ARMS CONTROL.

As a term, arms control only came into vogue at the start of the 1960s, based on theoretical work that had begun in the mid-1950s. Initially it referred to attempts to stabilize Cold War military relations, and in particular the nuclear balance; it was contrasted with disarmament, which was taken literally to mean arms reductions, presented as a measure born out of idealism without thought for strategic stability. Arms control eventually came to refer to any cooperation between potential enemies in the military sphere, just as in practice disarmament had been given a similarly wide definition before that time. After the end of the Cold War, the rather precise focus on regulating types of weapons and military inventories encouraged by both arms control and disarmament tended to give way to a much broader concern with security, and any military measures were considered as part of a wider package designed to influence broad political relationships between countries that were either trying to move away from or getting into antagonistic relations. Because much of the relevant activity has been global in scope, the European element cannot be easily isolated, Europe during the twentieth century was so central to great power war and conflict that its security was at issue in all negotiations.

The initial enthusiasm for disarmament came after World War I as a direct response to the assumption that the catastrophe was the result of the prewar arms race. Not only was it important to avoid such vicious cycles in the future, but there might be a way of securing a virtuous cycle, whereby political relations between antagonistic countries might be improved, if ways could be found to move from arms competition to arms cooperation. Military expenditure was also often castigated as wasteful and designed to line the pockets of arms manufacturers and a diversion from welfare needs. Governments always proclaimed their commitment to disarmament as a principle (as they continue to do into the twenty-first century) and tended to blame others for the lack of progress, but in practice they also were reluctant to take great risks when it came to trusting the word of potentially hostile foreign governments. They rarely accepted the simple notion that fewer arms should mean more peace, and so negotiations for disarmament and then arms control tended to be quite complex in their purposes and their effects.

In the immediate aftermath of World War I, the main negotiations were on naval forces (the Anglo-German naval arms race having been blamed, inaccurately, for the war). The major all-encompassing disarmament negotiations took place in Geneva in 1932–1933 but, after little progress, they collapsed with the rise of Adolf Hitler (1889–1945). There were some agreements but by and large they did not survive World War II, which rather, by its very occurrence, undermined the notion that peaceful gestures were of much value in the face of willful aggression. After World War II the arrival of the atomic bomb prompted activity at the new United Nations, but the developing Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union reduced the possibilities for progress. Only toward the end of the 1950s did negotiations begin in earnest again. The first agreements were on peripheral matters, but by the end of the 1960s there was an appetite for more substantial negotiations, and during the early 1970s the improvement in East-West relations was reflected in a series of initiatives that began to peter out as relations worsened again, only to pick up in the late 1980s as the Cold War moved to its conclusion. In some respects, the end of the Cold War made arms control in Europe much easier, but it also became unclear what exactly it was supposed to achieve.

CONTAINING WAR

Prior to World War I, the major purpose of disarmament negotiations was to contain war as a social institution. The aim was to limit the effects of war, usually by proscribing certain weapons (or at least their use) as excessively cruel in their effects or apt to extend the destructiveness of war. Though the scale and intensity of twentieth-century "total" war could have hardly been comprehended, this effort reflected anxieties both about the consequences of warfare burgeoning out of the categories in which it had previously been contained, and about the prospect of greater suffering on the battlefield, a greater exposure of commerce and civilian life to military attack, and a greater strain on national resources. The fruits of this interest can first be found in the St. Petersburg Declaration on exploding bullets of December 1868, and then in the Hague Conferences of 1899 and 1907. After World War I, this focus continued but now with heavy bombers, submarines, and poison gases as the main areas of concern. Efforts to control air warfare met with no success, though the problems of banning heavy bombers, and of writing effective conventions to restrict aerial bombardment to a "combat zone" or for use against solely military targets, were discussed during the 1920s and through the international Disarmament Conference of 1932– 1933. The major success was with the Geneva Protocol of 1925, which prohibited the use of "asphyxiating, poisonous or other gases, and bacteriological methods of warfare." This did not prevent stockpiling of chemical weapons, so the enforcement mechanism was largely fear of retaliation. As this was a very real fear, the Protocol survived World War II, in part also because of doubts surrounding the military benefits of chemical weapons.

Less successful was the London Protocol of 1936, in which thirty nations agreed to grant the passengers and crew of merchant vessels some protection against submarines. It was too vague in defining when attack became legitimate and failed to acknowledge the structural weaknesses of submarines, which were too small to rescue passengers and crews and too vulnerable to come to the surface to make a visible challenge. Because of its limitations, the code was liable to be unintentionally violated. On the second day of World War II, a German U-30 submarine sank the unarmed British passenger liner Athenia, with the loss of 120 lives, in the belief that it was attacking an auxiliary cruiser. The British then ceased to rely on the submarine code and ordered the arming of all merchantmen, which meant that they were, in effect, participating in hostilities. By the end of September, Germany had announced that it would suspend adherence to the code.

After 1945, the atomic bomb was the obvious weapon to be singled out for special treatment. The United States introduced proposals to the United Nations in 1946 that would have put the peaceful exploitation of atomic energy under an international agency and prevented the stockpiling of atomic bombs. In the light of the developing Cold War, these proposals failed to impress the Soviets and thus came to naught. When the two sides began to negotiate again in the 1950s, there were some successes, most notably the partial nuclear test ban of 1963, which dealt with atmospheric testing (widely seen as a health hazard) but still allowed underground testing, and so provided only a minimal impediment to weapons development. In the 1990s, a draft comprehensive test ban treaty was agreed to, but the U.S. Senate refused ratification. The spread of nuclear weapons was restricted to particular areas (Latin America, Antarctica, the seabed, and outer space). These could be agreed upon without too much difficulty because there were few good reasons for putting such weapons there in the first place. The 1970 Seabed Treaty was likened to an agreement not to screw aircraft to the ground. Attempts to control the spread of weapons to new countries (after the United States, the Soviet Union, United Kingdom, France, and China) through the 1970 Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty can claim modest but not complete success, with India and Pakistan declared nuclear powers by the 1990s, Israel widely presumed to be a covert power, and Iran and North Korea on their way to developing nuclear capability. On the credit side, South Africa and Libya abandoned nuclear plans and Iraq was forcibly disarmed. Following the break-up of the Soviet Union, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine were briefly nuclear powers but they were persuaded by western governments not to attempt to retain this status, which would have also been expensive and technically demanding. The record on the abolition of "cruel and unusual" weapons shows a complete blank. Attempts at arms restriction have failed to impede the development of modern weaponry.

FORCE RATIOS

The pressure for disarmament after 1918 was reflected in policies of national demobilization and so did not require international treaties. This was not, however, considered a sufficient guarantee of peace so long as arms races were still possible. What could be demobilized could be remobilized. It was considered desirable that states should renounce the right to be the sole judges of their own armaments and place their trust in the Covenant of the League of Nations. To preserve national security, a formula was developed based on the assumptions that (a) force levels reflected calculations of the external danger and (b) a sharp reduction in absolute levels would not reduce the level of security if the ratio between national forces was maintained.

The first attempt to put this theory into practice came with the Washington Naval Conference of 1922. Here the United States, the British Empire, Japan, France, and Italy reached agreement on capital ships, setting ratios of 5:5:3:1.7:1.7. This more or less reflected the ratios of the time. This treaty demonstrated the problems with this approach to disarmament. To achieve acceptable arms ratios it was necessary to simplify strategic relationships, exclude many militarily relevant factors, and concentrate on a few prestige weapons. The naval parity between the British and Americans soon became irrelevant and the strategic significance of capital ships also declined in comparison with cruisers, carriers, destroyers, and submarines. Shipbuilding efforts were redirected into a race in heavy cruisers.

The attempt in the early 1930s to produce a comprehensive treaty failed because of the deteriorating political situation and the inherent complexity of the exercise. The greater the number of elements and aspects of military strength covered by negotiators, the less chance they have of reaching an agreement, yet simplifying the military balances in order to render them manageable may also render them politically unacceptable. The Germans saw disarmament talks as a way of escaping from the humiliating military inferiority imposed at Versailles; the French saw the same talks as a means of maintaining this inferiority, arguing that there was no satisfactory way of compensating for Germany's industrial resources and manpower except by undermining its capacity for military preparedness in every possible way.

This approach only enjoyed some success in the 1970s with the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) between the United States and Soviet Union, which eventually mutated into the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START) in the 1980s. In this case, the strategic value of vast quantities of nuclear weapons came to be questioned in view of the diminishing marginal returns on nuclear weapons beyond those required for "assured destruction." In principle this should have meant that disparities in actual numbers, so long as destruction was assured, should not have been of great importance, but in practice neither superpower liked to accept an appearance of even notional inferiority. The guiding principle became that of "parity"—a rough equivalence in military strength between two nations that allowed both to claim they are "second to none." Definitions of parity that required asymmetrical adjustments in force structures were unacceptable. Thus the prior existence of parity became a necessary precondition for the negotiation of an arms agreement seeking to create a formal condition of parity. This was one reason why the attempt in the 1970s to translate the SALT approach to conventional forces in Europe in the talks on mutual force reductions failed. As with those of the 1930s, the problems lay in basic asymmetries, in this case the preponderance of Soviet manpower and tanks in Central Europe. Warsaw Pact proposals preserved the existing balance; North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) proposals sought to create a new one.

ARMS STABILITY

The argument against putting restrictions on the "natural" development of armaments has been that peace depends on a healthy awareness of the costs of war, and that this awareness is helped by the imposing presence of well-stocked arsenals. The problem with this argument is that so long as war-avoidance is not the preeminent policy objective, then, despite the costs, other objectives lead to declarations of war. Furthermore, if war appears unavoidable, then, as the rapid descent into World War I demonstrated, the mobilization of forces and the strategic attraction of getting in the first blow might create their own imperatives before political leaders can fully exhaust diplomatic alternatives to war.

From the mid-1950s, arms control was presented as an approach to arms cooperation based on strategic realism. This approach accepted the continuation of the nuclear age but sought to dissuade political leaders from precipitate military action in the midst of a crisis by reducing the incentives for getting in the first blow. If it was not possible to stop political leaders embarking on war as a "rational" act of policy, then it might still be possible to make sure that they remained the masters rather than the victims of events. The cooperative management of the military sphere would ensure the primacy of the political sphere at times of conflict.

Arguably the origins of this approach can be discerned at the 1932–1933 disarmament conference, where one objective was to render aggressors impotent through the proscription of "offensive" weapons. Unfortunately no weapon readily falls into a strict category of "offensive" or "defensive." In the case of heavy artillery and tanks, designated the key weapons for a land offensive, there would be occasions, such as when it was required to dislodge invaders from a foothold, when the defense might wish to call on these weapons. Yet while these weapons might be useful to the defense, they would be invaluable to the offense. (In ordering German rearmament, Hitler stressed "offensive weapons such as heavy tanks and artillery.") Offensiveness or defensiveness might be considered properties of a total force structure, but does that mean it is necessary to ask whether or not a professional army is more suitable for aggression than a conscript army? At the conference there was intense debate about the point at which a particular weapon developed the qualities necessary for offensive action, for example when a tank moved from being "light" to "heavy." The British and Americans disliked submarines for their "offensive" role as commerce raiders, while the French and others considered them defensive as the only weapon that, at the time, enabled a nation with few capital ships to defend itself at sea. A sufficiently cunning and resourceful offense can still prosper by making full use of the advantages of surprise, geographic position, and enemy uncertainties, as well as by making inspired use of non-prohibited weapons. It was not, for example, until the German sweep through Europe in 1940 that the tactical uses of aircraft as an offensive instrument were fully appreciated.

There was also the question of what confidence could be shown in such agreements if political relations deteriorated. Until the 1930s, the strategic advantage that might be gained through the violation of an arms treaty was not seriously considered. During the 1920s, with the exception of the control commission to check Germany's compliance with the Treaty of Versailles (and here the problem was not a lack of knowledge of Germany's transgressions but the reluctance to do anything about them), it was assumed by most governments that compliance was not a problem; international law would be respected. With the worsening world climate of the early 1930s, the Americans, British, and Soviets all swung round to the emphatic and total endorsement of international inspection. In 1955, President Dwight Eisenhower (1890–1969) suggested that transparency could be a confidence-building measure in its own right. His "open skies" proposal of October 1955 involved the mutual exchange of blueprints of "military establishments from one end of our countries to the other" and verification of these by reciprocal aerial inspection. This position was maintained by the United States in all arms negotiations with the Soviet Union after the war until 1958. The Soviets were reluctant to give up their high level of military secrecy, considered a great strategic asset, and saw "open skies" as just another form of espionage. Eventually this asset was severely diminished by the advent of reconnaissance satellites, which came to be accepted by both sides as a means of verification.

The open skies idea was discussed during the late 1950s as part of an East-West discourse on the specific question of avoiding surprise attacks. The American approach, which very much informed the original concept of arms control, depended on the need to reduce the possibility of getting caught out by a long-range nuclear strike that would remove the capacity for retaliation. The most deadly surprise attacks in the thermonuclear age, therefore, would be planned and executed within the territory of a superpower and would take the form of a first strike by long-range bombers or intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). U.S. proposals started from the assumption that before concrete adjustments could be made in force structures, it was necessary to build up confidence in the pacific intentions behind current military dispositions and to develop a system of inspection so as to demonstrate that any agreements could be verified. They led eventually to proposals in the strategic arms limitation talks to remove antiballistic missiles (ABMs) on the grounds not only that these systems encouraged the proliferation of offensive weapons (the offense being always likely to retain the upper hand in any contest) but also, to be sure that the defense would be swamped, that they might give an aggressor confidence in the possibility of defense against any residual retaliation after an attempted first strike against the enemy's means of retaliation. The Soviets needed some persuading of this case before the 1972 ABM Treaty could be agreed to, and later Republican administrations in the United States also wondered about the wisdom of banning "defensive" weapons in this way.

Just as the American proposals were guided by a fear of a "nuclear Pearl Harbor," Soviet proposals reflected their past experiences of surprise attacks. They also reflected a traditional view that to prepare for aggressive war, it was necessary to concentrate forces suitable for an invasion. Therefore, if the forces of NATO and the Warsaw Pact could be prevented from getting too close to each other in the areas of major tension in the center of Europe, then the opportunities to start a war, deliberately or through miscalculation, would be diminished. Soviet proposals therefore involved reducing armaments in Central Europe, establishing a nuclear-free zone, and, in addition, setting up control posts at large ports, railway junctions, highways, and aerodromes to guard against "dangerous concentrations" of forces. The military sterilization of Germany was a recurrent theme, as this was the country that had launched a surprise attack against the Soviet Union in 1941. During the late 1950s, there was substantial interest in NATO countries in the idea of "disengagement" in Central Europe, but the ideas fell foul of the political realities of the time. There was a familiar problem of equitable concessions. Disarmament in a zone equal in area on both sides of the Iron Curtain would be strategically unfair to NATO in that NATO lacked defense in depth and its zone would contain more installations of strategic significance than the Eastern zone. A nuclear-free zone would also have been comparatively disadvantageous to the West. More seriously, while a zone that took the Iron Curtain as its central line might make military sense, it was diplomatically awkward because it required recognition of the division of Europe and, in particular, of the division of Germany.

This final objection was eased as a result of the move to détente in the early 1970s. By the time of the 1975 Helsinki Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, the division of Europe was formally recognized. The new Mutual and Balanced Force Reduction (MBFR) talks involved a central guidelines area; nonetheless, the basic problem of asymmetry in force structures remained. Attempts to develop a compromise based on a trade-off between the prime offensive weapons held by each side—Western "tactical" nuclear weapons for Soviet tanks—did not get anywhere. Helsinki did lead to the introduction of confidence-building measures by the provisions for notification of and attendance at large-scale maneuvers. The experience of these measures, which the Warsaw Pact never took seriously, if anything, reduced confidence in arms control.

AFTER THE COLD WAR

During the darker days of the Cold War, there was debate over whether measures of disarmament or arms control might be the key to an improvement in political relations, or whether they must wait upon such an improvement taking place for other reasons. The manner of the Cold War's conclusion confirmed that cooperative agreements on armed forces are shaped by, rather than shape, core political relations. Agreements were most needed when relations were poor, but the lack of trust made them hard to achieve. Thus the conditions in the late 1980s made traditional arms control more possible to achieve, with regular summits between the superpowers and the winds of political change blowing throughout the communist world, but also rendered the agreements largely irrelevant, though the informal aspects of the negotiating process may at times have provided important opportunities for communication and reassurance. In practice, arms control reinforced the dominant political tendency of the time. When tensions were increasing, it could aggravate the process (for example, through disagreements over compliance or intransigence over apparently trivial points of negotiating detail). When tensions were easing, it could accelerate an improvement in relations. During the last years of the Cold War, there were major breakthroughs with agreements in 1987 on intermediate nuclear forces (INF) that saw cruise and Pershing nuclear missiles (which had caused massive protests in Western Europe at the start of the decade) and Soviet SS-20 missiles being removed. Even more important was the major Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE), which was signed to mark the formal end of the Cold War in November 1990. The CFE framework allocated force levels to individual states. These numbers represented high ceilings rather than realistic floors. As they were to be monitored, this element of transparency was hailed as an important source of confidence-building. But the political shift meant that many of its provisions were irrelevant and sometimes counterproductive as the states of postcommunist Europe started to reassess their strategic interests.

The problem, at least in Europe, shifted away from one of reinforcing stability in relations among great powers to creating stability in the internal and external relationships of medium, small, and in some cases quite tiny powers. The instruments employed by the international community in their attempts to rein in the various conflicts that erupted throughout the former Yugoslavia during the 1990s illustrate the new options: arms embargoes, air-exclusion zones, air and land humanitarian relief corridors, control of artillery pieces, cease-fire lines. All these measures suffered from partiality, in controlling only limited types of military activity, and also in tending to favor one side rather than another in the conflict. There is clearly much to be said for limiting the availability of weapons to the belligerents, but an embargo will tend to penalize the weaker, especially if geographically isolated (so that an embargo is readily enforced) and without an indigenous arms industry. The 1996 Dayton Peace Agreement on Bosnia, which included an arms control element, was turned into an agreement on force levels. Essentially the deal saw the Bosnian Serbs agreeing to cut down their arsenal (largely in the form of more elderly weapons) in return for a cap on the combined Muslim-Croat federation forces, which they could see growing through the combined efforts of the United States and a number of Muslim states. The agreement reflects the expectation of "balance," but of course the balance only exists to the extent that the federation holds together and that it is not upset by external sources in the event that hostilities resume. Stability here really depended on a continuing and strong international presence. The history of arms control warns that it can never be free-standing but is always a function of larger questions concerning the utility of force and security guarantees. It must also reflect the broad political currents of the time.

See alsoCold War; Disarmament; Helsinki Accords; NATO; Nuclear Weapons; Peace Movements; Warsaw Pact.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Blacker, Coit D., and Gloria Duffy, eds. International Arms Control: Issues and Agreements. 2nd edition. Stanford, Calif., 1984. A good assessment of efforts during the Cold War.

Blackwill, Robert D., and F. Stephen Larrabee, eds. Conventional Arms Control and East-West Security. Durham, N.C., 1989. Covers conventional arms control in Europe.

Bunn, George. Arms Control by Committee: Managing Negotiations with the Russians. Stanford, Calif., 1992. Another account of the negotiating process.

Graham, Thomas. Disarmament Sketches: Three Decades of Arms Control and International Law. An interesting memoir covering many key negotiations.

Madariaga, Salvador de. Disarmament. New York, 1929. Reprint, Port Washington, N.Y., 1967. A sharp, classic critique of disarmament over this period.

McKercher, B.J.C., ed. Arms Limitation and Disarmament: Restraints on War 1899–1939. Westport, Conn., 1992. On the history of arms control and disarmament up to World War II.

Pelz, Stephen E. Race to Pearl Harbor: The Failure of the Second London Naval Conference and the Onset of World War II. Cambridge, Mass., 1974. Covers naval treaties.

SIPRI Yearbooks: World Armaments and Disarmament. Oxford, U.K., 1968–. The best coverage of postwar discussions on arms control and disarmament.

Talbott, Strobe. Deadly Gambits: The Reagan Administration and the Stalemate in Nuclear Arms Control. New York, 1984. An inside account of many of the nuclear arms control debates relating to Europe.

Wittner, Lawrence S. Toward Nuclear Abolition: A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement. Stanford, Calif., 1971. Fully covers the history of the antinuclear movements pushing for disarmament.

Lawrence Freedman