Arms Control Essay

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Arms control is both a process and a result. On the one hand, it involves the conscious and dedicated effort by two or more parties (typically nation-states) to negotiate an improved security relationship. On the other, arms control is often manifested by an agreement to regulate some aspect of the participating states’ military capabilities or potential. The agreement may apply to the location, amount, readiness, or types of military forces, weapons, or facilities, but always presupposes cooperation or joint action among the participants regarding their military programs.

While not as centrally important today as it was during the second half of the twentieth century, arms control, in its broadest definition that encompasses not only traditional negotiations and agreements but also nonproliferation, counter proliferation, and disarmament, still has a role in a globalizing world that has ongoing security concerns. Arms control and other cooperative security initiatives should be seen as part of a nation-state’s foreign policy toolbox, available when necessary to enhance a state’s security, but seldom the only tools available; they complement rather than substitute for diplomatic, economic, and coercive military actions.

Arms control was born during the cold war to stall the military conflict primarily between the former Soviet Union, and its satellite states, and the United States long enough for the West to win. With the end of the cold war in 1991, the world experienced a flush of optimism and arms control activity that reached its zenith in the mid-1990s as formal agreements and cooperative measures were signed and entered into force with astounding speed. Both sides codified lower numbers of forces to ensure that the cold war was really over, but eventually arms control found a place dealing with the new concerns of proliferation, regional instability, and economic and environmental security. The value of arms control appeared to be growing in the new world, as states attempted to stem the illegal proliferation of weapons of mass destruction to rogue nations or groups and to meet their security needs in a multipolar, more interdependent world.

By the late 1990s, arms control had lost its luster for the United States and had become less important to a national security stance that no longer recognized the importance of such policies in the globalizing post–cold war world. The arrival of President George W. Bush in 2001 and the attacks of September 11 put the country on a war footing against a dramatically different kind of enemy. Arms control, at least from an American perspective, seemed passé, if not dead, a stance the Bush administration encouraged.

With the 2008 election of President Barack Obama, however, the United States restored arms control to its formerly central place in American diplomacy, and the international security agenda facing the new president required renewed attention to this policy approach. The Obama administration also saw arms control as a good way to try to restore better relations with Russia after several years of increasing antagonism.

What Is Arms Control?

Arms control can be defined as any agreement among states to regulate some aspect of their military capability or potential. Proponents of the concept believe that while the negotiating methods, regions of concern, and weapons involved may have changed, the underlying principles and objectives of arms control remain relevant today. The arms control process is intended to serve as a means of enhancing a state’s national security; it should not be pursued as an end unto itself. Arms control also should be distinguished from disarmament, the rationale for which is that armaments have been the major cause of international instability and conflict, and only through reductions in the weaponry of all nations can the world achieve peace. Proponents of disarmament have an overall goal of reducing the size of military forces, budgets, explosive power, and other aggregate measures.

Cooperative Security

Arms control falls under the rubric of cooperative security, a concept that has been used to outline a more peaceful and idealistic approach to security. One commonly accepted definition of cooperative security is a commitment to regulate the size, technical composition, investment patterns, and operational practices of all military forces by mutual consent for mutual benefit. Cooperative security is slightly different in meaning than collective security or collective defense. Collective security is a political and legal obligation of member states to defend the integrity of individual states within a group of treaty signatories, whereas collective defense is more narrowly defined as a commitment of all states to defend each other from outside aggression. By contrast, cooperative security can include the introduction of measures that reduce the risk of war, measures that are not necessarily directed against any specific state or coalition, a definition that definitely includes arms control.

Disarmament

The classical practices underlying disarmament can be found almost as far back as the beginnings of recorded Western history. Early practices were largely post conflict impositions of limitations on military force by the victor upon the vanquished. However, there were also examples of efforts to avoid conflict by cooperating to demilitarize likely regions of contact and restrict the use of new and destructive technologies. Efforts to impose some degree of order on interstate conflict focused on the advance of legal standards toward just war. Another series of efforts included demilitarizing colonial forces and avoiding distant conflicts. The period of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was marked by dramatic increases in the lethality of warfare and a parallel move toward bounding the employment of new weapons. Efforts were made to ban the use of certain systems and munitions, limit numbers of advanced systems deployed, and restrict the geographic employment of forces.

Traditionally then, disarmament was used to indicate the full range of endeavors to reduce and restrict military weapons and forces through a wide variety of means, from cooperation to imposition. These efforts included the demilitarization or deconfliction of potential regions of conflict, post-conflict limitations on state forces and weapons, as well as attempts to limit and eliminate new and destructive technologies. Efforts also included regulating the conduct of warfare, from determinations of noncombatant status to precepts of just and moral uses of armed force. Until the early 1960s, the concept of disarmament was broadly used as an umbrella under which all of these arrangements and means of implementation could reside.

Arms Control

Arms control belongs to a group of closely related views whose common theme is peace through the manipulation of force, and is but one of a series of alternative approaches to achieving international security through military strategies.

The centrality of the concept of disarmament was supplanted by the term arms control early in the nuclear age. World War II (1939–1945) saw the introduction of what many described as the “ultimate weapon,” or the atomic bomb, as well as near-global technologies of delivery. With the failure of early proposals to either eliminate or internationalize control over atomic weapons, the focus shifted toward limiting their development and spread and controlling their use and effects. Western academics and policy analysts soon realized that disarmament in the literal sense of eliminating nuclear weapons was not going to happen; these weapons had become a long-term reality of the international system. Thus, as they began examining these weapons and nuclear strategy, they adopted a preference for terminology that directly captured efforts to come to grips with “controlling” these weapons.

In the mid-1950s, policy makers began rethinking an approach that had emphasized general and complete disarmament and considered instead limited, partial measures that would gradually enhance confidence in cooperative security arrangements. Thus, more modest goals under the rubric of arms control came to replace the propaganda-laden disarmament efforts of the late 1940s and early 1950s. International security specialists began using the term arms control in place of disarmament, which they felt lacked precision and smacked of utopianism. The seminal books on the subject published in the early 1960s all preferred arms control as a more comprehensive term. Austrian scholar Hedley Bull differentiated the two as follows: disarmament is the reduction or abolition of armaments, while arms control is restraint internationally exercised upon armaments policy— not only the number of weapons, but also their character, development, and use.

The concept and theory of arms control was developed by a small number of academic study groups in the United States and Great Britain, who published the three seminal works on arms control in 1961. Strategy and Arms Control, by Thomas Schelling and Morton Halperin, reflected the findings of a 1960 summer study group organized under the auspices of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The basic premise of this book was that cooperative arrangements with adversaries could have the same objectives as sensible military policies in reducing the likelihood of war. The authors were influenced by the work of another member of the summer study, Donald G. Brennan, who served as editor of Arms Control, Disarmament, and National Security. Similarly, The Control of the Arms Race: Disarmament and Arms Control in the Missile Age, by Hedley Bull, was based on a series of symposia held at Oxford University in 1960. These three works form the essential basis for understanding modern arms control theory.

The arms control perspective was perhaps best expressed by Schelling and Halperin when they framed the arms control construct as follows:

We believe that arms control is a promising . . . enlargement of the scope of our military strategy. It rests essentially on the recognition that our military relation with potential enemies is not one of pure conflict and opposition, but involves strong elements of mutual interest in the avoidance of a war that neither side wants, in minimizing the costs and risks of the arms competition, and in curtailing the scope and violence of war in the event it occurs. (1)

Arms control in the nuclear age was framed as a component part of an overall military and national security strategy—an instrument of policy and an adjunct to force posture, not a utopian or moral crusade. It captured the more cooperative side of policy, focusing not on imposition but on negotiation and compromise, recognizing the shared interest in avoiding nuclear conflict.

Arms Control In The Cold War

Early Cold War Multilateral Efforts

Multilateral efforts early in the cold war sought to affect the control of nuclear weapons by limiting the physical scope of the weapons, their testing, and their further technological development and proliferation. Multilateral agreements prior to the 1970s banned placing nuclear weapons in Antarctica, outer space, or the earth’s seabed. Regional nuclear-weapon free zones also were established during this period in Latin America and later in the South Pacific, Africa, Southeast Asia, and Central Asia. Early restrictions on atmospheric testing were supplemented by efforts to ban all atmospheric tests and eventually all weapons test explosions, even underground. The early multilateral efforts were capped by the 1968 Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) that sought to prevent future additions to the nuclear club by establishing a framework for additional multilateral efforts extending to biological and chemical weapons and other arenas of arms control. The NPT also paid service to its disarmament heritage by containing a clause calling on all nuclear weapons states to seek the eventual elimination of their nuclear arsenals.

With the establishment of the NPT regime, the primary focus of arms control focus during the second half of the cold war centered on bilateral strategic controls between the United States and the Soviet Union. The meaning of arms control subsequently narrowed to a focus on the formal negotiating process, characterized by staged, multipart negotiation, implementation, and verification phases.

The Salt Era

The first effort of the bilateral U.S.-Soviet nuclear arms control process led to the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) and three treaties—an Interim Agreement on Offensive Weapons and Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (both signed in 1972, together called SALT I), and the 1979 SALT II treaty. Cold war tensions and a dangerous and expensive nuclear arms race, whose potential ramifications had been made evident by the Cuban Missile Crisis, spurred both the United States and the Soviet Union in the 1960s into a series of cooperative measures and steps toward bilateral cooperation to limit future strategic systems. With the development of sufficient capabilities in national technical means of unilateral verification, formal bilateral negotiations on SALT began in 1969. SALT I froze the total number of deployed intercontinental ballistic missiles on both sides and limited the total number of maritime strategic systems that could be deployed. It also limited the development and deployment of future antiballistic missile systems and restricted defense technologies. The two sides agreed on the outline of a follow-on agreement at the Vladivostok Summit in 1974. Subsequent negotiations led to SALT II, which placed an aggregate limit on deployed strategic launch vehicles and also limited the number of systems that could be equipped with multiple warheads.

The Start Era

The second series of negotiations between the United States and the Soviet Union addressed force reductions through the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START), leading to the START I and START II treaties and the elimination of an entire class of weapons through the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty. Beg inning simultaneously with the SALT talks, a broader series of East-West efforts had addressed the reduction of tensions between the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the Warsaw Pact. By 1987, the INF treaty negotiations came to fruition, and both sides’ intermediate-range missiles were withdrawn and destroyed. A key legacy of this agreement, in addition to its precedent for elimination of an entire category of weapon systems, was its reliance on on-site inspection teams to verify missile removal and destruction on the other side’s territory.

The START talks began in 1982 and proceeded alongside an extensive series of nuclear confidence-building measures addressing risk reduction and data sharing. The 1992 START I Treaty required measured reductions in both nuclear weapons and delivery vehicles, with intrusive verification provisions to ensure compliance. The bilateral nuclear arms control process was so firmly established that even with the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the two sides were still able to quickly negotiate the 1993 START II Treaty, in which both sides agreed to further reduce their nuclear arsenals. In addition, cooperative efforts succeeded in consolidating control of Soviet nuclear systems in the Russian Republic and initiating a broad effort known as cooperative threat reduction measures to reduce the chances of proliferation from the former Soviet Union. At the 1997 Helsinki summit meeting, both countries committed themselves to continue the strategic arms reduction process to even lower levels of nuclear warheads through a START III round, but this plan was obviated by the 2002 Moscow Treaty (officially the Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty, or SORT).

The Moscow Treaty And Beyond

The Moscow Treaty called for continued reductions in both sides’ arsenals of deployed strategic warheads, but with no formal verification measures to ensure compliance. Given that START was scheduled to expire in December 2009, and SORT in December 2012, the two states began negotiations on a replacement strategic agreement in earnest after Barack Obama became president of the United States in 2009.

Multilateral Arms Control Successes

Arms control has not been solely focused on bilateral U.S.Soviet strategic issues since the 1970s. There have been parallel efforts under way in multiple other fields, often led by the United Nations Conference on Disarmament. These multilateral discussions were not as highly charged politically as the bilateral efforts, but they did achieve several notable accomplishments. For example, in 1972 the world agreed to ban the production, stockpiling, and use of biological and toxin weapons (the Biological Weapons Convention), and in 1993 it agreed to a similar treaty on chemical weapons (the Chemical Weapons Convention). NATO and the Warsaw Pact came to an agreement on conventional force levels, composition, and disposition in the Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty in 1990. A Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty was signed in Geneva in 1996 (although it has not yet entered into force), and discussions are still ongoing regarding a global Fissile Materials Cutoff Treaty. A series of nuclear-weapon-free zones has essentially denuclearized the entire Southern Hemisphere. A coalition of states and nongovernmental organizations led the effort to ban landmines in 1997 (the Ottawa Convention), and several informal groupings of states were created to prevent the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction technologies through organizations such as the Zangger Committee, the Australia Group, the Wassenaar Arrangement, and the Nuclear Suppliers Group.

Arms Control And Disarmament Today

The agenda of existing, active efforts in the arena of arms control and disarmament remains extensive. The potential for nuclear proliferation—whether materials, components, systems, weapons, or expertise—keeps nuclear arms control on the agenda. Small arms and light weapons remain outside of any effective controls. Other weapons with catastrophic potential—particularly biological and chemical—while subject to international controls and even bans, remain a threat due to further development and possible proliferation. Far-reaching technological developments have opened up entire new arenas of potential and actual military development in areas such as information technology and outer space. Ongoing arms control efforts—unilateral, bilateral, and multilateral, formal and informal, between nations and nonstate parties in some cases—are addressing this wide agenda.

The U.S.-Russian strategic arms control implementation process will take decades to complete. This is a massive, difficult, expensive, and often contentious process, and it will be compounded with each new increment of cuts. The added factor of dealing with strategic defenses will complicate this bilateral endgame, at least in the short term, but it also holds the potential—at least to some observers—of being the only route to the continued safe drawdown of the two strategic nuclear arsenals. In addition, the United States and Russia have yet to address the additional nonstrategic nuclear weapons that are included in their arsenals, which will even further complicate bilateral arms controls. Similar cooperative efforts to dismantle, control, and destroy former Soviet chemical and biological weapons and capabilities extend the scope and horizons of the bilateral strategic arms control effort. The highly formal cold war bilateral arms control process will certainly be altered, but it is far from over.

We also can expect a continuation of multilateral arms control and disarmament efforts, particularly toward halting and reversing the proliferation and development of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons. Work remains to be done in fully implementing the NPT and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, and in improving the implementation of the Biological and Chemical Weapons Conventions.

Regional arms control and disarmament efforts are just emerging. Europe has long addressed security cooperation, confidence-building, and conventional arms control issues, and that effort will persist as the region continues to stake out its future course. Other regions have adopted nuclear-weapon-free zones, and some have established regional cooperative programs on a range of economic, political, and security issues. New and emerging arenas for arms control and disarmament include existing efforts among some states and nonstate actors to address controls or bans on small arms, at least academic discussion of controls on advanced conventional weapons, and emerging venues of military interest—and thus arms control interest—in space and cyberspace. All of these efforts are only in their infancy.

Humankind has a long legacy of attempts to limit the potential and destructive results of warfare. Today, as modern technologies threaten massive destruction and suffering, nations will continue to strive for humane and measured applications of force. As long as weapons remain tools of international relations, citizens of those nations will be involved in arms control and disarmament. For nearly three generations, policy development and intellectual advancement in the field of international relations have focused on the role of arms control and used the specialized language developed for that purpose. This field of international policy will remain viable and vital into the foreseeable future.

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