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Assessing the Record of Arms Control OVER VERVIEW VIEW At a time of widespread fears that a terrorist group or rogue state could carry out a horrific attack using weapons of mass destruction, it is easy to forget that the United States and the international community have worked quite successfully since the devastating U.S. bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to establish standards against and prevent the use and spread of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons. The exceptions chill us: the near catastrophe of the Cuban missile crisis and the deadly use of chemical weapons in the bloody Iraq-Iran war. Yet, dire predictions that some 20 countries or more would be armed with nuclear weapons have not come true. And most countries have forsworn chemical and biological arms as legitimate weapons of war. These are not minor accomplishments. When arms control is mentioned, most people think of the Cold War—and for good reason. The latter years of that era were dominated by superpower negotiations and summits at which grimfaced U.S. and Soviet diplomats and leaders tried to limit each other’s burgeoning nuclear arsenals. What brought them together was the ever more costly, risky, and politically unpopular nuclear arms race; the stark reality of which became undeniable during the harrowing 13 days of the October 1962 Cuban missile crisis. Shortly thereafter, the two superpowers negotiated the Limited Test Ban Treaty. The treaty did not slow the nuclear arms race, but it did offer tangible health and environmental benefits by outlawing harmful nuclear testing in the atmosphere, at sea, and in outer space. It also showed the two rivals that regulating their competition did not have to be a zero-sum game and that it could, in fact, produce mutual gains. After determining that the introduction of missile defenses would only spur a buildup in offensive forces to overwhelm them, the two sides agreed to ban nationwide missile defenses in the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. Treaties limiting offensive nuclear forces—SALT I, SALT II, the Intermediate- Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, and START I—soon followed. While these Cold War agreements did not end the U.S.-Soviet nuclear showdown, they helped manage it (and its aftermath), enabling the two sides and the world to avoid nuclear catastrophe. Yet arms control in the Cold War entailed more than merely restraining the superpower arms race. It was the chief tool in limiting the size of the nuclear club. To this end, Washington, Moscow, and other like-minded capitals concluded in 1968 the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), which established a legal, moral, and political norm against nuclear weapons. A handful of countries have defied the treaty, but more have given up nuclear weapons programs and actual weapons than acquired them since the treaty’s entry into force. Argentina, Belarus, Brazil, Kazakhstan, South Africa, South Korea, Taiwan, and Ukraine are some of the successes. Iraq has been forced to join their ranks, Libya has announced its intent to do so, and Iran and North Korea are under intense pressure to follow suit. Before nuclear weapons, chemical and biological weapons ranked as the most terrifying arms in mankind’s arsenals. Countries outlawed their use in the 1925 Geneva Protocol following the horrors of gas warfare in World War I. But the production and possession of germ and chemical weapons was not prohibited until the international community concluded the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) in 1972 and the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) in 1993. CWC states-parties, including the United States and Russia (which together have more than 70,000 tons of chemical weapons) are now working to destroy their banned arms. Still, several countries are suspected of harboring secret stockpiles of these two loathsome types of weapons and fears abound that more lethal concoctions could be cooked up in laboratories around the world. Facing these challenges, the BWC, which lacks verification and enforcement provisions, and the CWC must be strengthened to permit the international community greater authority to uncover and halt unlawful chemical and biological weapons work. —Arms Control Association 8 8
PANEL ONE NE Assessing the Record of Arms Control CHAIR: John Steinbruner, Chairman, ACA Board of Directors MANAGING THE U.S.- SOVIET ARMS RACE: John Newhouse, Senior Fellow, Center for Defense Information CONTROLLING THE SPREAD OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS: Nobuyasu Abe, UN Under-Secretary General for Disarmament Affairs OUTLAWING CHEMICAL AND BIOLOGICAL WEAPONS: Elisa D. Harris, Senior Research Scholar, Center for International and Security Studies at Maryland JOHN STEINBRUNER: We have three very distinguished people. The overall point of this panel is assessing the record of arms control to this point. The first speaker, John Newhouse, will talk about managing the U.S.- Soviet arms race. John Newhouse, as I suppose most of you know, is one of the principal scholars of the subject, as well as a practitioner. He is currently senior fellow at the Center for Defense Information. He was a principal European advisor to Strobe Talbott, when Strobe Talbott was deputy secretary of State. He was an assistant director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency in the early days, when the SALT treaty was emerging, and he wrote the definitive, historical account of that process. He spent a long time as guest scholar at the Brookings Institution and writer for The New Yorker, and his latest book is called Imperial America: The Bush Assault on the World Order and we’re very pleased to have his comments this morning. JOHN NEWHOUSE: Well, I’m deeply gratified and honored to be taking part in this ceremony honoring the contributions and the memory of Paul Warnke. And like Bob, I’m also very glad that Maggie, Georgia, Tommy, Benjamin, and Stephen and Margaret are also here. Paul would have obviously liked that a lot. Paul always knew exactly where he wanted to go; that is to say, where he wanted to take a particular negotiation or the path to an agreement. He fought harder against those who tried to block or impede progress in this direction, probably harder than any of his like-minded peers in that era. But in doing so, he never lost his robust sense of humor. At the peak of a Republican outcry against arms control in all of its forms, he wrote a piece in Foreign Policy under the title “Apes on a Treadmill.” This got him into no end of trouble on Capitol Hill, but he had no regrets. All that to say he took things as they came, worked awfully hard, and never minced words. I mentioned his humor. Twice I saw him reduce an entire Soviet arms control team, including its chief, to helpless laughter. And he didn’t do this in any kind of an edgy or mean-spirited way. He just took their negotiating position and spoofed it a little bit, and they loved it. During much or most of the Cold War, national security policy was dominated by contesting pressures to build ever more strategic arms and to impose some controls on these weapons. Advocates of arms control argued plausibly that setting limits would stabilize the competition for increasingly large arsenals of progressively more destructive weapons. Given the politics surrounding arms control, it was never possible to envisage or work toward a comprehensive agreement that would remove the threat and set eternal limits on the weapons or produce a fully verifiable arms control regime. The idea was partly, insofar as verification is concerned, to get tight limits, to get a verification regime so tight that it would reduce—even though there would be margins left for cheating—the incentive to cheat because it wouldn’t make any sense to do so on a scale worth risking the collapse of the process. Put differently, Paul and those on his side of the argument envisaged a process of one agreement leading to another agreement. These were envisaged I think as links in a chain, and with each link, giving the parties greater confidence in the process and also engaging their larger interests 9 9
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