Quote of the week:
“The fear of the bomb is not the beginning of wisdom. Fearful men have a kind of foresight, but in their partial view of the future all signs point to a foregone conclusion. How else could the frightening consequences of nuclear fission justify both McCarthyism and pacifism?” — Wayne A.R. Leys, “Human Values in the Atomic Age”
The thirteen-year period from 1987 to 2000 was the golden age of nuclear arms control. This golden age began when two risk-taking leaders cast off the spell of deterrence orthodoxy to sign the 1987 Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces Treaty. When Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev declared, quite sensibly but still remarkably, that a nuclear war could not be won and must not be fought, and then backed up their words with the INF Treaty, they broke the back of the nuclear arms race.
Washington and Moscow subsequently agreed to two strategic arms reduction treaties, a treaty mandating deep cuts in conventional forces in Europe, an “Open Skies” Treaty permitting cooperative over-flights from Vancouver to Vladivostok, a treaty banning the production, possession and use of chemical weapons, and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, banning nuclear testing in all environments for all time.
This last achievement was the culmination of four decades of effort, initially prompted by public revulsion against atmospheric testing. Until the CTBT was finally negotiated, each nuclear test was a declaration of the Bomb’s power and utility. Each test also demonstrated faith and commitment to battlefield use in the event of a breakdown of deterrence. The absence of nuclear testing conveys a very different message — that nuclear weapons aren’t like other instruments of war that are regularly tested. They are different, a class apart. Major and regional powers have learned to live without these tests for the last two decades.
You sometimes hear the facile argument that the golden age of arms control became possible only when the Soviet Union was falling apart. This is like declaring that the Empire State Building only became a reality when the observation deck and spire were completed on its top.
Finishing touches should not be confused with the immensity of an extraordinary construction project. The golden age of arms control became possible because of decades of hard diplomatic labor. Deterrence alone didn’t establish conditions for success, because deterrence was and is about threatening terrible destruction. Deterrence doesn’t achieve deep cuts; diplomacy does.
One of the critical diplomatic achievements and preconditions for deep cuts was the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. The first tranches of arms control were inconceivable without the ABM Treaty. Deep cuts became feasible when Reagan wished to pursue extravagant space-based missile defenses, and when Gorbachev figured out that the surest way to derail this project was to undercut its perceived need. Thanks to George Shultz, Paul Nitze and others, Reagan sided with the dealers rather than the squeezers around him. Superpower arsenals then shrank by over 80 per cent.
Once the ABM Treaty was reaffirmed, agreements negotiated by George H.W. Bush and Boris Yeltsin followed. Their 1993 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty finally prohibited multiple warheads atop land-based missiles, a longstanding pursuit of arms controllers that corrected the permissiveness of the first strategic arms limitation accord. The disallowance of MIRVs atop ICBMs addressed the concerns of those most worried about Moscow’s nuclear war-fighting capabilities. For good measure, Bush 41 and Yeltsin also unilaterally removed some of their least safe and secure weapons from forward deployments. These momentous accomplishment have been or are being thrown away, thanks to Bush 43 and Donald Trump, with a major assist from Vladimir Putin.
The last hurrahs during the Golden Age occurred during the first term of the Clinton administration, which negotiated the removal of nuclear arms in the newly independent states of Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Belarus — states that had no controls, money or expertise to secure their sudden nuclear inheritance after the Soviet Union’s dissolution. Russia refused to implement strategic arms reduction treaties without the return of these weapons; the Nonproliferation Treaty would have been badly undermined, as well.
President Clinton also secured the indefinite extension of the Nonproliferation Treaty and the Senate’s consent to ratify the Chemical Weapons Convention, negotiated largely during the George H.W. Bush administration. Clinton wasn’t done: he provided the impetus needed to conclude negotiations ending nuclear tests.
The theory and practice of arms control took hold when it was most needed. Arms control helped to prevent the Cold War from becoming hot and facilitated the draw down of nuclear excess once political conditions permitted. Equally if not more importantly, the interchanges and cooperative practices of arms control proved essential for Washington and Moscow to control loose nukes when the Soviet Union dissolved. Not one of the 39,000 poorly guarded weapons in the Soviet stockpile became a mushroom cloud — including weapons suddenly beyond Moscow’s grasp in the temporary possession of newly independent states.
Nuclear arms control was the least appreciated great achievement of the Cold War.
This success story has been mostly forgotten and is in the process of being dismantled. At the peak of its success at the turn of a new millennium, nuclear arms control began to unravel, along the nuclear safety net woven at great effort over the previous decades. The reasons for this dramatic turnaround will be assessed in another post.
Note to readers: This post is a foretaste of my book in progress on the rise, demise, and revival of nuclear arms control.