Arms Control

ARMS CONTROL

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.

See also: cold war; reykjavik summit; strategic arms limitation treaties; strategic arms reduction talks; strategic defense initiative; united states, relations with

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Walter C. Clemens Jr.