In the mid-1980s, many smart people predicted the death of arms control. Thomas Schelling was one of them. Others included Richard Haass, Albert Carnesale, Les Gelb, and Zbigniew Brzezinski.
US-Soviet relations were in terrible shape. The White House and the Kremlin were talking past each other. Uber-hawks in the Reagan administration compiled a long list of Soviet treaty violations – some true, mostly over the top – to block new accords, which seemed unlikely in any event, given the one-sided nature of the administration’s proposals. Almost everybody was surprised when President Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev threw nuclear orthodoxy out the window to reach a deal eliminating intermediate- and shorter-range nuclear missiles in 1987.
Schelling’s pessimistic appraisal, “What Went Wrong with Arms Control?” appeared in the Winter 1985/86 issue of Foreign Affairs. His critique deserves another read because he was a founding father of nuclear arms control and because prospects for treaty making have once again ebbed. Schelling argued that arms control had “gone off the tracks” in part because “it often looks as if it is the arms negotiations that are driving the arms race.” More fundamentally, Schelling’s complaint had to do with how misshapen the process had become. In his view, the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty was “not merely the high point but the end point of successful arms control.”
The enterprise went astray, in Schelling’s opinion, for the lack of “any coherent theory of what arms control is supposed to accomplish.” He wrote, “I judge the proposals and negotiations on offensive weapons to have been mostly mindless, without a guiding philosophy.” A major contributing factor to Schelling’s disillusionment was “the shift of interest from the character of weapons to their numbers.” The obsession over “matching enemy capabilities whether we like them or not” made no sense. More heresies followed:
Nobody ever offers a convincing reason for preferring smaller numbers (I may exaggerate: saving money is a legitimate reason…). And some people think that with fewer numbers there is less likelihood that one will fall into mischievous hands or be launched by mechanical error; this I think is incorrect, but may not be worth refuting because it is in no one’s main motivation. For the most part, people simply think that smaller numbers are better than bigger… If people really believe that zero is the ultimate goal it is easy to see that downward is the direction they should go. But hardly anyone who takes arms control seriously believes that zero is the goal.
What, then, should strategic arms control be about? Or, as Schelling asked, “If you were to limit something, what would you want to limit?” His answer was limits to promote force postures consisting of “economical and reliable retaliatory weapons that are neither susceptible to preemption nor capable of preemption.” Stabilizing, offsetting nuclear force postures would share three “crucial elements:” an assured retaliatory capability, “restrained targeting and some capacity for war termination.” No surprise about element #1. Element #2 — counterforce targeting as the enemy of stabilizing deterrence and arms control – was ignored once these capabilities were in reach. Element #3 was hardly discussed.
Schelling thought highly of the ABM Treaty because it reinforced cautionary behavior:
A prudent restraint from aggressive violence that is based on acknowledgment that the world is too small to support a nuclear war is a healthier basis for peace than unilateral efforts to build defenses… Most of what we call civilization depends on reciprocal vulnerability.
The counterforce compulsion trumped the ABM Treaty. The United States and the Soviet Union didn’t take Schelling’s advice because decision makers were listening instead to powerful domestic constituencies, including competing laboratories, military services and missile production complexes. The three states currently increasing their nuclear arsenals at the fastest rate – China, India and Pakistan – might just succeed in avoiding the counterforce trap, despite having familiar domestic drivers. It’s too soon to tell, but so far, Beijing and New Delhi have been focusing on economic growth while competing well below their military industrial capacity.
The Cold War fixation with nuclear numerology may have been wrongly applied, but it remains our temperature gauge for nuclear dangers, our surrogate for measuring the health of the Nonproliferation Treaty regime and a key indicator of how much effort Washington and Moscow devote to reversing nuclear excess. Numbers continue to matter. They tell us whether countries are in a holding pattern, or headed in a more dangerous or saner direction. Getting to zero may well be an impossible journey, but movement in this direction is the glue that helps keep the NPT intact.
Schelling was nonetheless right about many things, especially the overriding need to focus on avoiding or reducing the war-fighting character of nuclear arsenals. Once counterforce requirements have been embraced, nuclear excess is sure to follow. Counterforce capabilities present far more of a roadblock than missile defenses in reducing the size of large nuclear arsenals. The safest harbor for stabilizing deterrence, as Schelling advised, can be found when retaliatory weapons are neither susceptible to preemption nor capable of preemption.