 11 and 26 of the Charter make only cautious references to disarmament and the regulation of armaments. As the Cold War developed and East-West arms competition intensified, there were increasing calls for disarmament, especially from the non-aligned countries which came to form a majority of UN membership. Both the USSR and the USA put forward schemes for general and complete disarmament in 1959-60. The UN General Assembly held Special Sessions on Disarmament in 1978, 1982, and 1988, which were long on rhetoric but short on achievement.

In the UN era, a sharp distinction came increasingly to be drawn between general and complete disarmament on the one hand, and arms limitation (largely synonymous with arms control) on the other. The former was widely criticized as unattainable. Some argued that the idea of all countries agreeing to disarm at the same time was not credible; that arms still had a function within societies, and in their defence against external enemies; and that inspection of disarmament would be very difficult, especially as nuclear weapons, so large in their effects, were relatively easy to conceal. Against a background of such pessimistic arguments, advocacy of more modest measures of arms limitation gained much ground from about 1960 onwards. Considerable emphasis was placed on the possibilities of effective verification of such measures, especially on account of the rapid development of satellite monitoring technology from the 1960s onwards.

The main international arms control and disarmament agreements concluded since 1945 are as follows.

• 1963	Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (PTBT).
• 1968	Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT).
• 1972	Biological Weapons Convention (BW Convention).
• 1972	US-Soviet Accords resulting from the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, placing limits on long-range nuclear weapons delivery vehicles and on anti-ballistic missile systems (SALT-I Accords).
• 1987	US-Soviet Treaty eliminating intermediate-range nuclear forces (INF Treaty).
• 1990	Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE Treaty).
• 1991	US-USSR Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START I Treaty).
• 1993	US-Russia Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START II Treaty).
• 1993	Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production, and Use of Chemical Weapons and on Their Destruction (CW Convention).
• 1996	Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT).
• 1997	Ottawa Convention Prohibiting the Use, Stockpiling, Production, and Transfer of Anti-personnel Mines (APM Convention).

There are also treaties concluded by states in the following regions establishing nuclear-weapon-free zones: Latin America (Treaty of Tlatelolco, 1967) ; South Pacific (Treaty of Rarotonga, 1985) ; Africa (Treaty of Pelindaba, 1985) ; South-East Asia (Treaty of Bangkok, 1995). The purposes of these and other agreements concluded since 1945 were not the reduction of armaments as an end in itself, but were more limited, specific, and also varied. Specialists in the field have identified the possible purposes of arms control and disarmament negotiations as, in general, encompassing the following:

• To reduce the risk of war breaking out, for example by limiting weapons systems, manoeuvres, or deployments seen as particularly destabilizing.
• To reduce the severity and extent of war if it does break out, for example by limiting possession and use of nuclear and chemical and biological weapons.
• To reduce the economic costs of armed confrontation, for example by placing limits on numbers of expensive items of military hardware such as large naval vessels and nuclear-armed ballistic missiles.
• To introduce an element of predictability into the strategic plans of states.
• To reduce certain undesirable side effects of arms competition, such as the radioactive pollution caused by nuclear weapons tests in the atmosphere and in the sea.
• To reduce or eliminate the use of certain weapons that are indiscriminate in character, such as anti-personnel landmines.
• To prevent the extension of great power military confrontation to new areas (treaties limiting military activities in Antarctica and in outer space are among the many examples).
• To facilitate peaceful and co-operative relations between adversaries in particular geographical areas or on particular subjects.
• To facilitate a dialogue between military powers, to enable them to understand each other's security concerns, and to assist them in seeing security in multilateral terms.

In short, arms control and disarmament are widely seen as instrumental, the underlying goal being security. Any agreement, and any given set of negotiations, might involve tension or even conflict between some of the purposes outlined above. Multilateral arms negotiations have not provided an escape from moral complexity and political controversy.

There have been many criticisms of arms control and disarmament negotiations and agreements. Although an underlying purpose of diplomacy in this area has been to build up a degree of mutual understanding between adversaries, this has not always worked: conferences on armaments have often been the scene of polemical statements, including complaints about the adversary's allegedly poor record of implementation. Even when states have not openly violated an agreement's provisions, they have sometimes evaded its purposes in their development and deployment of weapons. Some agreements, whether on naval matters in the 1930s or on nuclear non-proliferation since 1945, have been criticized as inherently discriminatory. There has been a natural tendency for arms control negotiations to focus on matters (such as numbers of missiles) that are relatively easy to count and control, but to be slower in addressing matters (such as the development of multiple independently targeted missile warheads) that are potentially more destabilizing. Sometimes arms limitation negotiations have been criticized as failing to tackle qualitative aspects of arms competition, or more generally for being too mildly reformist when more fundamental change was needed. Local wars with an East-West dimension, including in Vietnam and Afghanistan, continued despite the simultaneous conclusion of arms control agreements between the USA and USSR. Laboriously negotiated and highly detailed agreements have sometimes been of reduced relevance by the time they were actually concluded, because political and military circumstances had changed.

Despite such criticisms, arms control and disarmament negotiations and agreements respond to perennial problems of the international system, and remain an important part of statecraft. In the period of the Cold War, the habit of mutual consultation, and the emergence of some elements of common understanding of strategic problems, may have contributed something to the larger process of change in the USSR that resulted, in 1989-91, in the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the USSR itself.

Bibliography

• Bull, Hedley, The Control of the Arms Race (London, 1961).
• Goldblat, Jozef, Arms Control: A Guide to Negotiations and Agreements (London, 1994).
• Sims, Jennifer E., Icarus Restrained: An Intellectual History of Nuclear Arms Control (Boulder, Colo., 1990).
• Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, SIPRI Year-book (Oxford annual).
• Talbott, Strobe, Deadly Gambits: The Reagan Administration and the Stalemate in Nuclear Arms Control (London, 1984)

— Adam Roberts

n. international disarmament or arms limitation, especially by mutual consent.

See the Introduction, Abbreviations and Pronunciation for further details.

For more information on arms control, visit Britannica.com.

Russia's governments - tsarist, Soviet, and post-Soviet - have often championed arms limitation. Power and propaganda considerations as well as ideals lay behind Russian and Soviet proposals. Because Russia and the USSR usually lagged behind its Western adversaries in military technology and economic strength, Russian leaders often called for banning new weapons or abolishing those they did not yet possess. Russia sought to bring the weapons of all countries to the same qualitative level. If that happened, Russia's large size would permit it to field larger armies than its rivals. By contrast, the United States often led the world in military technology and economic strength. Accordingly, U.S. diplomats often called for freezing the existing military balance of power so that the United States could maintain its advantages. Such measures, if implemented, would often have put Russia at a disadvantage.

Fundamental Barriers to Disarmament

Besides its large size, Russia had the advantage of secrecy. Both tsars and commissars exploited the closed nature of their society to hide weaknesses and assets. With its open society, the United States had fewer secrets to protect, so it advocated arms treaties that permitted onsite inspection. The usual pattern was that the United States wanted inspection first; disarmament later. The Soviets wanted disarmament first; inspection later, if ever.

Language differences magnified these difficulties. While English has just one word for disarmament, Russian has two, and thus distinguishes between voluntary and coerced disarmament. Voluntary disarmament, as the outcome of self-restraint or negotiation, is razoruzhenie, whereas disarmament by force is obezoruzhit. Vladimir Ilich Lenin, however, believed that razoruzhenie was a pacifist illusion. The task of revolutionaries, he argued, was to disarm its enemies by force. Soviet diplomats began calling for wide-scale disarmament in 1922. They said that Western calls for "arms limitation" - not full razoruzhenie - masked the impossibility for capitalist regimes to disarm voluntarily. Soviet ideologists averred that capitalists needed arms to repress their proletariat, to fight each other, and to attack the socialist fatherland.

Seeking a more neutral term, Western diplomats in the 1950s and 1960s called for "arms control," a term that included limits, reductions, and increases, as well as the abolition of arms. But kontrol in Russian means only verification, counting, or checking. Soviet diplomats said "arms control" signified a Western quest to inspect (and count) arms, but not a willingness actually to disarm. After years of debate, Soviet negotiators came to accept the term as meaning "control over armaments," rather than simply a "count of armaments." In 1987, when the USSR and United States finally signed a major disarmament agreement, President Ronald Reagan put the then-prevailing philosophy into words, saying: "Veriat no proveriat" (trust, but verify).

The Making of Arms Policy

A variety of ideals shaped tsarist and Soviet policy. Alexander I wanted a Holy Alliance to maintain peace after the Napoleonic wars. Like Alexander I, Nicholas II wanted to be seen as a great pacifist, and summoned two peace conferences at The Hague in an effort to achieve that end. Lenin, however, believed that "disarmament" was a mere slogan, meant only to deceive the masses into believing that peace was attainable without the overthrow of capitalism. When Lenin's regime proposed disarmament in 1922, its deep aim was to expose capitalist hypocrisy and demonstrate the need for revolution. From the late 1920s until his death in 1953, Stalin also used disarmament mainly as a propaganda tool.

Nuclear weapons changed everything. The Kremlin, under Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev, recognized that nuclear war could wipe out communist as well as noncommunist countries. Whereas Lenin and Stalin derided "bourgeois pacifists" in the West, the Soviet government under Khrushchev believed it must avoid nuclear war at all costs. Sobered by the 1962 Cuban missile confrontation, Khrushchev's regime admonished the Chinese Communists in 1963: "The atomic bomb does not respect the class principle."

Nuclear weapons also gave Moscow confidence that it could deter an attack. The USSR tested a nuclear bomb in 1953, and a thermonuclear device in 1953. By 1954, the Kremlin had planes capable of delivering Soviet bombs to America. In 1957 the USSR tested the world's first intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), leading Khrushchev to claim the Soviet factories were producing ICBMs "like sausages." He tried to exploit the apparent Soviet lead in missiles to extract Western concessions in Germany.

By 1962, increased production in the United States had reversed the so-called missile gap. By 1972 the United States had also produced a warhead gap, as it placed multiple warheads on ICBMs and submarine missiles. Still, by 1972 each nuclear superpower had overkill capability: more than enough weapons to absorb a first-strike and still destroy the attacker. Having ousted Khrushchev in 1964, Soviet Communist Party leader Leonid Brezhnev signed the first strategic arms limitation treaty (SALT I) with President Richard Nixon in 1972 and a second accord (SALT II) with President Jimmy Carter in 1979. Each treaty essentially sought to freeze the Soviet-U.S. competition in strategic weapons - meaning weapons that could reach the other country. SALT I was ratified by both sides, but SALT II was not. The United States balked because the treaty enshrined some Soviet advantages in "heavy" missiles and because the USSR had just invaded Afghanistan.

The 1972 accords included severe limits on antiballistic missile (ABM) defenses. Both Moscow and Washington recognized that each was hostage to the other's restraint. Displeased by this situation, President Ronald Reagan sponsored a Strategic Defensive Initiative (SDI, also called Star Wars) research program meant to give the United States a shield against incoming missiles. If the United States had such a shield, however, this would weaken the deterrent value of Soviet armaments. The Soviets protested Reagan's program, but at the same time it secretly tried to expand the small ABM system it was allowed by the 1972 treaty.

New Times, New Thinking

When Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev succeeded Konstantin Chernenko as top Soviet leader in 1985, he advocated "new thinking" premised on the need for mutual security in an interdependent world. Between the two great powers, he said, security could only be "mutual." Gorbachev said Soviet policy should proceed not from a class perspective, but from an "all-human" one.

Gorbachev's commitments to arms control were less tactical and more strategic than his predecessors - more dedicated to balanced solutions that accommodated the interests of both sides of the debate. In contrast, Khrushchev often portrayed his "peaceful coexistence" policy as a tool in the struggle to defeat capitalist imperialism, and Brezhnev demanded "coequal security" with the United States. Gorbachev, on the other hand, initiated or agreed to a series of moves to slow or reverse the arms competition:

• a unilateral moratorium on underground nuclear testing from 1985 to 1987, with acceptance of U.S. scientists and seismic equipment near Soviet nuclear test sites in Kazakhstan
• agreement in 1987 to the INF treaty, requiring the USSR to remove more warheads and to destroy more intermediate-range and shorter-range missiles than the United States (after which Reagan reiterated "veriat no proveriat")
• opening to U.S. visitors in September 1987 a partially completed Soviet radar station that, had it become operational, would probably have violated the 1972 limitations on ABM defenses
• a pledge in December 1988 to cut unilaterally Soviet armed forces by 500,000 men, 10,000 tanks, and 800 aircraft
• withdrawing Soviet forces from Afghanistan by February 15, 1989
• supporting arrangements to end regional conflicts in Cambodia, southern Africa, the Persian Gulf, and the Middle East
• acceptance in 1990 of a Final Settlement with Respect to Germany setting 1994 as the deadline for Soviet troop withdrawal from Germany
• in 1990 a Soviet-U.S. agreement to reduce their chemical weapons stocks to no more than 5,000 tons each.

All members of NATO and the Warsaw Treaty Organization signed the Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE) treaty in 1990. It limited each alliance to 20,000 battle tanks and artillery pieces, 30,000 armored combat vehicles, 6,800 combat aircraft, and 2,000 attack helicopters. In 1991, however, members of the Warsaw Pact agreed to abolish their alliance. Soon, Soviet troops withdrew from Poland,

Czechoslovakia, and Hungary. Trying to compensate for unexpected weaknesses, the USSR tried to reclassify some military units to exempt them from the CFE limits. NATO objected, but Soviet power was shrinking and minor exemptions such as these mattered little.

In 1991 Gorbachev and U.S. president George Herbert Walker Bush signed the first Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START I). It obliged Washington and Moscow within seven years to cut their forces by more than one-third to sixteen hundred strategic delivery vehicles (ICBMs, submarine missiles, heavy bombers) and six thousand warheads. When the USSR dissolved later that year, the Russian Federation (RF) took the Soviet Union's place in START and other arms control regimes. START I became legally binding in 1994, and each party began steps to meet the ceilings set for seven years hence, in 2001.

In September 1991, after an attempted coup against Gorbachev in the previous August, President Bush announced the unilateral elimination of some 24,000 U.S. nuclear warheads and asked the USSR to respond in kind. Gorbachev announced unilateral cuts in Soviet weapons that matched or exceeded the U.S. initiative. He also took Soviet strategic bombers off alert, announced the deactivization of 503 ICBMs covered by START, and made preparations to remove all short-range nuclear weapons from Soviet ships, submarines, and land-based naval aircraft.

Post-Soviet Complications

In November 1990 the U.S. Senate had voted $500 million of the Pentagon budget to help the USSR dismantle its nuclear weapons. In December 1991, however, the USSR ceased to exist. Its treaty rights and duties were then inherited by the Russian Federation (RF). However, Soviet-era weapons remained not just in Russia but also in Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan. These three governments agreed, however, to return the nuclear warheads to Russia. The United States helped fund and reward disarmament in all four republics.

President Bush and RF President Boris Yeltsin in 1993 signed another treaty, START II, requiring each side to cut its arsenal by 2003 to no more than 3,500 strategic nuclear warheads. The parties also agreed that ICBMs could have only one warhead each, and that no more than half the allowed warheads could be deployed on submarines. START II was approved by the U.S. Senate in 1996, but the RF legislature ratified it only on condition that the United States stand by the ABM treaty. As a results, START II never became law. Confronted by the expansion of NATO eastward and by deteriorating Russian conventional forces, Russian military doctrine changed in the mid-1990s to allow Moscow "first use of nuclear arms" even against a conventional attack.

Ignoring RF objections, NATO invited three former Soviet allies to join NATO in 1999 and three more in 2002, plus three former Soviet republics, plus Slovenia. The Western governments argued that this expansion was aimed at promoting democracy and posed no threat to Russia. The RF received a consultative voice in NATO. Following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on America, Presidents Vladimir Putin and George W. Bush found themselves aligned against terrorism. Putin focused on improving Russia's ties with the West and said little about NATO.

The RF and U.S. presidents signed the Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty (SORT) in May 2002. Bush wanted to reduce U.S. strategic weapons to the level needed for a "credible deterrent," but preferred to do so without a binding treaty. Putin also wanted to cut these forces but demanded a formal contract. Bush agreed to sign a treaty, but it was just three pages long, with extremely flexible commitments. START I, by contrast, ran to more than seven hundred pages.

SORT required each side to reduce its operationally deployed strategic nuclear warheads to between 1,700 and 2,200 over the next decade, with a target date of December 31, 2012. At the insistence of the United States, the warheads did not have to be destroyed and could be stored for possible reassembly. Nor did SORT ban multiple warheads - an option that had been left open because START II had never become law. SORT established no verification procedures, but could piggyback on the START I verification regime until December 2009, when the START inspection system would shut down. Putin signed SORT even though Moscow objected to Bush's decision, announced in 2001, to abrogate the ABM treaty. Bush wanted to build a national defense system, and Putin could not stop him.

Bibliography

Berman, Harold J., and Maggs, Peter B. (1967). Disarmament Inspection and Soviet Law. Dobbs Ferry, NY: Oceana.

Bloomfield, Lincoln P., et al. (1966). Khrushchev and the Arms Race: Soviet Interests in Arms Control and Disarmamen The Soviet Union and Disarmament, 1954 - 1964. Cambridge, MA: The M.I.T. Press.

Clemens, Walter C., Jr. (1968). The Arms Race and Sino-Soviet Relations. Stanford, CA: The Hoover Institution.

Clemens, Walter C., Jr. (1973). The Superpowers and Arms Control: From Cold War to Interdependence. Lexington, MA: Lexington Books.

Dallin, Alexander. (1965). The Soviet Union and Disarmament. New York: Praeger.

Garthoff, Raymond L. (1994). Detente and Confrontation: American-Soviet Relations from Nixon to Reagan. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution.

Kolkowicz, Roman. (1970). The Soviet Union and Arms Control: A Superpower Dilemma. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Spanier, John W., and Nogee, Joseph L. (1962). The Politics of Disarmament: A Study in Soviet-American Gamesmanship. New York: Praeger.

—WALTER C. CLEMENS JR.

Historians have been slow to grasp the significant, occasionally dominating, role that arms control negotiations played in Cold War diplomacy—a situation undoubtedly the result of the often mind-numbing technical aspects of these lengthy deliberations. In the prenuclear era, political disputes might spark threatening military buildups, but political dimensions remained the focus of subsequent negotiations. This changed after 1950 as weapons systems themselves took on a political character. "The arms race … was both a result of the Cold War and a cause," as the former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev emphasized, "as it constantly provided new stimuli for continued rivalry." The arms control pacts that gradually emerged from various multilateral and bilateral negotiations helped neutralize the insecurities brought on by the constant arrival of new weapons systems. "The decision to reduce arms," Gorbachev concluded, "became an important step on the road to ending confrontation and creating healthier relations between East and West."

Arms control and disarmament agreements were traditionally designed to accomplish two essential purposes: to stabilize the military climate and to diminish the military violence in any subsequent hostilities. The various arrangements, which reduced, limited, and regulated armaments, provided a more stable international environment; but could not themselves resolve other threatening, contentious issues. Controlling armaments had to be coupled with diplomatic resolve so that in an atmosphere temporarily cleared of insecurities inspired by unregulated weaponry, statesmen might deal with critical political, social, and economic differences.

Defining Arms Control and Disarmament Techniques

Although the terms "disarmament" and "arms control" have been widely used, there often has been, and still is, considerable confusion over their meanings. "Disarmament" became the fashionable term during the nineteenth century, particularly during and after the Hague Conference of 1899, to describe all efforts to limit, reduce, or control the implements of war. While some individuals may employ disarmament in the literal sense—the total elimination of armaments—most diplomats and commentators do not. The United Nations and its subsidiary agencies use it as a generic term covering all measures, "from small steps to reduce tensions or build confidence, through regulation of armaments or arms control, up to general and complete disarmament."

In the early 1950s, academic specialists linking the technology of nuclear weaponry to the strategies of the Cold War began substituting the term "arms control." For them "disarmament" not only lacked semantic precision but carried utopian expectations, whereas "arms control" involved any cooperation between potential enemies designed to reduce the likelihood of conflict or, should it occur, its scope and violence. Most arms controllers sought to enhance the nuclear deterrence system, and only occasionally sought force reductions, while literal "disarmers" dismissed arms control as a chimera and supported proposals seeking general and complete disarmament.

From a historical perspective the basic techniques that comprise arms control and disarmament undertakings may be divided into six general categories:

1. Limitation and Reduction of Armaments. These pacts put specified limits on the mobilization, possession, or construction of military forces and equipment, and may result in reductions. The restrictions may be qualitative, regulating weapons design, as well as quantitative, limiting numbers of specific weapons.
2. Demilitarization, Denuclearization, and Neutralization. Demilitarization and denuclearization involve removing or placing restrictions on military forces, weapons, and fortifications within a prescribed area of land, water, or airspace. Neutralization is a special status that guarantees political independence and territorial integrity, subject to a pledge that the neutralized state will not engage in war except in defense. The essential feature of all three is the emphasis on geographical areas.
3. Regulating or Outlawing Specific Weapons. These agreements regulate the military use or the possession of specific weapons. Their rationale is that the unrestricted use, or any use, of a particular weapon exceeds recognized "just use of force."
4. Controlling Arms Manufacture and Traffic. This approach involves restrictions, including embargoes, on the sale or transfer of weapons and munitions. It may prohibit the manufacture of specific weapons.
5. Laws of War. These efforts seek to lessen the violence and damage of war. The principles underlying the rules of war (or laws of war) are (a) the prohibition of weapons that cause unnecessary or disproportionate suffering; (b) the distinction between combatants and noncombatants; and (c) the realization that the demands of humanity should prevail over the perceived necessities of combat.
6. Stabilizing the International Environment. This technique seeks to lower international tensions through lessening the possibility of an uncontrollable cause célèbre provoking an unwanted war. In addition, it seeks to protect the environment from lasting damage due to the testing or use of military weapons.

Obviously, the six categories are not exclusive. The outlawing of weapons has the same effect as limiting them. Thus, a treaty that prohibits placing weapons of mass destruction in outer space (1967) is also an example of geographic demilitarization. In addition, a treaty may incorporate several arms control techniques: the Treaty of Versailles (1919), for example, limited the number of German troops, demilitarized specific zones, and outlawed German manufacture of military aircraft, submarines, and tanks.

The methods of achieving arms control and disarmament objectives may be classified into three broad categories—retributive measures, unilateral measures, and reciprocal measures—which can be subdivided into six general methods:

1. Extermination. A retributive measure, extermination is an ancient and drastic means of ensuring no future warlike response from one's opponent, dramatized by Rome's destruction of Carthage or the elimination of some American Indian tribes.
2. Imposition. Also a retributive measure, imposition results when victors force arms limitation measures on the vanquished, such as the terms imposed upon Germany and other enemy states in 1919 and 1945.
3. Unilateral Neglect. Often confused with unilateral decisions, unilateral neglect refers to a nation's decision not spend for defense, as in the U.S. unilateral reduction of army and naval forces after the Civil War (1866) or the British and U.S. self-imposed arms reductions between the world wars.
4. Unilateral Decision. A consciously decided policy of self-imposed military restrictions or limitations, as in Japan's post–World War II constitution and the Austrian Peace Treaty (1955), both restricting armaments to defensive purposes.
5. Bilateral Negotiation. A reciprocal measure, bilateral negotiation is a traditional method by which two nations seek mutually acceptable solutions to tensions heightened by armaments, as with the Rush-Bagot Agreement (1817) and the SALT, START, and INF treaties.
6. Multilateral Negotiation. Another reciprocal measure, multilateral negotiation is a common twentieth-century approach to regional and global military-political problems that involve the interests of several nations. The Hague treaties (1899, 1907) and the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (1968) are multilateral agreements. The Latin American denuclearization treaty of 1967 is a regionally negotiated pact.

Arms Control and Disarmament to World War Ii

Most American leaders, at one time or another, have defined the United States as a "peace-loving nation" that deplores the existence of large military forces and believes that their reduction will lead to a more peaceful world. Yet while American diplomats have frequently supported arms control objectives, they also have opposed them. For example, they rejected the idea of naval reductions at the 1899 Hague Conference and refused to consider political-military "guarantees" that might have brought about arms reductions during the League of Nations negotiations. Thus, early U.S. involvement in the efforts to limit weapons and warfare has been mixed.

Apart from early efforts to halt the trading in arms with various Indian tribes, the United States pursued three major undertakings during this period: demilitarizing the Great Lakes; formulating "rules of war" to govern the actions of its armed forces; and participating in the two Hague peace conferences.

Rush-Bagot Agreement The War of 1812 demonstrated that the Great Lakes were of strategic importance to the United States and Britain's eastern Canadian provinces. At war's end, the British flagship on the lakes was a three-decker more powerful than Admiral Horatio Nelson's Victory, and two even larger vessels were being built at Kingston, Ontario. The Americans responded by beginning construction of two vessels that would be the world's largest warships.

These undertakings conflicted with the U.S. Congress's economy drive, so, on 27 February 1815, President James Madison was authorized "to cause all armed vessels of the United States on the lakes to be sold or laid up, except such as he may deem necessary to enforce proper execution of revenue laws." Economies also led Great Britain to curtail construction and dismantling of warships.

Despite these unilateral actions, many in Washington were concerned that minor border incidents between Canadians and Americans might lead to a renewed naval race. In November 1815, President Madison endorsed efforts to negotiate with the British to limit the number of armed ships on the lakes. If the building of warships began again, he feared, a "vast expence will be incurred" that might lead to "the danger of [a] collision" between the two countries. In London, Lord Castlereagh agreed that such a naval race was "ridiculous and absurd."

The 29 April 1817 bilateral agreement limited the naval forces of each party "on Lake Ontario, to one vessel, not exceeding one hundred tons burden, and armed with one eighteen pound cannon. On the upper lakes, to two vessels, not exceeding like burden each, and armed with like force," and "on the waters of Lake Champlain, to one vessel not exceeding like burden, and armed with like force." However, the pact did not end competitive armaments in the Great Lakes region. Fortifications continued to be built, and there were violations of the naval terms, and during the Civil War, the U.S. Senate voted to terminate the agreement. Despite these obstacles, the Rush-Bagot Agreement remains one of the most successful U.S. arms control undertakings—and certainly its most enduring, for it enhanced the security of both parties and saved them a great deal of money. Also, it paved the way for the Treaty of Washington (1871), which resolved remaining political issues between the parties and led to the "unguarded frontier" between Canada and the United States.

Rules of War In 1863 a Columbia University professor, Francis Lieber, submitted his Code for the Government of Armies of the United States in the Field to the War Department. The Lieber Code, as it became known, was drawn from medieval jurists and was incorporated into the Union army's General Order No. 100. Among other things, it recognized the status of noncombatants, regulated treatment of prisoners of war, prohibited the use of poison, forbade the seizure of private property without compensation, and ordered that cultural treasures not be willfully destroyed. Lieber's contribution later influenced the Declaration of Brussels (1874) on the rules and customs of war.

Hague Conferences Peace advocates everywhere welcomed Czar Nicholas II's 1899 invitation for a meeting of the great powers at The Hague to deal with the threatening international arms race. The Americans were optimistic about the conference's prospects for peace even though their own government had recently concluded a war against Spain and was committed to a naval buildup and army modernization.

President William McKinley took the position that "it behooves us as a nation to lend countenance and aid to the beneficent project." Yet the active military force of the United States "in time of peace [is] so conspicuously less than that of the armed powers of Europe," he said, "that the question of limitations had little practical importance for the United States." Thus, while the U.S. peace movement collected petitions registering popular support for reducing armaments, at The Hague, Captain Alfred T. Mahan, the U.S. delegate, joined Admiral John A. Fisher, the British naval delegate, to prevent any limitation of naval forces. Other proposals sought to restrict military budgets, prohibit the use of new types of firearms and explosives, restrict the use of certain munitions, prohibit the dropping of projectiles or explosives, prohibit the use of submarines or similar engines of destruction, and revise and codify the laws and rules of war, especially those from the Conference of Brussels that were still unratified.

Secretary of State John Hay stated that the first four restrictions "seem lacking in practicability, and the discussion of these propositions would probably prove provocative…. But it is doubtful if wars are to be diminished by rendering them less destructive, for it is the plain lesson of history that the periods of peace have been longer as the cost and destructiveness of war have increased." Despite Washington's lack of interest, declarations prohibiting the use of asphyxiating gas and expanding (dum-dum) bullets and the throwing of projectiles from balloons were approved. With the U.S. delegation's support, rules of war aimed at preventing armies from committing excesses—such as those at the expense of noncombatants and prisoners of war—also were endorsed by the conferees.

At the Second Hague Conference of 1907, some thirteen new declarations clarifying and codifying the law of war were agreed upon. These were revised in 1929 and 1949. The conventions relating to prisoners of war and noncombatants were the basis of considerable diplomatic activity during World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War.

Prior to the Second Hague conference, President Theodore Roosevelt indicated that the United States might support naval limitations; however, none of the major European powers would consider reducing or limiting their military forces. In June 1910 both houses of Congress unanimously endorsed naval limitations, a decision sparked by the British launching of the dreadnoughts, a new class of battleship, which promised another round of expensive ship construction. The proposal failed to gain support abroad, but it pointed to new efforts a decade later.

Between the World Wars, 1919–1939

The enormity of death and destruction wrought by World War I focused the attention of the American public and its government on ways of preventing future war. America's role in these interwar undertakings included the introduction of disarmament in the League of Nations Covenant, sponsorship of the Washington naval limitation system, 1922–1935, endorsement of the Kellogg-Briand Pact aimed at "outlawing" war, and belated, ambivalent support of the League of Nation's disarmament efforts.

League Covenant and Disarmament In January 1918, President Woodrow Wilson emphasized disarmament in Point Four of his Fourteen Points (a statement of the Allies' war aims) and in his endorsement of it as Article Eight of the League of Nations Covenant. Point Four called for "adequate guarantees given and taken that national armaments will be reduced to the lowest point consistent with domestic safety." Wilson did not consider arms reduction a high priority, but he clearly saw it as in the U.S. interest. A commitment to general disarmament, no matter how ambiguous, would justify the imposition of arms restrictions on Germany and its allies.

At the Paris Peace Conference Wilson reduced his emphasis on arms reductions because of considerations of national sovereignty, the threat of Bolshevism, and demands of economic nationalism. He even threatened a new naval race by urging Congress to fund the construction of 156 warships, including ten super-dreadnoughts and six high-speed battle cruisers, called for in the Naval Appropriation Act of 1916, in order to obtain political concessions. British Prime Minister David Lloyd George was unwilling to accept U.S. naval parity, nor did he agree with Wilson's desire to append the Monroe Doctrine to the League Covenant. Unwilling to undertake a costly naval race, Lloyd George relented on the latter point and agreed to future negotiations on the former.

Wilson tried the same strategy during the Senate's ratification hearings (May 1919–March 1920), insisting there were only two alternatives: the League of Nations and disarmament, or increased naval construction and higher taxes. The Senate rejected league membership on the grounds it impinged upon the nation's sovereignty and left the naval problems for the Harding administration.

The Washington Naval System In the spring of 1921, President Warren G. Harding and Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes confronted a burgeoning naval race—before the year was out, more than 200 warships were under construction. Hughes invited the other major naval powers—Great Britain, Japan, France, and Italy—to meet at Washington, D.C., on 12 November 1921. Over-ruling his admirals, Hughes developed a detailed plan grounded on two themes: an immediate halt of all capital ship construction and the defining of national strategies in terms of "relative security." By presenting his proposal for capital ship reductions and limitations in his opening speech, Hughes seized the diplomatic initiative and gained widespread public support.

The Washington Conference produced seven treaties and twelve resolutions, two of which contained arms control provisions. The most significant was the Five Power Naval Treaty of 6 February 1922, which established a reduction in battleships, quantitative limits (or ratios—United States 5:Britain 5:Japan 3) on capital ships and aircraft carriers, qualitative restrictions on future naval construction, and restrictions on fortifications and naval bases in the central Pacific. The ratios established battleship parity between the United States and Britain and acknowledged Japan's de facto preeminence in the western Pacific. Naval limitation was realized because the United States, Britain, and Japan had temporarily resolved their political differences, especially regarding China, and desired to reduce naval expenditures.

Attempts to abolish or restrict submarines failed, and the agreement to prohibit the "use in war of asphyxiations, poisonous or other gases" was not ratified, but the two concepts did reappear—the former in the London Naval Treaty of 1930, and the latter in the Geneva Protocol of 1925.

Since a formula for limiting smaller warships was not found, a new naval race appeared as admirals rushed to build cruisers that would fall just below the 10,000-ton limit that defined capital ships. Facing an expensive naval building program, Congress urged President Calvin Coolidge to negotiate limits on cruisers, destroyers, and submarines. At the Geneva Naval Conference (1927), the administration wanted to extend the Washington Treaty's Big Three capital ship ratios (5:5:3) to auxiliary categories. However, the U.S. delegation abandoned Hughes's earlier approach of considering naval armaments as one thread in existing political relationships, and instead focused on technical issues.

With Japanese negotiators on the sidelines, American and British naval experts agreed on the idea of parity, but could not define it because the British and U.S. fleets were structured quite differently. Whereas the British sought strategic equality that acknowledged commercial and imperial obligations, the Americans demanded mathematical parity. The U.S. insistence on fewer large cruisers with eight-inch guns and Britain's determination to have more, smaller cruisers with six-inch guns deadlocked negotiations.

The failed Geneva effort paved the way for the London Naval Conference of 1930. Herbert Hoover's election in 1928 coincided with that of British Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald, who, like Hoover, believed that the reduction of armaments could contribute to world peace. Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson indicated that he and the president, employing naval experts as advisers, would seek a "yardstick" to bridge the difficulties that had plagued the 1927 Geneva Conference—but no yardstick was forthcoming. The yardstick episode emphasized a recurring dilemma that plagued U.S. arms control efforts well into the Cold War era: arms control requires a perspective beyond technical considerations, for by concentrating on mathematical or other engineering factors, U.S. policymakers often tended to obscure or avoid basic political problems.

The 1930 London Naval Treaty refined the Washington naval system by applying a 10:10:7 ratio to capital ships and aircraft carriers. All five powers agreed not to build their authorized capital ship replacements between 1931 and 1936, and to scrap a total of nine capital ships. By 1936 the United States would have eighteen battleships (462,400 tons), Britain eighteen battleships (474,750 tons), and Japan nine battleships (266,070 tons). Aircraft carrier tonnage remained unchanged, despite attempts to lower it.

While the United States and Britain ultimately reached an agreement on naval "equality," many senior Japanese naval officers believed that applying the "battleship ratio" to all classes of warships would be disastrous for their nation's security. Reluctantly, however, the Japanese government accepted negotiated ratios for cruisers, destroyers, and submarines.

Naval arms control pleased most American politicians and their constituents, and President Herbert Hoover estimated that the United States saved $1 billion. However, the limits outraged professional naval officers in all three countries. The Japanese lamented that they must stop cruiser construction; the British complained that fifty cruisers did not provide protection for long sea-lanes; and the Americans felt that Japan's higher cruiser ratio reduced the chance of a U.S. victory in a western Pacific war.

The years following the signing of the London Naval Treaty saw increased political tensions in the Mediterranean and undeclared wars in Ethiopia and Asia. Japan demanded naval parity, but Britain and the United States refused. Subsequently, Japan withdrew from the Second London Naval Conference (1935) and abrogated the Washington naval system. On 31 December 1936, the quantitative and qualitative limitations on naval armaments ended.

Naval arms control had rested on the assumption that Japan was satisfied with its world position. However, Japanese expansionists, both military and civilian, who dominated policy by 1934 believed that the United States and Britain were hindering Japan's economic expansion, and thus keeping that nation's industries depressed. Consequently, Japan's admirals argued that, if freed from treaty restrictions, they could build a strong fleet, dominate China and Southeast Asia, and become the leading power in Asia.

Throughout the interwar negotiations over naval limitations, U.S. policies were clearly motivated by a desire to reduce military expenditures and, at the same time, gain whatever strategic advantages were possible. The desire for the former drove most civilian policymakers, while efforts to achieve the latter were foremost in the minds of senior naval officers. Only the most single-minded analyst would suggest that U.S. negotiating positions involved any significant measure of altruism.

Outlawing War The Kellogg-Briand Pact, also known as the Pact of Paris for the Renunciation of War (1928), renounced offensive war as "an instrument" of national policy. It called on nations to settle their differences by pacific means. The idea originated with a Chicago lawyer, Salmon O. Levinson, who argued that international law should declare war a criminal act. While this idea appeared to be utopian, many opponents to the League of Nation's concept of collective security saw an alternative in the movement to outlaw war.

The Kellogg-Briand Pact emerged as an attempt by the Coolidge administration to induce Paris authorities to alter their position that France's security needed to be enhanced by British or U.S. political-military commitments before they agreed to arms limitations. Secretary of State Frank B. Kellogg's offer to French Foreign Minister Aristide Briand acknowledged the virtue of a world tribunal to enforce the outlawry of war, but he was realistic enough to know that the Senate and the American people (and those of most other nations) were not ready for such a commitment.

Most historians have criticized the pact for its failure to provide for enforcement. Only a few believe it influenced international law, even though after World War II major war criminals were found guilty of violating the treaty. Any reappraisal of the Kellogg-Briand Pact should take into consideration that it did not abolish "defensive" war and that the United States and other nations made various reservations upon signing.

The League of Nations and Disarmament After several early committees failed to come up with a disarmament proposal, the League of Nations created an "independent" preparatory commission in 1926 to prepare a draft treaty. President Calvin Coolidge accepted the league's invitation to send a representative. In a message to Congress on 26 January 1926, he declared that "the general policy of this Government in favor of disarmament and limitation of armaments cannot be emphasized too frequently or too strongly. In accordance with that policy, any measure having a reasonable tendency to bring about these results should receive our sympathy and support."

The American delegation, headed by Hugh Gibson, U.S. minister to Switzerland, maintained a fairly consistent policy between 1926 and 1930. He emphasized that the U.S. Army had been unilaterally reduced after World War I from some 4 million men to 118,000, which he acknowledged America's geographical situation made possible. Gibson also emphasized—pointing to the Washington naval system—that his government favored the limitation of naval forces by categories and approved qualitative restrictions only when accompanied by quantitative limitations. Still, the United States opposed budgetary limitations and any regulation that might restrict industrial potential.

The Conference for the Reduction and Limitation of Armaments—also known as the World Disarmament Conference—convened in Geneva on 2 February 1932 and began negotiations on the preparatory commission's draft convention. Secretary of State Stimson declared that President Hoover would not authorize discussions involving political arrangements to facilitate arms control measures. Nevertheless, on 9 February 1932, Gibson assured the gathered diplomats that the United States wished to cooperate with them to achieve arms limitations. As the disarmament conference bogged down, President Hoover and, later, President Franklin D. Roosevelt attempted to stimulate negotiations. Citing the Kellogg-Briand Pact's outlawing of aggressive war, Hoover on 22 June 1932 proposed a one-third reduction in all armies and battle fleets. Additionally, he urged the abolition of tanks, large mobile guns, and chemical weapons and the prohibition of aerial bombardment.

When the French argued that his plan must be anchored to some kind of verification, Hoover reversed the earlier U.S. position. President Wilson initially rejected permanent supervision of German disarmament at Versailles because this precedent might run counter to America's future interests. "The United States," he declared, "will not tolerate the supervision of any outside body in [disarmament], nor be subjected to inspection or supervision by foreign agencies or individuals." Secretary of State Frank Kellogg restated this policy in January 1926. "The United States will not be a party to any sanctions of any kind for the enforcement of a treaty for the limitation of armaments," he asserted, "nor will it agree that such treaties to which it may be a party shall come under the supervision of any international body—whether the League of Nations or otherwise." Arms limitation measures, he insisted, "so far as we are concerned, must depend upon the good faith of nations." On 30 June 1932, Stimson announced that the United States was prepared "to accept the right of inspection" if there was any likelihood of concluding "a treaty of real reduction." This belated change of policy was insufficient because the French now also demanded a guarantee of military assistance in case of attack.

On 16 May 1933, President Roosevelt proposed abolition of modern offensive weapons. He also announced America's willingness to consult with other states in the event of threatened conflict, but since the Senate showed little interest in abandoning neutrality for international cooperation, this initiative failed. Confronted by French intransigence and German aggressiveness, the World Disarmament Conference slowly dissolved without any accomplishments.

Evaluating Interwar Experiences

At the beginning of the Cold War, some American leaders were wary of entrusting any element of national security to arms control and disarmament, even if the agreements were linked to functioning international organizations. Harking back to the U.S. lack of military preparedness on the eve of World War II, these individuals believed that interwar disarmament activities had compromised national security. Bernard M. Baruch, who presented the initial U.S. proposal for international control of atomic weaponry, recalled that in preparing the plan "the [interwar] record of meaningless disarmament agreements and renunciations of war" was "very much in my mind."

Other policymakers believed that Japan's decision to challenge the United States was the result of naval limitation treaties that had left the United States with an inferior navy. After World War II, James Byrnes, President Harry Truman's secretary of state, recalled that as a young congressman he had approved of the Washington Naval Treaty and that "what happened thereafter influences my thinking today." Byrnes felt that "while America scrapped battleships, Japan scrapped blueprints. America will not again make that mistake." Secretary of State Dean Acheson, who assisted in developing the Baruch Plan, reportedly saw in international efforts to control atomic energy "a parallel with the Washington Disarmament Conference of 1921–1922. The idea of heading off a naval race had been a good one, but the content of the treaties was wrong. Worse, the United States did not build all the ships allowed by the treaty limits and the Japanese fortified their island bases." "Policymakers ordinarily use history badly," Ernest R. May points out in "Lessons" of the Past (1973), because there is more assumption than analysis in their retrospective views. Even a brief analysis would have shown that at the Washington conference it was the United States that scrapped the most blueprints and uncompleted hulls. Congressional and public opposition to the expenditure necessary to complete the building program had made the treaty a virtue out of necessity. Later, Coolidge and Hoover were more interested in balancing the budget than in building ships, and their actions went unchallenged by legislators with little enthusiasm for increasing naval expenditures. While the notion that Japan secretly violated its pledge not to fortify the league-mandated Pacific islands has long persisted, historical investigations have revealed very little evidence to support such a conclusion.

Even more significantly, these critics and others failed to consider the relationship between naval limitation and its political setting. President Harding and the Republican Party oversold the system as one that would, by itself, bring about a new era of peace and considerable savings. Few leaders were willing to face the fact that the naval treaties were only first steps toward a more stable, mutually beneficial international system for the western Pacific region, and that additional political arrangements to resolve new issues were required to maintain that stability. Consequently, when extremists—isolationists in the United States and military expansionists in Japan—thwarted political accommodation, it was impossible for the naval limitation treaties, by themselves, to prevent the oncoming conflict.

The Cold War

After World War II, as the new weapons technology threatened the very survival of American society and its people, its policymakers continued to pursue traditional objectives. They sought to enhance the nation's (and its allies') security through deterrence, to reduce military expenditures, to influence international public opinion, and to gain domestic partisan political advantage. Politics became more important when arms issues became embroiled in election campaigns.

American public opinion during the Cold War reflected an ambiguity regarding arms control and disarmament treaties, especially with the Soviet Union. Opinion polls invariably showed that a majority of Americans favored arms control agreements with the Soviets, but at the same time a majority also said that they expected the communists to cheat if given an opportunity. Many politicians sought to follow the polls: they claimed to favor arms limitations, yet they never hesitated to demonstrate to their constituents that they were "tougher on communists" than their opponents. Thus, as the Cold War lengthened, the politicians' desire to be seen as strong on national defense often resulted in misleading, even derogatory, appraisals of arms limitations.

The unstable political-military environment with increasingly accurate nuclear weapons systems capable of obliterating cities, equally worrisome to leaders and to the public, persuaded the United States to engage in talks with the Soviet Union. Each successive administration after 1945 found itself—despite certain individual misgivings—engaged in protracted arms control negotiations. Washington's desire to sustain its influence in the United Nations and to maintain relations with its allies, especially in western Europe, often spurred arms control efforts.

The Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, nourished by Hubert Humphrey and sponsored by John F. Kennedy, was established on 26 September 1961 to facilitate these negotiations. Its director was to be the principal adviser to the president on arms control and to act under the direction of the president and the secretary of state—a unique and often strained administrative arrangement. Despite limited staff and resources, the agency was instrumental in negotiating the Limited Nuclear Test Ban, the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and the treaties banning chemical and biological weapons. Perhaps because of its global approach, the agency was sacrificed to the new unilateralists—led by Senator Jesse Helms—in 1997; its transfer to the State Department was completed in March 1999.

The United Nations, United States, and Disarmament Government leaders, peace reformers, and the general public hoped that the new United Nations, with active U.S. participation, might provide the venue for controlling tensions and reducing the prospects of a nuclear war. The Atlantic Charter, issued by President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill on 14 August 1941, declared that "all nations of the world, for realistic as well as spiritual reasons must come to the abandonment of the use of force." It further envisaged the creation of "a permanent system of general security" as well as practicable measures to "lighten for peace-loving peoples the crushing burden of armaments." The United Nations Charter emphasized the maintenance of peace and security. The General Assembly was to consider the principles governing "disarmament and the regulation of armaments" (Article 11, paragraph 1), while the Security Council was responsible for developing plans for the establishment of a system for "the regulation of armaments" (Article 26).

Bernard Baruch presented the U.S. proposal dealing with atomic weapons at the initial meeting of the UN Atomic Energy Committee on 14 June 1946. Although he regarded his remarks as a basis for discussion, they came to be known as the Baruch Plan—the definitive statement of U.S. policy. The plan called for the creation of the International Atomic Development Authority (IADA), which would control or own all activities associated with atomic energy, from raw materials to military applications, and would control, license, and inspect all other uses. In addition, it would foster peaceful uses of atomic energy by conducting research and development. When the IADA was established, the manufacturing of atomic bombs would cease and all existing weapons were to be destroyed. Baruch declared that sanctions must be imposed on nations possessing or building an atomic device without a license. Finally, he insisted that "there must be no veto to protect those who violate their solemn agreement not to develop or use atomic energy for destructive purposes."

From the outset, American and Soviet diplomats were at odds. The United States viewed the atomic bomb as an important source of its military power and insisted on extensive safeguards before destroying its atomic weapons or releasing information on their manufacture. The Soviets and others argued that the Americans were insincere, because they would not relinquish their atomic arsenal while expecting others to forgo developing their own atomic energy programs. And they were not far off target. "America can get what she wants if she insists on it," Baruch asserted in December 1946. "After all, we've got it and they haven't, and won't for a long time to come."

While some writers blame Washington for the failure of the negotiations, the historian Barton J. Bernstein suggests a more realistic perspective: "Neither the United States nor the Soviet Union was prepared in 1945 or 1946 to take the risks that the other power required for agreement. In this sense, the stalemate on atomic energy was a symbol of the mutual distrust in Soviet-American relations." Not until the ill-fated UN discussions focusing on general and complete disarmament in the 1960s were such broad-gauged approaches again examined.

In a September 1961 address to the General Assembly, President John F. Kennedy responded to Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev's 1959 proposal for "general and complete disarmament" by offering one of his own. Both plans primarily sought to influence international and domestic opinion, since neither leader had any reason to expect their plan would gain approval. Extended discussions of the plans by the Eighteen Nation Disarmament Committee (ENDC) revealed that a major point of contention continued to be that of verification. The United States insisted that verification must not only ensure that agreed limitations and reductions had taken place, but also that retained forces and weapons never exceed established limits. The Soviet Union countered that continued verification of retained forces and weapons constituted espionage.

While a few arms control agreements have emerged from the General Assembly and its subordinate bodies, their debates have been more valuable for the discussion of practically every aspect of disarmament. Arthur H. Dean, who represented the United States at the ENDC, wrote: "The discussions—at Geneva, at the United Nations, and in confidential diplomatic conversations—were a necessary means whereby the nations of the world could become educated on disarmament questions and the ground could be broken for concrete agreements."

Nuclear Test Bans and Nonproliferation The nonnuclear states' search for a comprehensive test ban was closely linked to the major nuclear powers' desire to restrict the spread of nuclear weapons through a nonproliferation treaty. The inability to achieve a comprehensive test ban was a source of friction between the two groups for five decades, especially during the periodic nonproliferation treaty review conferences. Beginning with President Dwight Eisenhower, successive administrations declared that a comprehensive test ban was their goal although they varied greatly in efforts for its accomplishment.

Limited Test Ban The spread of radioactive fallout resulting from atmospheric nuclear tests aroused public protests in the 1950s—led by Albert Schweitzer, Linus Pauling, and a host of "peace" groups—and put pressure upon President Eisenhower to halt the testing. When a 1957 Gallup Poll revealed that 63 percent of the American people favored banning tests, compared with 20 percent three years earlier, the president initiated the tripartite (U.S.–British–Soviet) test ban negotiations. Eisenhower turned to technical experts to develop a verification system, a move that was to have unexpected long-term results. With the advent of the nuclear age, even greater use was made of experts—including military officers, scientists, and technical specialists. Unquestionably, these experts were vital to the proper shaping of negotiating positions; however, they often complicated issues to a point where they become technically, and therefore politically, insoluble. A case in point is that during early test ban negotiations, seismologists sought a verification system that could distinguish between earthquakes and small underground nuclear explosions. After techniques acceptable to most were developed, technical experts kept searching for more and more refinements to reduce the already low error rate. As a result, it was impossible to negotiate a comprehensive test ban because critics would argue that one could not be absolutely certain that no cheating was going on.

While Eisenhower's efforts resulted only in obtaining an informal test moratorium, John F. Kennedy came to the presidency committed to obtaining a comprehensive ban on tests. His sobering encounter with Khrushchev at Vienna in 1961 and the subsequent Berlin crisis, however, derailed his plans. The October 1962 Cuban missile crisis, paradoxically, brought Kennedy and Khrushchev closer and led to the signing on 5 August 1963 of the Limited (or Partial) Nuclear Test Ban (LNTB).

The 1963 Moscow experience again suggests that successful arms control negotiations cannot be structured as an engineering or technical exercise; they must be essentially a political undertaking. When ambassador-at-large W. Averell Harriman was sent to Moscow to finalize the test ban, he took scientific advisers with him but deliberately excluded them from the negotiating team. He later explained, "The expert is to point out all the difficulties and dangers … but it is for the political leaders to decide whether the political, psychological and other advantages offset such risks as there may be."

The Kennedy administration's inability to provide absolute guarantees of Soviet compliance resulted in the LNTB's banning all tests except those conducted underground. This provided the Department of Defense and its nuclear scientists with a "safeguard" or guarantee that the United States would continue underground testing, as they put it, to ensure the safety and reliability of nuclear weapons. From 1964 to 1998, the United States conducted 683 announced tests, compared with 494 for the Soviet Union. Washington's emphasis on the "safeguard" continued to be used to justify testing after the Cold War ended.

The Non-Proliferation Treaty The People's Republic of China's first nuclear test on 16 October 1964, focused President Lyndon B. Johnson's attention on the dangers of nuclear proliferation. In 1965 both the United States and Soviet Union responded to the UN call to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons by submitting their own draft treaties to ENDC, and, after resolving a few differences, became identical by 1967. The committee's nonaligned members argued that a nonproliferation treaty must not simply divide the world into nuclear "haves" and "have nots," but must balance mutual obligations. Thus, to stop states from engaging in "horizontal" proliferation (the acquisition of nuclear weapons), the nuclear powers should agree to end their "vertical" proliferation (increasing the quantity and quality of their weapons). The nonaligned nations specified the necessary steps, in order of priority: (1) signing a comprehensive test ban; (2) halting the production of fissionable materials designed for weapons; (3) freezing, and gradually reducing, nuclear weapons and delivery systems; (4) banning the use of nuclear weapons; and (5) assuring the security of nonnuclear states.

The Non-Proliferation Treaty was signed on 1 July 1968, after the United States and Soviet Union reluctantly agreed "to pursue negotiations in good faith" to halt the nuclear arms race "at the earliest possible date" (the fig leaf they tried to hide behind), and to seek "a treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control." The dubious adherence to this pledge has been a point of serious contention at each subsequent review conference.

The Non-Proliferation Treaty is the cornerstone of a carefully structured regime that emphasizes the banning of nuclear tests and several other elements. The Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency was created in 1957—as the coordinating body for Eisenhower's Atoms for Peace project—to promote and safeguard peaceful uses of atomic energy. It has established a system of international safeguards aimed at preventing nuclear materials from being diverted to military uses. During 1974 and 1975, the Nuclear Suppliers Group was established in London to further ensure that nuclear materials, equipment, and technology would not be used in weapons production. Finally, nuclear-weapons-free zones further extended the nonproliferation effort.

Comprehensive Test Ban The comprehensive test ban issue was dormant during the early years of Richard Nixon's presidency, largely so it would not interfere with U.S.–Soviet negotiations on strategic arms limitations. At a Moscow summit meeting with Premier Leonid Brezhnev in July 1974, the two leaders resurrected the bilateral Threshold Test Ban Treaty, under which they agreed to hold underground tests to less than 150 kilotons, restrict the number of tests to a minimum, not interfere with the other's efforts at verification, and exchange detailed data on all tests and test sites. The Peaceful Nuclear Explosions Treaty, signed by Brezhnev and President Gerald Ford in May 1976, allowed nuclear explosives under 150 kilotons to be used in a peaceful manner—such as "digging" canals. The pact provided, for the first time, on-site inspections under certain circumstances.

President Jimmy Carter shifted his focus from the unratified threshold test ban back to a comprehensive test ban. In 1977 the Soviet Union indicated that it was willing to accept a verification system based on national technical means (each nation's intelligence-gathering system), supplemented by voluntary challenge inspections and automatic, tamperproof seismic monitoring stations known as "black boxes." When signs pointed to an agreement on a comprehensive ban, major opponents—including the weapons laboratories, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Secretary of Energy James Schlesinger—killed the effort by emphasizing America's need for periodic tests to assure the reliability of the nuclear weapons stockpile.

In July 1982, President Ronald Reagan ended U.S. participation in the comprehensive test ban talks, arguing that the Soviet Union might be testing over the 150-kiloton threshold. He insisted that verification aspects of both the threshold ban and peaceful explosions treaties must be renegotiated before a comprehensive accord could be considered. Critics pointed out that proving a test had taken place was much easier than verifying a specific magnitude; therefore, the administration had things backward. When Premier Mikhail Gorbachev informed Reagan in December 1985 that he would accept on-site inspections as part of a comprehensive ban, Reagan's refusal to consider the offer made it clear that the administration's concern about verification was a sham and that it had been used to avoid any agreement.

President George H. W. Bush issued a policy statement in January 1990 that his administration had "not identified any further limitations on nuclear testing … that would be in the United States' national security interest." Negotiations proceeded on verification protocols for the 1974 threshold treaty and the 1976 peaceful explosions pact; in June 1990, Bush and Gorbachev signed the new protocols clearing the way for their ratification.

The UN General Assembly, supported by the United States, overwhelmingly adopted a Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty on 10 September 1996. President William Jefferson Clinton signed the agreement and announced that its entry into force would be of the highest priority. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee's Republican chairman, Jesse Helms, a longtime opponent of the test ban, blocked its consideration until late in 1999, when Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott unexpectedly scheduled a ratification vote. After a bitter partis