Arms Control at a Crossroads: Renewal or Demise? 9781685859848, 9781685859879

Citation preview

ARMS CONTROL at a

CROSSROADS

ARMS CONTROL at a

CROSSROADS Renewal or Demise?

edited by

Jeffrey A. Larsen and Shane Smith

Published in the United States of America in 2024 by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. 1800 30th Street, Suite 314, Boulder, Colorado 80301 www.rienner.com and in the United Kingdom by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. 1 Bedford Row, London WC1R 4BU www.eurospanbookstore.com/rienner © 2024 by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Larsen, Jeffrey Arthur, 1954– editor. | Smith, Shane (Michael Shane), editor. Title: Arms control at a crossroads : renewal or demise? / edited by Jeffrey A. Larsen and Shane Smith. Description: Boulder, Colorado : Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc., [2023] | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “Reviews the foundations of arms control, highlights the perspectives of the major nuclear powers, and assesses current initiatives and future possibilities for meeting challenges across a range of strategic domains, technologies, and weapons — Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2023033441 (print) | LCCN 2023033442 (ebook) | ISBN 9781685859848 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781685859879 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Arms control. | Security, International. Classification: LCC JX1974.A1 A76 2023 (print) | LCC JX1974.A1 (ebook) | DDC 327.1/74—dc23/eng/20230824 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023033441 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023033442 British Cataloguing in Publication Data A Cataloguing in Publication record for this book is available from the British Library. Printed and bound in the United States of America The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48-1992. 5 4 3 2 1

We dedicate this book to our children, Alex and Sydney Smith and Heather, Peter, Julia, Andrew, and Carolyn Larsen; and to our grandchildren, Kai, Kaleia, and Camila Larsen. May their lives be untouched by conflict that could be avoided through judicious diplomacy and the creative application of arms control and cooperative security.

Contents

Preface

ix

1 Does Arms Control Have a Future? Jeffrey A. Larsen and Shane Smith

1

Part 1

The Foundations and Context of Arms Control

2 Deterrence and Strategic Stability Schuyler Foerster 3 The Evolution of Arms Control Mechanisms James M. Smith Part 2

33

Perspectives of the Major Powers

4 United States Amy F. Woolf 5 Russia Steven Pifer 6 China Phillip C. Saunders Part 3

17

51 71 91

Arms Control Domains

7 Nuclear Weapons David A. Cooper 8 Proliferation, Nonproliferation, and Disarmament Rebecca Davis Gibbons vii

113 131

viii

Contents

9 Arms Control Monitoring Regimes Justin Anderson 10 Chemical and Biological Weapons Amanda Moodie and Michael Moodie 11 The Impact of Emerging Technologies Marina Favaro 12 Conventional Weapons and Novel Systems Amy J. Nelson 13 Arms Control in Cyberspace and Outer Space George Perkovich Part 4

147 167 185 203 221

The Way Ahead

14 The Return of Geopolitics David Santoro 15 New Horizons for Cooperative Security Kerry M. Kartchner 16 Arms Control’s Uncertain Future Brad Roberts List of Acronyms Bibliography The Contributors Index About the Book

239 253 273

285 289 317 319 331

Preface

THE FUTURE OF THE ARMS CONTROL ENTERPRISE LOOKS BLEAK. After more than fifty years of service as a tool that has enhanced international security and helped prevent nuclear war, we could soon face a world without formal strategic arms control treaties. Less-formal cooperative security arrangements may fill the void in limiting the dangers of an uncontrolled world populated by revanchist states with growing arsenals of weapons of mass destruction, but that is far from certain. This book is an effort to educate the current generation on the past value of arms control and cooperative security, to remind readers of its previous successes, and to explore how these mechanisms may prove valuable in the future. This volume is the fourth in a succession of books on arms control and cooperative security dating back to the mid-1990s. Each iteration has taken stock of arms control developments and identified alternative approaches and forms that it might take in response to changes in the security environment. We are again at what may be a pivotal moment in international politics, and the future of arms control is up in the air. To shed light on where it may be heading, the present collection features a stellar cast of authors, both young scholars and more senior analysts, all of whom are experts in their fields. The editors were honored to have such a strong team agree to contribute to this updated text. In 1996, in Arms Control Toward the 21st Century (Larsen and Rattray), the editors defined arms control as “a process involving specific, declared steps by a state to enhance security through cooperation with other states.” Those steps could be unilateral, bilateral, or multilateral, and implicit or explicit. The editors expressed their belief that “while the negotiating methods, regions of concern, and weapons involved may be changing, the underlying principles and objectives of arms control remain ix

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relevant in the post–Cold War world.” They hypothesized that arms control would be more important to national security than it was in the past. Its value appeared to be growing in the new world, as states attempted to implement treaties already in place, stem the illegal proliferation of weapons of mass destruction to rogue nations or groups, and meet their security needs in a more multipolar, interdependent world. Arms control was assuredly here to stay—or so they thought. The definition of arms control and the contributors’ belief in the role that arms control and cooperative security can play have withstood the test of time, even if the optimism of the 1990s has not. Each succeeding edition in this informal series has also recognized how the definition has broadened to include nonstate actors, informal agreements, and new domains. By 2002, with the publication of Arms Control: Cooperative Security in a Changing Environment (Larsen), it was clear that the early post–Cold War years had been a golden era for arms control. By the turn of the century, the world was enjoying a period of reduced great-power tension that led, ironically, to a diminished level of interest in the need for formal arms control. The role of cooperative security was increasing, however, as the major powers dealt with legacy concerns such as “loose nukes” and proliferation, but also dangers from small arms, nonstrategic weaponry, and violent nonstate actors. Subsequently, in 2009, Arms Control and Cooperative Security (Larsen and Wirtz) was written at a time of significant debate over the future role and value of arms control and an unfocused beginning of the return of great-power competition. The golden era of arms control had passed, and the United States had spent years after September 11, 2001, focused on counterproliferation and the global war on terror, with significantly reduced interest in formal constraints. The new administration of President Barack Obama, however, entered office with a goal to reinvigorate and advance a range of arms control, cooperative security, and disarmament initiatives. That 2009 volume reflected a flush of optimism about a future without nuclear weapons, at a time when the threat from nonstate actors and transnational challenges seemed greater than that from other states. But that seemingly benign period also passed, and the arms control community has been pulled in multiple directions over the past decade. The pendulum of international politics has once again swung back to an emphasis on nationalism and military strength over mutual restraint and cooperation. Today, the world faces a radically different threat environment. There is a distinct near-term prospect of intense competition and conflict among three nuclear-armed great powers without treaties in place to help curb arms racing or destabilizing behavior. In addition, the emergence of regional nuclear powers, the advancement of new technologies and strategic domains, and Russian, North Korean, and Syrian use of chemical weapons portend a challenging time for arms control in the years ahead.

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The editors and authors of this book believe that earlier definitions of arms control remain valid in their expanded form, and also that the potential roles for the mechanisms of arms control and cooperative security in traditional and new domains remain as important as ever. In fact, they may become even more crucial in the years ahead—a future that may closely resemble the early days of the Cold War with its unconstrained arms buildups. Nevertheless, while there may be pessimism within the security community over the possibility of a return of traditional arms control, there may perhaps also be optimism over cooperative approaches that could one day lead to renewed negotiations and the return of arms control to a central role in the relationship among nations. *  *  * The editors would like to thank their publisher, Lynne Rienner, for once again recognizing the value of a book on this critical subject. They also thank the anonymous outside reviewers, the colleagues who provided insight into the current state of arms control and international relations—especially Paul Bernstein—and the Air Force Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) and its previous director, James Smith, for sponsoring the project that resulted in this book. INSS was founded at the Air Force Academy some thirty-two years ago by one of our editors and is currently headed by the other. The orginal mission of INSS—to serve as a think tank on arms control for the US Air Force—has expanded in subsequent decades to consider deterrence issues and challenges associated with the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction more broadly. The legacy of contributions by INSS to strategic thinking, nuclear policy, and arms control continues. The material in this book is based on research sponsored by Larsen Consulting Group LLC under agreement number FA-7000-21-2-0008. The views and conclusions contained herein are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as necessarily representing the official policies or endorsements, either expressed or implied, of the US Air Force Academy or the US government. —Jeffrey Larsen and Shane Smith

1 Does Arms Control Have a Future? Jeffrey A. Larsen and Shane Smith

IS ARMS CONTROL DEAD? NOT QUITE, BUT ITS PROGNOSIS appears grim. The challenges ahead are numerous and steep. That does not mean, however, that there is no future for arms control. Its value remains, and the need for its benefits is likely to grow, even as the resurgence of great-power competition casts a pall over existing arrangements that have long helped prevent the spread and use of the world’s most dangerous weapons. As one veteran of nuclear arms control has written, “Formal, treaty-based arms control is likely coming to an end. But the need to prevent nuclear war will remain.”1 As long as there is a shared international interest in preventing the “unthinkable,” arms control has a future. One thing seems certain about that future: arms control over the next generation will look different than it has over the past half-century. In many ways, it must. Arms control will need to adapt to the realities of a new era to remain a relevant instrument of statecraft. Trends suggest the new era will be defined by competition among multiple nuclear-armed great powers, potentially intense regional conflicts, rising nationalism, the advancement of information and communication technologies, and the emergence of new strategic domains in space and cyberspace, all of which are having transformative impacts on international security relations. What arms control will look like in this new era is difficult to predict. Arms control reflects politics, and politics are notoriously difficult to forecast, especially in a time of dramatic change. We may be at an inflection point in global history not unlike the immediate years after World War II or the end of the Cold War. In this uncertain context, arms control has lost its luster among many of the world’s political leaders as they seek flexibility to adjust to the new era. The resulting stress on international cooperation may very well lead to a collapse of arms control as we know it. 1

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However, just as in eras past, political leaders will one day again see the utility and value of arms control as a primary tool for managing competition— because the costs and risks of a world without it are too great. It may be useful to think about arms control today like the early Cold War theorists and practitioners did, as they also sought to identify rules of the road and mechanisms for managing extreme competition in a new and unfamiliar era. Their work took decades to bear fruit and it was far from guaranteed that it would succeed. The arms control terms and processes they collectively defined and implemented eventually became a pillar of nonproliferation, international security, and strategic stability. But the arms control concepts, theories, and mechanisms designed for that era may no longer apply. Driven by a distantly familiar threat of nuclear Armageddon that reemerged in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the world asks whether it is entering a new era, with new challenges and complexities, or returning to a cold war. Is arms control up to the task? Does it need to be reenvisioned? How might existing arrangements be strengthened or new ones fashioned to ensure arms control remains a valuable tool for the future? Are there alternative pathways for the arms control enterprise in this emerging security environment? How might this enterprise be reconceptualized? This book provides students and practitioners with the scholarly foundation for answering those questions. It examines the state of play in the world of arms control and offers a chance to rethink its purpose and effectiveness as a tool, process, or set of mechanisms that can still enhance international security.

What Is Arms Control? Defining Arms Control

Arms control can be defined as an arrangement among political entities (typically nation-states) to regulate some aspect of their military capability or potential. The arrangement may apply to the location, amount, readiness, or types of military forces, weapons, or facilities. Whatever their scope of terms, however, all forms of arms control have one common requirement: they presuppose a common interest and some form of cooperation or joint action to achieve it. There have been historical exceptions to this cooperative approach. For example, at times one state has imposed coercive disarmament on another. During the George W. Bush administration of the early 2000s, for example, more assertive concepts of diplomacy, counterproliferation, and compellence gained some traction in the United States’ approach to dealing with destabilizing elements of the international system. But the more common approach to controlling arms has been one based on cooperation

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between adversaries. This makes arms control a subset of cooperative security, as previous editions of this book have made clear, and a concept to which the authors of this volume subscribe. Early theorists like Hedley Bull defined arms control as any form of military restraint between potential enemies in the interest of achieving a common purpose, even while pursuing conflicting goals.2 Thomas Schelling and Morton Halperin conceptualized three primary objectives that arms control might serve: to reduce the likelihood of war, to reduce the costs of preparing for war, and to minimize the scope and violence of war if it occurred.3 While the relative merits of each objective have been grounds for academic consideration, most theorists and political leaders have agreed that the prevention of war—particularly nuclear war—was the highest priority. The bottom line of early theoretical thinking about the subject was that arms control was a process involving specific, declared steps by a state to enhance security through cooperation with other states. Those steps could be unilateral, bilateral, or multilateral; cooperation could be either implicit or explicit. Arms control should not be seen as an end in and of itself, but as one tool in a state’s national security tool kit that can enhance its—or more accurately, multiple nations’—sense of security through a process of agreed approaches and constraints. As Amy Nelson put it in an early authors’ meeting, arms control is “a process punctuated by treaties.” Its ultimate purpose is to build trust and enhance the stability of the international order. What remains true is that arms control is but one of a series of alternative approaches to achieving international security and strategic stability through military measures. Arms control embraces a broad set of mechanisms, including negotiations, treaties, bilateral and multilateral agreements, unilateral commitments, regimes, weapon-free zones, and the like. It is a process that has been proven over the past fifty-plus years. Today, however, the world faces the breakdown of this consensus over the value of military restrictions on the great powers. In a field that has experienced a sine wave of interest and disinterest since its origins in the early years of the Cold War, we are now at a nadir with disillusionment toward arms control obvious on all sides. Nevertheless, official US policy continues to recognize the potential relevance of arms control as a tool for enhancing national security. The Relationship of Arms Control to Cooperative Security and Disarmament

This book places arms control within the rubric of cooperative security. One definition of cooperative security is “a commitment to regulate the size, technical composition, investment patterns, and operational practices of all military forces by mutual consent for mutual benefit.”4 That larger

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concept grew in popularity during the post–Cold War years, perhaps because the prospects of war between major powers were receding, removing the perceived need for often contentious and rigorous restrictions of arms control. Disarmament calls for the elimination of specific classes of weapons in the hope that without those weapons, the world will be a safer place. Traditionally, “disarmament” was used to indicate the full range of historical endeavors to reduce and restrict military weapons and forces through a wide variety of means, from cooperation to imposition. These efforts included the demilitarization or deconfliction of potential regions of conflict—at home and in colonial areas. They included postconflict limitations on state forces and weapons, as well as attempts to limit and eliminate particularly heinous or indiscriminate technologies. And they included efforts to regulate the conduct of warfare more broadly, from determinations of noncombatant status to precepts of just and moral uses of armed force. The concept was used as an umbrella under which all these arrangements and means of implementation could reside. Disarmament underlay efforts to confront the specter of nuclear war in the 1950s, but it proved unable to prevent an arms race. Policymakers began rethinking an approach that had emphasized general and complete disarmament and to consider instead limited, partial measures that would gradually enhance confidence in cooperative security arrangements. This led to the creation of the concept of arms control in the early 1960s as a more realistic alternative to disarmament. Disarmament has enjoyed a modest resurgence since the early 2000s when the so-called “gang of four” US statesmen proposed the elimination of nuclear weapons, a theme picked up by President Barack Obama when he called for “a world without nuclear weapons.”5 Since then, there has been a fertile debate on the concept of humanitarian disarmament, as well as some modest successes in this field led by a new generation of disarmament advocates. Several of these efforts do not fall under the traditional definition of arms control, but reflect bottomup led approaches that in most cases do not have the full endorsement of the great powers and therefore have had limited effects. These include the 1997 Mine Ban Treaty, the 2008 Convention on Cluster Munitions, and the 2017 Nuclear Weapons Ban Treaty.

Arms Control in the Cold War With the failure of early proposals to eliminate atomic weapons, the focus shifted toward limiting their development and spread, and toward controlling their use and effects. Western academics and policy analysts soon realized that disarmament in the literal sense of eliminating nuclear

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weapons was not going to happen; these weapons had become a long-term reality of the international system. Thus, as they began examining these weapons and nuclear strategy, they adopted a preference for terminology that directly captured efforts to come to grips with “controlling” these weapons and bounding their use. The founding premise of traditional arms control theory—that arms control can be an important adjunct to national security strategy—has, in practice, not always been obvious or consistently observed because arms control is inherently a counterintuitive approach to enhancing security. Arms control makes national security dependent on the cooperation of prospective adversaries. It often involves setting lower levels of arms than might otherwise appear prudent based on a strict threat assessment. It mandates establishing an interactive relationship with potential opponents and, in the case of mutually intrusive verification and data exchanges, exposes sensitive national security information and facilities to scrutiny by foreign powers. It requires seeking and institutionalizing cooperation where the potential for conflicts of interest seemingly far outweighs common objectives. It is fundamentally a high-stakes gamble, mortgaging national security against little more than the collateral of trust and anticipated reciprocal restraint, often in a geopolitical context fraught with political hostility and tension. It is, in fact, a voluntary (and not always reversible) delimitation of national sovereignty. Viewed from this perspective, arms control is not obviously better than its alternative—unilaterally providing for one’s own security.6 For arms control to be an effective instrument of national security, its objectives must be determined by, and be in close harmony with, the broader objectives of overall national security strategy.7 At the most basic level of abstraction, three grand conceptual dilemmas dominated strategic thinking and the formulation of US national security objectives during the Cold War: What deters? How much is enough? What if deterrence fails? Arms control was an attempt to deal with these questions.8 Traditional arms control theory was based on the premise that the superpowers inherently shared an area of common ground (avoiding nuclear war), and that this element of mutual interest could serve as the basis for limited, cooperative arrangements involving reciprocal restraint in the acquisition of weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Arms control assumed a high priority on the national security agenda as a way of managing the superpower nuclear rivalry. The new importance of arms control was a reaction to the bipolar structure of the international system and the revolutionary nature of nuclear weapons. Generally, negotiations were limited in scope, and focused on increased strategic nuclear stability between the superpowers. The conduct of bilateral negotiations became very formal, with agreements sometimes taking years to reach.

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Multilateral efforts early in the Cold War sought to affect the control of nuclear weapons by bounding the physical scope of the weapons and limiting their testing and further technological development and proliferation. With the signing of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1968, the nuclear agenda for cooperative controls was narrowed to issues between the major nuclear powers. The primary arms control focus of the second half of the Cold War became centered on bilateral strategic controls between the United States and the Soviet Union, and the meaning of “arms control” subsequently narrowed even further to focus on the formal processes. Not all arms control had to do with nuclear weapons, however. In the multinational arena, arms control continued to make progress with treaties and agreements restricting chemical weapons, biological weapons, missile technologies, export controls, and conventional weapons. As the chapters in this book demonstrate, there is a rich history of multilateral arms control outside the narrow strictures of nuclear weapons. Arms control was so central to US national security and foreign policy during the Cold War that the US State Department created an in-house Arms Control and Disarmament Agency to deal with such weighty matters. One of the most valuable results of negotiations across multiple domains was the development of trust and an understanding between the United States and Soviet Union of a shared goal in creating a stable environment.

Changes in the Post–Cold War Era In the immediate aftermath of the Cold War, the West experienced a flush of optimism and activity regarding arms control. The 1990s were truly a high-water mark for arms control, as formal agreements and cooperative measures were signed and entered into force with astounding speed. Many of these, in fact, were agreements reached years before, but only now ratified. Arms control found a place in dealing with the new concerns of advanced weapons proliferation, regional instability, and economic and environmental security. The value of arms control appeared to be growing as states attempted to implement treaties already in place, stem the illegal proliferation of weapons of mass destruction to rogue nations or groups, and meet their security needs in a more interdependent, multipolar world. Arms control held a preeminent place in US diplomacy during the Cold War. But after forty years as the centerpiece of bilateral security and US national security policy, its prominence began to wane after the attacks on September 11, 2001. The Soviet Union had disappeared, Russia was viewed as a strategic partner in such transnational threats as terrorism, China was not yet a peer competitor, and the problems that arose in the Middle East and Southwest Asia, which dominated US military planning and operations for a generation, were not ones that could be solved by arms control.

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The decade of the 2000s witnessed a much wider definition of cooperative security, one that de-emphasized traditional arms control and focused more on nonproliferation of WMD. International events beginning in late 2001 had a profound effect on all dimensions of international relations. Global terrorism—including the specter of terrorists armed with chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear weapons—and actions well outside of accepted norms of international behavior by rogue and failing states raised severe challenges to the foundations of cooperation and diplomacy that lie at the heart of arms control. The George W. Bush administration’s decision to abandon the AntiBallistic Missile Treaty in 2002 and to de-emphasize the role of arms control in US foreign policy was welcomed by some observers as a realistic response to the end of the Cold War. The traditional role for arms control— to enhance stability and forgo potentially devastating misunderstandings between the two superpowers—was no longer seen as a central concern. By contrast, less formal international collaboration that organized collective action to stem the threat posed by rogue states, clandestine terrorist networks and entrepreneurial groups that trafficked in WMD, dual-use items, and associated delivery systems had increased in importance. Cooperative security seemed to offer a new and promising policy instrument. By the 2000s, however, the reach and purpose of arms control had grown appreciably from its early beginnings. As one analyst has written, even in the realm of bilateral arms control the goals had increased to include the following: 1. Provide public recognition that the two sides regard one another as important equals. 2. Provide communication in difficult times. 3. Provide transparency that leads to predictability that, in turn, enhances stability. 4. Avoid an action-reaction arms race. 5. Close off militarization of a specific technology. 6. Reduce incentives for preemptive attacks in times of crisis by shaping the structure of forces. 7. Save money by capping expenditures on new systems. 8. Reduce the chance of inadvertent escalation caused by mismanagement during crises.9 Arms control had indeed exceeded far beyond its originators’ assumptions. But within a few years, it all began tumbling down. One of the big losses in the decade of the 2010s was the breakdown of confidence that strategic stability remained a shared US-Russian goal, thereby undermining the role of arms control and increasing the possibility of nuclear use—whether deliberately, via escalation, or through accident or miscalculation.10

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The Return of Great-Power Competition The last arms control treaty between the United States and the Russian Federation, the New START Treaty, was signed in 2010 and entered into force in February 2011 during the Obama administration. At the same time, President Obama was calling for continued efforts to reduce the number and role of nuclear weapons, while simultaneously pursuing across-the-board modernization of the US nuclear enterprise. In addition to New START, he began a series of discussions with Moscow on stability and hosted four nuclear security summits that included nearly every nation that had some role for nuclear weapons or energy. President Donald Trump came into office in 2017 with a quite different agenda, including skepticism toward any agreement that might delimit US military power. He withdrew from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty in 2019, following reports of Russian cheating on the provisions of the treaty. He also accepted the de facto demise of the Open Skies Treaty. But the administration also maintained a rigorous mutual inspection relationship with Russia for New START, although it failed to extend New START as its February 2021 expiration deadline approached. The administration called on China to join in trilateral or multilateral negotiations over a follow-on strategic agreement, but was unable to pull Beijing into those discussions. One of President Joe Biden’s first acts on entering office in January 2021 was to agree to the Russian proposal to extend New START until 2026. Unfortunately, the Covid-19 pandemic resulted in the suspension of inspections for two years after 2020. In August 2022, the United States announced it was temporarily suspending further inspections by Russia due to that country’s invasion of Ukraine. Nonetheless, in December 2021 Russia had put forward a proposal for agreement on broader security guarantees, which it delivered to Brussels and Washington. These were deeply flawed Russo-centric positions to which neither the United States nor the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) would concede, but they could be potential building blocks for future negotiations when Russia eventually decides to rejoin the international community.11 Challenges today include the complexity created by a larger number of nation-states involved in issues that typically can be ameliorated through arms control such as biological and chemical weapons development and use, nuclear weapons and threats, missiles, and advanced conventional weapons. In addition, the world now faces the possibility of strategic consequences resulting from nefarious acts in new domains such as space and cyber. Added to these issues is the impact of new and emerging technologies across the board, many of which are available to states other than the superpowers. None of these new policy instruments or emerging technologies are covered by arms control. The enlargement of the concept of deterrence into a broader, holistic, cross-domain, or integrated form also creates uncertainty and stress,

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for which traditional arms control may not be the most appropriate answer. This includes apparent changes to the norms surrounding nuclear weapons, the increasing use of bellicose language in diplomatic circles, and the actual use of proscribed chemical and biological agents on the battlefield and in operations such as targeted assassinations. The lack of communication and dialogue between the United States, Russia, and China is also of concern. For example, because of the annexation of Crimea in 2014 the NATO alliance ended all practical cooperation with Russia, a mandate that remains in place today. Even in the depths of the Cold War, the two superpowers routinely talked to one another. Indeed, that is where arms control earned its stripes as a valuable means for reducing tensions and building cooperation and trust. Reduced US embassy staffing in Moscow, ending on-site inspections for New START, China’s refusal to participate in bilateral or trilateral nuclear talks, and the lack of high-level meetings all bode ill for settling the serious differences between the major nuclear players. This lack of dialogue has ripple effects across domains, geographic regions, and functional considerations. As Brad Roberts clearly states in the conclusion to this book, “The collapse of bilateral US-Russian nuclear arms control . . . would likely have significant consequences for a treaty system that depends on cooperation among the major powers to ensure effective enforcement of its main provisions.” Such a collapse was perhaps foreordained by the Russian government’s announcement in February 2023 that it was suspending its participation in the New START treaty regime. On top of these specific issues affecting relations between the great powers, the world seems to be undergoing a slow descent into nationalism and autarky, moving away from the liberal rules-based international order that the West has been building over the past seventy-five years. All of this warrants a reevaluation of arms control and its approach to enhancing stability. As the 2022 US National Security Strategy said: “Global cooperation on shared interests has frayed, even as the need for that cooperation takes on existential importance. The scale of these changes grows with each passing year, as do the risks of inaction.”12 That is why “the United States will work with allies and partners, civil society, and international organizations to strengthen arms control and nonproliferation mechanisms, especially during times of conflict when escalation risks are greater.”13 Therefore, “We will continue to seek pragmatic engagement with competitors about strategic stability and risk reduction” even given the return of great-power competition.14

Overview of the Book Despite the discouraging situation facing arms control in the world of the 2020s, the authors in this book believe there is still a role for arms control and cooperative security. In the chapters that follow. they assess the role,

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value, and purpose of arms control and cooperative security with regard to the political realities we face today. They explore arms control theory, arms control’s successes and challenges during the Cold War and since, changes to the international security environment in recent years, and the likelihood of future cooperative arrangements or agreements in various issue areas, geographic regions, and domains. This book takes the position that the underlying principles and objectives of arms control remain relevant. Arms control may not be as centrally important in the near term as it was during the Cold War, but it still has a role to play in a globalized world that has growing security concerns. Part 1, “The Foundations and Context of Arms Control,” establishes a baseline for understanding arms control and cooperative security. It begins with a discussion of arguably the most important goal of arms control, to create strategic stability and avoid a nuclear war. Schuyler Foerster ably addresses this critical concept in his chapter, describing stability as “preserving a degree of predictability about state behavior, reducing uncertainty in a crisis, and minimizing the risks of miscalculation in circumstances that might escalate into conflict.” His key point is the necessity for dialogue between potential adversaries to meet the original goals described by Thomas C. Schelling and Morton H. Halperin. As Foerster writes, the challenge today is that “arms control and other forms of collaboration on security issues can address sources of strategic stability, but only if the broader political climate will allow it.” Arms control can help that dialogue, he says: “Arms control—in its broader sense of encompassing a range of collaborative security efforts—can play an important role, even if only to ensure that the potential adversary is part of the conversation.” James M. Smith provides a historical overview of arms control and its multifarious mechanisms. Arms control and disarmament have resulted in “ratified treaty positions with the force of law, norms of broad agreement on the most dangerous of weapons, and rules of the road over behaviors and technologies in novel realms of conflict.” Together, this mélange of cooperative security agreements has encouraged peace since the end of World War II. Part 2 turns to perspectives on arms control of the three major powers: Russia, China, and the United States. Amy F. Woolf begins with a survey of US views of arms control and the way in which it creates arms control policy. According to her, “Arms control and collaborative security endeavors are among the tools that help strengthen US national security… they complement military, diplomatic, and economic measures in an integrated deterrence architecture.” The challenge today is that after five decades of consensus within the US government on the value of negotiations and agreements, that perspective is breaking down and is subject to competing interests within the American political system.

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Not surprisingly, Russia has a different perspective, as Ambassador Steven Pifer highlights. Russia’s relations with the United States are in a post–Cold War slump. However, as he points out, in early 2022 (prior to the war in Ukraine) the United States and Russia each professed interest in continuing dialogue on strategic stability. Both presidents also declared in 2021 that “a nuclear war can never be won and must never be fought.” Yet this did not stop Moscow from invading Ukraine or threatening the West with nuclear attack, using its arsenal as a deterrent to Western support for Kyiv. When and if negotiations resume over arms control issues, they will need to overcome several issues on which neither side seems willing to budge: for Moscow, that means concern over the United States’ strategic missile defenses and conventional prompt global strike capabilities; for Washington, Russia’s unnecessarily large arsenal of non-strategic nuclear weapons. Phillip C. Saunders looks at China and arms race dynamics in East Asia. He describes a regional environment where arms control will be increasingly necessary to manage US-China strategic competition, but where obstacles are steep and growing. Progress will require a degree of mutual restraint and accommodation, even as competition is likely to intensify. North Korea’s nuclear developments “promise to make an already tense regional security environment even more fraught.” Part 3 of the book addresses specific domains in which arms control might be expected to operate. It covers nuclear, biological, chemical, conventional, and so-called novel weapons; disarmament and nonproliferation approaches; and the new domains of cyber and space. David A. Cooper starts by addressing nuclear weapons and arms control. This is the only realm that threatens the very survival of humanity should things go terribly wrong. This demands the creation and maintenance of norms of behavior governing these weapons and their handling, particularly given the global movement toward great-power competition. As he puts it, “It is increasingly obvious that nuclear weapons will play a key role in this new era of great-power competition. Unfortunately, the brief span of nuclear history provides few guideposts for the way ahead.” Arms control and other cooperative measures will remain a valuable means of enhancing stability in this world. Rebecca Davis Gibbons addresses nonproliferation and disarmament in her chapter. An expert on the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, she argues that the small number of nuclear states today reflects the success of global nonproliferation efforts since the 1960s. However, those efforts all required great-power cooperation, which is currently lacking. Fortunately, whereas historically a state would attempt to incorporate new technologies into its military arsenal, this has not been the case with WMD, due to the arrangements put in place to prevent proliferation. A breakdown in great-power cooperation will pose significant strains to those arrangements.

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Justin Anderson describes various monitoring regimes that have been established in nuclear and chemical treaties, thereby ensuring compliance with the terms of those agreements. He points out that the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) is notable as the only major international treaty without such a monitoring regime. One of the strengths of his chapter is his insightful case study of how a nominal on-site inspection might take place between adversaries. The father-daughter team of Amanda and Michael Moodie together tackle chemical and biological weapons. The editors acknowledge that putting these two topics into one chapter is a disservice to each of these issues and is not necessarily the most useful way to think about these quite different capabilities or the challenges they present. It is a commonly used organizing technique but, as they point out, combining the two can lead to problems when trying to limit the spread and use of these weapons. The BWC and the Chemical Weapons Convention employ quite different approaches to dealing with the military capabilities associated with the different underlying sciences. Their conclusion that “exploring untraditional and potentially uncomfortable alternatives to familiar arms control practice could generate surprising (and valuable) results” is a perspective that could apply to arms control writ large. Marina Favaro tackles the intellectually challenging topic of new and emerging technologies and their likely impact on arms control. She points to a lack of political will to engage in such complex and uncertain issues, in part because there is a dearth of understanding how such technologies work or how they might impact security issues. Her chapter helps fill that intellectual gap. She concludes that the mechanisms of arms control are meant to establish trust and enhance stability; they need to be “sufficiently flexible to accommodate a rapidly changing technology landscape.” Amy J. Nelson covers conventional weapons and novel systems. While focusing on the Conventional Armed Forces in Europe Treaty as the strongest example of an extant arms control treaty for dealing with the challenges of limiting national military forces and equipment, the heart of her chapter is her review of weapons that may arise from new and emerging technologies. These include hypersonic delivery systems and other exotic systems, all of which may prove even more difficult to control than were more traditional systems. George Perkovich provides one of the most interesting chapters in this book as he covers the new domains of cyberspace and outer space. One of the biggest challenges in these domains is that many cyber and space capabilities are “quadruple dual-use”: they are made, owned, and operated by both commercial and state users; they are used for peaceful as well as hostile purposes; they are used for espionage as well as attack; and from space they can deliver either conventional or nuclear weapons. This makes tradi-

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tional, treaty-based arms control impractical for dealing with these domains. So, does arms control have any value? As he puts it, “Probably not much, but it doesn’t hurt to try.” The number of actors and systems that would have to be controlled in these domains is nearly boundless. Therefore, he recommends that we develop rules of the road that restrain behaviors, targets, and effects of operations in space or cyber, as well as means of verifying and ensuring compliance with those unilateral limitations. In Part 4, David Santoro reviews the international system we live in today. He describes a system in which competition between the major powers has grown so intense that future historians may call this period “a defining moment for the next international order.” This is not what most observers believed would be the case at the end of the Cold War. Nevertheless, he argues that these developments do not necessarily augur poorly for the long-term prospects of arms control or its future usefulness. In the near term the focus should be on reducing nuclear risks and creating crisis management mechanisms to prevent inadvertent escalation of crises. Kerry M. Kartchner addresses cooperative security and its potential future. His main point is that cooperative security, like arms control, is a means to an end, and can be trumped by problematic political relationships. The role of cooperative security is often to fulfill the need in security arenas when more formal arms control is unable to do so. He calls for a reconceptualization of cooperative security and its mechanisms to meet the challenges of a new era of great-power competition. Brad Roberts concludes the book with his take on “Arms Control’s Uncertain Future.” He is pessimistic about the near-term possibilities for any arms control deals between the major powers. In fact, he predicts an “interregnum” developing, a period in which all sides focus on developing war-fighting capabilities that may lead to an arms race. Cooperation on limits to that behavior will not be of interest to the parties involved. In short, it will be a dangerous period. However, like all things, this period will also eventually end—although precisely when, why, or how is a matter of conjecture and debate. This interregnum will likely be similar to the early Cold War years, a competitive period that preceded the rise of arms control as a means of controlling behavior and stabilizing relations. Will arms control return this time? Probably, but most likely in a new form.

Conclusion Today there is debate over the future value of traditional arms control, not only in new arenas, but even with respect to the few treaties and agreements that remain. We are at a crossroads, with the future direction of arms control uncertain, but its past value indisputable. The great powers must

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seriously consider what role arms control can play in enhancing future national security considerations. These new roles might be different than the way policymakers and scholars have thought about arms control in the past. Arms control in the future will need to address the concept much more broadly, including multiple actors, in all regions and in new domains, considering all types of military capabilities. New approaches may include not just traditional negotiations and treaties, but risk reduction, crisis management, data exchanges, confidence- and security-building measures, and stability dialogues. While there may be pessimism within the security community over the possibility of a return of traditional arms control any time soon, there may perhaps be optimism over cooperative approaches, Russia’s need to return to the international system as a normal power, and China’s desire to be seen as great power and peer. Any of these elements could lead once again to renewed negotiations and the return of arms control to a central role in the relationship between nations.

Notes 1. Brooks, “The End of Arms Control?” 96. 2. Bull, The Control of the Arms Race. 3. Schelling and Halperin, Strategy and Arms Control. 4. Carter, Perry, and Steinbruner, A New Concept of Cooperative Security. 5. See Shultz, Perry, Kissinger, and Nunn, “A World Free of Nuclear Weapons,” A15; and the same authors in a follow-on piece, “Toward a Nuclear-Free World.” Also “Remarks by President Barack Obama in Prague, as Delivered.” 6. Kartchner “The Objectives of Arms Control.” 7. In the introduction to their seminal book, Schelling and Halperin state: “There is hardly an objective of arms control to be described in this study that is not equally a continuing urgent objective of national military strategy—of our unilateral military plans and policies,” Strategy and Arms Control, 3. 8. Throughout much of the Cold War, these three dilemmas were elaborated mostly in nuclear terms: What deters nuclear war? How many nuclear weapons are enough? What if nuclear deterrence fails? But they are equally applicable to the full range of defense scenarios, including policies and threats involving conventional, chemical, biological, and other weapons. 9. Brooks, “The End of Arms Control?” 85. 10. Wolfstahl, “Why Arms Control?” 102. 11. See Bugos, “Toward a New Nuclear Arms Control Framework Arrangement.” 12. US Department of Defense, National Security Strategy, 7. 13. Ibid., 29. 14. Ibid., 29.

PART 1 The Foundations and Context of Arms Control

2 Deterrence and Strategic Stability Schuyler Foerster

THE THESIS OF THIS CHAPTER IS TWOFOLD: FIRST, THE PRINCIPAL purpose of arms control is to contribute to the deterrence of war and to strengthen strategic stability among potential adversaries; second, the requirements for deterrence and strategic stability in the twenty-first century are much more complex and multifaceted than they were at the dawn of the nuclear age. Arms control is a means; deterrence and strategic stability are the ends. Hence, if we are to think about arms control in the current and prospective international security environment, we need to understand how the requirements for deterrence and strategic stability have changed and adapt our arms control approaches accordingly. Arms control should be viewed as one of many means to engender greater predictability and confidence in a complex strategic relationship. Ideally, it can foster a framework of collaborative security among potential adversaries that contributes to both deterrence and strategic stability.

Deterrence, Strategic Stability, and Arms Control in the Cold War The Foundations of Deterrence and Strategic Stability

The concepts of deterrence and strategic stability are foundational in international security. They were core constructs in understanding international security long before the nuclear age, but they took on new urgency in an era defined by nuclear weapons and the Cold War confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union. In that bipolar construct, deterring war took precedence over waging war because nuclear war between the two superpowers was viewed as an apocalypse in which humanity would not 17

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survive. As Bernard Brodie famously wrote after the birth of the nuclear age, “Thus far the chief purpose of our military establishment has been to win wars. From now on its chief purpose must be to avoid them. It can have almost no other purpose.”1 Strategic stability is resistance to sudden change, such that a security relationship is unlikely to shift quickly from peace to war even under pressure of a crisis.2 This definition does not connote absence of change, only that, to the extent possible, change may be measured and deliberate, evolutionary, predictable, and manageable. At its core, strategic stability is about preserving a degree of predictability about state behavior, reducing uncertainty in a crisis, and minimizing the risks of miscalculation in circumstances that might escalate into conflict or from one level of conflict to another. This holistic view includes—but goes beyond—the traditional focus on military and particularly nuclear forces. It is fundamentally a political condition, driven significantly—but by no means exclusively—by military considerations. As we will see, the definition of strategic stability has not fundamentally changed, but the nuclear age raised the stakes of military confrontation to an existential level. During the Cold War, the relationship between nuclear and conventional forces evolved in such a way that strategic stability was more difficult to achieve. Since the Cold War, strategic stability has become even more elusive as the sources of strategic instability expanded beyond the military domain. In its simplest form, deterrence seeks to persuade a potential adversary not to take a certain action—in this case, initiating or escalating conflict. Deterrence is not new to the nuclear age; having significant military capability has always been a way of dissuading potential adversaries from going to war. Typically, a state would seek to persuade a would-be attacker that it would be defeated or, at a minimum, denied achievement of its objectives if it were to attack—what we have come to understand as deterrence by denial. In the nuclear and missile age, however, there is little that a state can do to prevent the substantial damage that a large-scale nuclear strike would inflict. Deterrence in the nuclear age, therefore, took on a different emphasis—deterrence by punishment—by conveying to a potential attacker that, regardless of the damage the attacker might inflict, a retaliatory strike would be devastating. In short, the punitive costs of war were presumed to outweigh the prospective benefits of waging that war. Strategic stability emerged as essential to deterrence because, as nuclear weapons were married to ballistic missiles, one could conceive of a disarming first strike, thus giving an adversary the incentive to start a war— the antithesis of deterrence. In 1959, Albert Wohlstetter rebutted the presumption that possession of nuclear weapons by the two superpowers made war unthinkable.3 Instead, vulnerable retaliatory forces—whether bombers concentrated on a few bases or liquid-fueled missiles in above-ground basing

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modes—could invite an adversary to contemplate the possibility of preemptively destroying the other’s retaliatory forces. Strategic stability in the nuclear age depended, therefore, on denying a prospective adversary the incentive to strike first. As a result, basing modes for strategic nuclear systems evolved to reinforce the survivability of retaliatory forces. According to the logic of mutual assured destruction (MAD), each side would refrain from an attack because the other side would in any event be able to deliver a lethal retaliatory strike. Credibility of this basic deterrence model rested on the notion that, even if a retaliatory strike were not fully credible, the costs of miscalculation would never be acceptable. To reinforce the credibility of this basic deterrence model, arms control thinking during the 1950s focused on establishing negotiated agreements on force levels and military deployments in ways that reduced the incentive for a state to initiate war through preemptive military action. As Thomas Schelling and Morton Halperin wrote over sixty years ago, “The present study is concerned less with reducing national capabilities for destruction in the event of war than in reducing the incentives that may lead to war or that may cause war to be more destructive in the event it occurs.”4 This search for stability also reinforced the role of arms control as a conceptual alternative to disarmament, based on the pragmatic assumption that prospective enemies had a common interest in avoiding nuclear holocaust. Hence, arms control in the Cold War focused on the immediate threats to deterrence and strategic stability in the nuclear age. The dangerous brinkmanship of the Cuban missile crisis motivated the United States and the Soviet Union in the 1960s to hold serious discussions on nuclear arms control. Both superpowers saw the 1963 Partial Test Ban Treaty and the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty as necessary to restrict the number of nuclear powers before pursuing limits (and ultimately reductions) on their strategic nuclear weapons delivery vehicles. The 1972 Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT) and Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM Treaty) reflected an agreement by both superpowers to cap strategic offensive forces and restrict the capability to defend against attack, thus perpetuating mutual vulnerability as a means of creating a form of strategic stability, at least in their bilateral relationship. Other bilateral arrangements during this period were similarly designed to facilitate crisis management and avoid miscalculation. While these foundational nuclear arms control agreements addressed the bilateral superpower strategic relationship, reinforcing the basic deterrence model, they did not address the more complex problem of extended deterrence, by which the United States also extended the threat of nuclear retaliation on behalf of allies even if the US homeland was not being attacked. The logic of MAD works best in a two-sided game; its presumed “stability” rests on the notion that neither side would have an incentive to use nuclear weapons first. Yet extended deterrence requires an adversary to believe that

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the United States would be the first to use nuclear weapons to thwart a superior conventional attack against allies a continent away. Throughout the Cold War, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was faced with forward-deployed Soviet and Warsaw Pact conventional forces in Europe that posed a threat that could not be countered by NATO conventional forces. In the 1950s, the United States and NATO relied on a strategy of “massive retaliation,” but, as the United States became vulnerable to Soviet missile attacks, it became clear that the threat of inevitable nuclear response lacked credibility. Even though in the 1960s—at US urging—NATO shifted to a strategy of “flexible response,” the most likely scenario remained a Soviet conventional attack on Europe that required NATO to initiate nuclear use.5 The underlying dilemma remained. The only way to pose a punitive risk to the Soviet Union would be to threaten to use US strategic nuclear weapons. Without a credible threat of US nuclear retaliation on behalf of allies, mutual nuclear deterrence could have the undesirable and destabilizing effect of inviting an aggressor to go to war with superior conventional forces with less fear of nuclear escalation.6 This strategic problem worsened in the 1970s with the advent of multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles (MIRVs), along with significantly improved missile accuracies, which ultimately rendered virtually all land-based strategic nuclear systems vulnerable and reminiscent of Wohlstetter’s dire warnings two decades before. In addition, the Soviet Union began deploying SS-20 intermediate-range ballistic missiles (IRBMs) that could strike key targets across Europe, with nothing other than US strategic nuclear systems that could hold important targets in the Soviet Union at risk. This led to NATO’s “double-track” decision in 1979, under which it would—in the absence of arms control agreements with the Soviet Union—deploy in Europe ground-based US intermediate-range nuclear weapons that could strike targets in the Soviet Union without using US-based central strategic systems. Ultimately, NATO did deploy groundlaunched cruise missiles (GLCMs) and Pershing II intermediate-range ballistic missiles that could target the Soviet Union. Within Europe, there nonetheless remained questions about whether these deployments rendered US strategic deterrence more or less credible. Clearly, the credibility of deterrence remained in the eye of the beholder. By the 1980s, there was little evidence that the United States and the Soviet Union had a shared conceptual framework for mutual deterrence or strategic stability. Each side was significantly expanding the number of MIRVed warheads while pursuing the elusive goal of strategic defenses. In the United States, there were persistent (and unreconciled) debates as to whether MAD was something to be reinforced in the interest of strategic stability or overcome in the search for a way to use nuclear weapons effectively in war.7 Many argued that the Soviet Union would be able to achieve a first-strike capability and negate the threat of retaliation from the United

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States. Such concerns—along with the Soviet introduction of SS-20s in Europe and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan—undermined the period of détente that had existed in the early 1970s and led to the scuttling of the 1979 SALT II Treaty. The underlying strategic instability of the US-Soviet relationship created serious questions for the United States and its allies. Would the United States really place its own survival at risk in the interest of defending its allies? Did mutual nuclear deterrence have the unanticipated consequence of “making the world safe for non-nuclear war”? Could arms control reconcile these contradictions? The end of the Cold War brought some respite—albeit temporarily— from these unsettling and ultimately unanswerable questions. The Contributions of Arms Control to Stability

By the end of the 1980s, new economic and political realities significantly altered the arms control landscape. In the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev clearly signaled his willingness to stabilize strategic relations with the West so he could focus on his domestic agenda. This led to an expansion of the arms control agenda to encompass more than strategic nuclear weapons. In 1987, the United States and the Soviet Union signed the IntermediateRange Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF Treaty), which banned all land-based intermediate range systems and led to the elimination of NATO GLCMs and Pershing IIs and Soviet SS-20s. In 1991, the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START) and START Treaty led to substantially reduced US and Soviet deployed strategic nuclear arsenals, although a subsequent attempt to eliminate MIRVed ICBMs in the START II Treaty never came to fruition. The 1990 Conventional Armed Forces in Europe Treaty (CFE Treaty) replaced the longmoribund Mutual and Balanced Force Reductions (MBFR) talks and focused not on manpower levels, but on the conventional armaments essential to any combined arms offensive action.8 Together with the 1986 Stockholm Agreement, by which the Soviet Union accepted on-site inspection of military exercises, and the ensuing Vienna Documents outlining confidence- and securitybuilding measures in Europe, the CFE Treaty was designed to eliminate the Warsaw Pact conventional offensive superiority that had made the European strategic relationship inherently unstable from NATO’s perspective. The net effect of these arms control achievements was to establish—at least for the time being—a balance at lower force levels in strategic nuclear and conventional forces. With respect to the military relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union, arms control had codified a stable deterrent relationship as the Cold War came to an end. Although biological and chemical weapons were included in the arsenals of the Cold War superpowers, among others, they were not central to either superpower’s war-fighting doctrines. Nonetheless, each contributed to the instability of the Cold War relationship by incorporating the prospect

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of using weapons of mass destruction either in conjunction with or as part of an escalatory ladder to the use of nuclear weapons. In 1972, alongside negotiations on SALT and ABM, both superpowers signed the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC), which prohibited the development, production, acquisition, transfer, stockpiling, and use of biological and toxin weapons. Similarly, in 1992, both agreed to the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), which did the same for chemical weapons. Together, the BWC and CWC—which have been agreed to by 188 and 193 states, respectively—were attempts to eliminate two categories of weapons of mass destruction. Even if neither is totally eliminated, these conventions contribute to deterrence by imposing potentially substantial political costs if the taboo against their possession and use is broken. One can ask whether arms control contributed to the stabilization of the superpower relationship, or whether the agreements were the product of a changed political climate. The answer is probably both. In retrospect, the “near-death experience” of the Cuban missile crisis animated both superpowers to use arms control as a means to help stabilize the relationship, and the arms control achievements of the early 1970s paralleled other positive developments in the East-West relationship. Leonid Brezhnev’s military buildup in the late 1970s similarly contributed to a growing sense of vulnerability in the West, which only waned after Gorbachev took the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) on a different path. The lesson is that arms control and other forms of collaboration on security issues can address sources of strategic instability, but only if the broader political climate will allow it. The Cuban missile crisis spurred agreements to stem the proliferation of nuclear weapons among other states. The détente period in the early 1970s enabled agreements to cap strategic offensive forces and stem the development of strategic defenses, although neither endured. The flurry of arms control agreements across the spectrum of weaponry at the end of the Cold War reduced US and Russian strategic and theater nuclear forces to a point where a disarming first-strike capability seemed out of the question and eliminated a Russian capability to mount a surprise combined offensive in Europe, by both substantially reducing critical conventional armaments and instituting unprecedented transparency regarding each other’s military activities. As is discussed elsewhere in this book, virtually all these arms control agreements have either been dissolved, suspended, or rendered irrelevant because of worsening political relationships. Clearly, arms control has never been a substitute for effective capabilities to bolster deterrence and strengthen strategic stability. Even while the strategic relationship might appear benign, there remains the need to hedge against a dangerous change in the political climate. For example, while the Soviet Union was disintegrating, NATO had concluded that “the threat of a simultaneous, full-scale attack on all of NATO’s European fronts has effec-

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tively been removed,” and the “circumstances in which any use of nuclear weapons might have to be contemplated . . . are therefore even more remote.”9 Nonetheless, in language virtually unchanged from the Cold War, NATO reiterated, “The supreme guarantee of the security of the Allies is provided by the strategic nuclear forces of the Alliance, particularly those of the United States.”10 Despite a fundamentally transformed strategic environment, the need for deterrence had not changed. Similarly, even though the Cold War had ended, the need for a credible extended deterrent remained. Despite the disappearance of the Soviet Union, allies in both Europe and Asia wanted reassurance that the United States would not abandon them.11 In 2009, President Barack Obama adopted the goal of a world free of nuclear weapons; in 2010, the United States and Russia signed the New START Treaty, further reducing the number of deployed strategic warheads and launchers; and a growing body of opinion advocated the removal of US nuclear weapons stored in Europe and adoption of a “nofirst use” declaratory policy. Yet NATO allies closest to Russia balked at any policy shift that would place into question NATO and US determination to come to their aid in a crisis or in the case of attack. Hence, despite its earlier rhetoric, the Obama administration’s April 2010 Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) discarded notions of no-first use, affirmed modernization of the US nuclear arsenal, and placed particular emphasis on strengthening regional deterrence and reassuring US allies and partners.12 In the same year, NATO’s new strategic concept reiterated its long-standing language about the “supreme guarantee” provided by US strategic nuclear forces.13

The Post–Cold War Era Since the Cold War, two factors have combined to compel a rethinking of deterrence and strategic stability and how—or to what extent—arms control can play a role in strengthening them. The first is the reemergence of greatpower strategic competition, a reminder that many of the dilemmas of the Cold War had not disappeared but had, in fact, become more multifaceted. The second is the continuing and accelerating competition in emerging technologies that not only redefine military weaponry, but also create new instruments and domains of warfare that may or may not involve military weapons. Reemergence of Great-Power Strategic Competition

The decades following the end of the Cold War witnessed a substantial change in the geopolitical landscape. For the first decade following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Russia was a weak state, trying to rebuild. Until Russia declined, in 2015, to renew cooperative threat reduction arrangements, US-Russian cooperation in reducing Russia’s strategic and

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conventional systems to meet treaty limits encouraged those who anticipated that Russia could be a serious partner in placing their strategic relationship on a stable foundation. Russia’s annexation of Crimea and incursion into separatist regions of eastern Ukraine in 2014 brought NATO back to a disturbing reality: that Russia, albeit weakened in the 1990s, had fundamentally irreconcilable strategic interests and retained substantial grudges against the West. Russia’s 2007 cyber attacks against Estonia and its 2008 invasion of Abkhazia and South Ossetia in Georgia seemed, in retrospect, part of a broader Russian strategy. Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, had long expounded a concept of Russkiy Mir—Russian World—which became a core justification for Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Angela Stent summarizes Russia’s worldview as elaborated by Putin in several statements since he took office in 2000: Russia is a unique civilization, in many ways superior to that of the West, and is both European and Eurasian. Western concepts of individualism, competition, and untrammeled free expression are alien to the more holistic, organic, communal Russian values. Russia has a right to a sphere of influence in the lands that were part of both the Russian Empire and the USSR, and Moscow has a duty to defend the interests of compatriot Russians living outside the motherland. The West represents a threat to both Russian values and interests. And its agents inside Russia are poised to do its bidding.14

Similarly, after decades of focusing on economic modernization, China under President Xi Jinping has demonstrated a new level of confident nationalism and assertiveness: launching the Belt and Road Initiative in 2013, calling in 2014 for a new Asian security order managed by Asian countries, accelerating military modernization, and expanding China’s military presence in the South China Sea. Xi’s elevation to an unprecedented third term in 2021 coincided with his call for the “reunification of the motherland”—notably Taiwan—following a substantial crackdown on the vestiges of autonomy in Hong Kong.15 The February 2022 Russia-China Joint Statement on International Relations symbolized this growing shift in great-power relations. Whether or not this supposed “friendship with no limits” is durable, their joint statement reflected: (1) a shared belief in models of governance that are inconsonant with Western approaches to liberal democracy; (2) a conviction that the United States and its allies in Europe and Asia perpetuate a “Cold War mentality” that is inherently threatening to China’s and Russia’s “rightful” place in the international system; and (3) their determination to alter what they see is a power structure dominated by “actors representing but the minority on the international scale” who “continue to advocate unilateral approaches to addressing international issues and resort to force.”16

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This increasingly assertive posture by Russia and China threatens to undermine traditional concepts of deterrence and strategic stability. First, the threat by a nuclear power to use force to alter borders resurrects the traditional dilemma of extended deterrence, except that neither Ukraine nor Taiwan is covered by an explicit security guarantee (although each has received military assistance and general assurances of support from the United States). If the traditional extended deterrence guarantees to allies are in question, how much more circumspect might others who would like to be protected by the United States be about US assurances, especially when the attacker uses non-nuclear forces but has nuclear forces in the background? Second, it is difficult to conceive of a stable security environment when the worldviews of major powers are antithetical. If a major power views the existing security order as illegitimate, that power can be expected to seek ways to revise the status quo. When—as in the Cold War—the only instrument to revise that status quo was through military force capped with nuclear weapons, then one could define strategic stability in narrower terms to remove or reduce the incentives to launch a preemptive attack and thereby reinforce deterrence. In that context, arms control was able to contribute to strategic stability by reducing some of those incentives. Third, in the absence of any restraining arms control regimes, a deteriorating political climate introduces the potential of a reinvigorated arms race, whether in nuclear weapons or in other emerging weapons technologies that could further destabilize the strategic relationship. In the current environment, major powers have a large menu of policy instruments by which they can advance their revisionist objectives. Some developing military technologies can aid defense and reinforce the credibility of deterrence; others open new domains of conflict that can be weaponized either as a substitute for or a complement to military force. None of these new policy instruments or emerging technologies is covered by arms control. New Technologies and Domains of Conflict

Technology has always shaped the nature of warfare, but the advent of the information age has had a profound and transformative effect on war. In particular, four broad lines of technology have challenged our traditional views of deterrence and strategic stability. Other chapters in this book discuss these issues in greater depth. First, improvements in long-range precision strike have increasingly enabled conventional weapons to be strategically effective without necessarily resorting to nuclear weapons. Because of the strategic, political, and moral reservations about the use of nuclear weapons, military planners have long sought a more “usable” weapon that could strike strategic targets with

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effect from long range. Such weapons offer an offensive capability that, because they do not involve nuclear weapons, escalates the level of warfare but makes the logic of nuclear deterrence more difficult to apply. Moreover, whereas “strategic” arms control used to equate to “nuclear” arms control, the availability of effective strategic weapons that do not employ nuclear warheads complicates any prospective arms control agenda. Second, the ongoing development of hypersonic missile technologies— with or without nuclear warheads—means that weapons could more readily find their way to their targets undetected and incentivize first strikes against vulnerable strategic targets. Instead of ballistic missiles flying predictable and detectable paths, or cruise missiles flying at subsonic speeds, hypersonic weapons open the possibility of strategic strikes with virtually little or no warning or defense. Just as when the United States and the Soviet Union pursued development of MIRV technologies in the 1960s and 1970s despite their destabilizing effect, the United States, Russia, and China today are determined to develop this technology because none can afford to be left alone without it in a contested strategic environment. Not only are the weapons potentially destabilizing, but the arms racing phenomenon is also destabilizing. Third, information technologies have come to dominate not only military affairs, but our entire societies. On one level, “cyberwar” is simply an extension of traditional information warfare and disinformation campaigns. Yet modern societies now depend on sophisticated information technologies for almost every aspect of their lives, offering a huge potential vulnerability to any state—or nonstate actor—that can render those information systems inoperable or ineffective. Emerging artificial intelligence (AI) technologies offer unprecedented capabilities that could, on the one hand, potentially enhance strategic stability by providing greater transparency in intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) but, on the other hand, be destabilizing by creating greater uncertainty and disruption. In addition, social media tools enabled by the qualitative and ubiquitous improvements in information technology offer opportunities for political leaders to manipulate public opinion and undercut confidence in political institutions.17 These technologies provide opportunities not only to strike critical military communications infrastructure based in space or on the earth, but also to disable or disrupt key civilian targets—including political organizations, energy infrastructure, financial systems, and commercial supply chains— without the use of military force. They potentially serve as a precursor to what could be perceived as a disarming first strike.18 Finally, despite the existence of the BWC and CWC, biological and chemical weapons remain potential instruments of terror and instability. Revolutions in biotechnology suggest that the BWC may not incorporate all the avenues in which states or nonstate actors can threaten populations, and subsequent BWC review conferences have not succeeded in establishing an effective monitoring and verification regime. Similarly, despite the CWC,

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chemical weapons have been used in recent years in Iraq, in Syria, and in Russian-sponsored assassination attempts. Clearly, the success of arms control regimes in contributing to deterrence and strategic stability ultimately depends on the political will of those states and international organizations with the power to act.

Implications for Deterrence and Strategic Stability States will always seek the ability to deter attacks on themselves or their allies. How they pursue deterrence, however, can be stabilizing or destabilizing. Strategic stability, on the other hand, involves a relationship between states and how they perceive each other. During the Cold War, this was largely a question of the strategic nuclear relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union. There were times during the Cold War when one side feared that the other would believe—whether justified or not—that there was an advantage in attempting a preemptive attack to disarm the other’s retaliatory capability. That perception of vulnerability was a source of dangerous instability regardless of the efficacy or credibility of the retaliatory capability that was supposed to serve as a deterrent. In the NATO context, the same dynamic applied: regardless of the strength of NATO’s conventional and nuclear response capabilities, there were at times lingering fears that the Soviet Union would decide that the risks of attack were acceptable. In the twenty-first century—particularly in the reemergence of greatpower strategic competition and with the development of new technologies and new domains of conflict—what constitutes stable deterrence is a much more complex and multifaceted question. The simpler metric of the nuclear age—reduce incentives for preemptive nuclear attack—no longer suffices. Just as we need to conceive of strategic stability as essentially political and not just military, we need to view deterrence as more encompassing than military weapons deterring attack by other military weapons. We have already seen how deterrence of nuclear war—deterrence of nuclear attack by the threat of nuclear retaliation—expanded to accommodate the demands of extended deterrence, including deterrence of conventional attack with the threat of nuclear response. Similarly, we have come to see how new technologies can complement military weapons without the use of kinetic force. The instruments of warfare may not only be military, but could include political, economic, or informational attacks. Hence, threats to strategic stability are not only military, and effective deterrence must incorporate policy instruments that go beyond military force. The concept of integrated deterrence, as embodied in the 2022 US National Defense Strategy, is an attempt to address this expanded view of deterrence: “Integrated deterrence entails developing and combining our strengths to maximum effect, by working seamlessly across warfighting

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domains, theaters, the spectrum of conflict, other instruments of U.S. national power, and our unmatched network of Alliances and partnerships. Integrated deterrence is enabled by combat-credible forces, backstopped by a safe, secure, and effective nuclear deterrent.”19 Integrated deterrence reflects, at least in part, a long-standing desire to reduce reliance on the threat of using nuclear weapons as the ultimate deterrent. Since the advent of flexible response in the 1960s, the United States has sought to reduce its reliance on the threat of nuclear retaliation. For decades, the search for credible and affordable options that could be employed without the political, strategic, and moral questions surrounding nuclear use stimulated the development of weapons—notably long-range precision conventional strike weapons—that could accomplish the strategic tasks that, heretofore, only nuclear weapons could accomplish. An additional aspect of integrated deterrence is the explicit recognition that defense and denial are critical components of deterrence. With nuclear weapons, the focus has been on punitive retaliatory threats, recognizing that there is neither a proven effective defense against nuclear attack nor the ability to deny the attacker success in nuclear strikes. Integrated deterrence focuses on a variety of scenarios in which an adversary can present the United States and its allies with a fait accompli—employing a variety of weapons and nonlethal tools—before anyone can respond. Part of that strategy is to emphasize resilience in systems, networks, and critical infrastructure to ride out early attacks and enable a response.20 This represents one aspect of deterrence by denial, which is inherently more credible than deterrence by punishment. Integrated deterrence requires a range of response options—military, political, economic, and informational—that are credible and effective. It appropriately highlights the critical importance of building greater resilience to reduce vulnerability to attack. That resilience should extend beyond military systems to critical civilian infrastructure and to political institutions. In short, stable deterrence can no longer be achieved solely with the punitive threat of nuclear escalation; it also requires the ability to defend and to deny across a spectrum of domains, both military and civilian.

Requirements for a Twenty-First-Century Stable Deterrent Arms control has been able to contribute to deterrence and strategic stability when the participants shared an interest in doing so. The search for strategic stability during the Cold War and the decades that followed was driven by the combination of high stakes and recurring doubts about whether the guarantees on which deterrence was based would be tested. Yet when there is no longer

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a shared framework about the nature of strategic stability and how deterrence can be achieved, arms control loses much of its efficacy as a tool. No event highlights the fragility of the twenty-first-century security environment more than the Russian invasion of Ukraine beginning in February 2022—an invasion with conventional forces that soon evolved into a form of twentieth-century industrial warfare. NATO had not extended to Ukraine a security guarantee and was determined to avoid being in direct conflict with Russian forces, fearing that the war would expand into NATO territory and escalate with the use of nuclear weapons. A delicate balancing act ensued—determined to deny Russia victory in Ukraine, the United States and its allies provided increasing levels of military assistance to augment Ukraine’s ability to defend and counterattack, while trying not to provoke Russian escalation. As the struggle began to look more like a war of attrition, however, that balancing act became more difficult—could it be sustained, or would Russia eventually wear down Ukraine’s defenses? Meanwhile, economic woes, energy shortages, and diminishing food supplies in the developing world demonstrated that this war had global repercussions. The outcome of a protracted conflict looked uncertain and posed several questions, including whether the war in Ukraine would encourage or discourage China’s leadership in making a move against Taiwan. Deterrence is the art of dissuading a potential adversary from going to war or escalating within war. Its efficacy can never be proven, but its failures are obvious. Perhaps deterrence succeeded in the Baltic States because Russia did not launch the attacks for which NATO had been preparing for several years. In Ukraine, deterrence—in its broad, “integrated” form— clearly failed. Was it because Ukraine was not covered by a NATO security guarantee, but the Baltic States were? Was it because Putin believed that the West would not respond, and that Ukraine would be inept in its defense? Was it because Putin saw it as more urgent that Ukraine—above all other former Soviet states—needed to be absorbed into the Russian orbit and denied closer association with the West? The Russian attack on Ukraine clearly demonstrated how unstable the security environment had become. One can readily identify four broad sources of that instability—all of which provide incentive for a state to consider using force to achieve its political objectives: first, major powers such as Russia and China assert their rights to spheres of influence on which they see the United States and its allies encroaching. In their eyes, the existing international structure is illegitimate because other powers do not respect what they see as their rights as a great power. This does not necessarily trigger military aggression—after all, the Cold War remained cold— but it offers an underlying motivation. Second, the development of new technologies and new tools of warfare offer possibilities for revisionist powers to disrupt existing institutions and

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threaten substantial damage to societies even without the use of military force or as a complement to the use of military force short of all-out war. Hence, revisionist powers have a larger menu of tools to use in pursuit of their political objectives within what they may consider acceptable risks. Third, the potential targets of aggression—specifically, the United States and its allies and partners—may be viewed as incapable of mounting the cohesion and responsiveness needed to defend. This certainly seems to have been the case in Russia’s attack on Georgia in 2008 and on Ukraine in 2014; the United States’ focus was elsewhere, allies had largely sidelined investments in defense, and Western societies were facing deep domestic political, economic, and social divides. In addition, neither Georgia nor Ukraine were members of NATO. Presumably, Putin believed this lack of political will and national cohesion was still true in 2022. Even though he may have misjudged how unified the West’s response would be, it was still a miscalculation that precipitated war. Fourth, the role of the United States remains indispensable in sustaining any stable international security framework, so questions about its commitment will threaten that stability and potentially invite competitors to take advantage. During the Donald Trump administration, the president often cast doubt about the durability of the US commitment, although there remained a strong bipartisan consensus that NATO was vital to US security. Nonetheless, doubts persisted beyond the Trump years. As one German study put it, “NATO enjoys broad, bipartisan support in Congress. In the event of a crisis, however, the president is the one person who matters.”21 The United States and its allies may have come together in the 2022 Ukraine crisis, but few would predict continued alliance consensus beyond the 2024 US election. These four sources of strategic instability are more political than military, and an effective and credible deterrence capability remains an essential—but not sufficient—response. As long as the United States and its allies are faced with essentially revisionist worldviews from the leaders of Russia and China, the imperative of deterrence is to ensure that no country seeks to alter the existing international order by force. In the case of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the essential balancing act is to ensure that Russia does not succeed in its aggression while deterring Russia from escalating the conflict.

Conclusion: Implications for Arms Control The conditions of strategic stability and an effective and credible deterrent can be advanced unilaterally, if necessary. But sustained stability and deterrence ultimately depend on the perceptions of potential adversaries— whether they are willing to live within the status quo and whether they are actually deterred by the threats posed to them if they were to decide to chal-

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lenge that status quo. During periods of the Cold War, perceived vulnerability by one side to a preemptive attack by the other presented a strategic instability that was often met by arms racing. However, a mutual perception of unacceptable vulnerability to the perils of nuclear war also provided an incentive for arms control, as was the case after the Cuban missile crisis and in the late 1980s. In the twenty-first century, the pursuit of strategic stability has gone well beyond the realm of strategic nuclear arms control. As we have seen, strategic stability has been challenged less by the fear of either side having a preemptive strike capability, but more by a broader disconnect about the nature of the international order. Here arms control—in its broader sense of encompassing a range of collaborative security efforts—can perhaps still play an important role, even if only to ensure that a potential adversary is part of the conversation. In the current environment, any progress in establishing or reestablishing limits on categories of weapons is highly unlikely. Yet diplomacy can still pursue important goals, which would be critical whether or not it is possible to rejuvenate existing arms control regimes. These include: • Increased transparency, through information exchange, agreed monitoring regimes, confidence- and security-building measures, and verification. • Establishing mutual understandings, such as “rules of the road” and what kinds of behavior are appropriate, especially regarding new domains (e.g., space and cyber). • Negotiating boundaries on emerging technologies to engender greater predictability and visibility into development programs to mitigate some of the destabilizing effects of arms racing. • Creating regularized opportunities for political, military, economic, and social-cultural contacts and dialogue. None of these may be possible in the foreseeable future, as Brad Roberts convincingly argues in his concluding chapter to this book. But there have been times when potential adversaries recognized that they had a shared interest in pursuing some, if not all, of these goals. When those opportunities arise—as they inevitably will—the United States and its allies must be prepared to engage. In the long term, strategic stability will depend on whether competitors believe they have a stake in the system or want to challenge it. In the meantime, the broadened concept of integrated deterrence can enable a more effective and credible posture of deterrence, defense, and resilience that is affordable and sustainable. This is essential to reducing the likelihood of war in a period of instability. Arms control has always been a complement to and never a substitute for defense, but trying to build a framework of collaborative security with competitors will enhance our ability to maintain a stable deterrence.

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Notes 1. Brodie et al., The Absolute Weapon, 76. 2. This definition is developed in more detail in Foerster and Larsen, “NATO Strategy,” 8–9. 3. Wohlstetter, “The Delicate Balance of Terror.” 4. Schelling and Halperin, Strategy and Arms Control, 3 (emphasis in original). See also Bull, The Control of the Arms Race. 5. See “Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara’s Address at the Ministerial Meeting of the North Atlantic Council, Athens, 5 May 1962.” 6. See Pedlow, NATO Strategy Documents 1949–1969, for a survey of the evolution of NATO strategy documents leading up to the adoption, in MC 14/3, of the strategy of “flexible response.” 7. See Keeny and Panofsky, “MAD Versus NUTS.” 8. See Foerster et al., Defining Stability. Russia suspended its participation in the CFE Treaty in December 2007. 9. NATO’s New Strategic Concept, paras. 7, 56. The Strategic Concept was agreed on in November 1991, almost eight weeks before the dissolution of the USSR. 10. Ibid., para. 54 (emphasis added). 11. It has always been the case that reassuring allies was in many respects a more difficult challenge than deterring potential adversaries. See Howard, “Reassurance and Deterrence.” 12. For an in-depth discussion, see Pifer et al., “U.S. Nuclear Deterrence and Extended Deterrence.” For a detailed discussion of the 2010 NPR, see Roberts, The Case for U.S. Nuclear Weapons in the 21st Century, especially 28–49. 13. This remained NATO’s strategic concept until the 2022 Madrid summit. Active Engagement, Modern Defence, para. 18. 14. Stent, Putin’s World, 37. These ideas are similarly reflected in Russia’s 2015 National Security Strategy, paras. 12–18. See also Hill and Stent, “The World Putin Wants,” 108–122. 15. Economy, “Xi Jinping’s New World Order,” 52–67; Blanchette, “Xi Jinping’s Faltering Foreign Policy.” 16. “Russia-China Joint Statement on International Relations.” Ironically, this statement came three weeks before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which certainly represented on Russia’s part a “unilateral approach to addressing international issues and resort to force.” 17. For examples, see White, Dismiss, Distort, Distract, Dismay. For Russian interference in the US 2016 election, see “Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections.” On Russian influence in European elections, see “Putin’s Asymmetric Assault on Democracy in Russia and Europe.” 18. For a deeper discussion of “hybrid warfare,” see Snegovaya, Putin’s Information Warfare in Ukraine; van Puyvelde, “Hybrid War—Does It Even Exist?”; Cecire, “Russia’s Art of War”; Lasconjarias and Larsen, NATO’s Response to Hybrid Threats. 19. “Fact Sheet: 2022 National Defense Strategy.” At least in rhetoric, this is not a unique concept: the 2015 Russian National Security Strategy specified (para. 36): “Interrelated political, military, military-technical, diplomatic, economic, informational, and other measures are being developed and implemented in order to ensure strategic deterrence and the prevention of armed conflicts.” 20. Garamone, “Concept of Integrated Deterrence Will Be Key to National Defense Strategy.” 21. Overhaus, “A Matter of Credibility,” 16.

3 The Evolution of Arms Control Mechanisms James M. Smith

AS LONG AS THERE HAVE BEEN ARMS, THERE HAS BEEN ARMS control. This chapter provides a foundation for the coverage of multiple arenas of arms control by surveying many of the processes and mechanisms employed in prior and contemporary practice. A brief review of the centuries-long history of arms control and disarmament reveals that major efforts can be grouped into three categories: (1) elimination of especially dangerous or horrific weapons; (2) demilitarization of selected or sensitive regions; and (3) the establishment of rules and norms for cooperative enhancement of security.1 This chapter uses that categorization as an organizing structure. It first surveys selected examples of disarmament and arms control applied to dangerous and destabilizing weapons, including chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons. It then reviews regional demilitarization efforts such as nuclear-weapons-free zones and major-power conventional arms control. And it looks at a range of rules-based and cooperative arms control efforts that are today being applied across a wide spectrum of weapon types. The mechanisms of arms control include bilateral and multinational treaties, executive decisions, UN mandates, voluntary regimes, export controls, and related efforts such as nonproliferation, counterproliferation, and disarmament. A brief word on definitional practice. The terms disarmament and arms control can be found in the broader literature as both interchangeable synonyms and as almost polar opposites. In this chapter we use disarmament in the traditional sense of efforts and mechanisms intended to reach and enforce the number zero: the total elimination of a weapon system. The term arms control came into use in the modern age when weapons systems reached a level of sophistication, military capability, and cost that states would not realistically consider forfeiting after making such an investment. 33

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Thus, the goal became one of limitation at a level above zero, or what became known as “arms control.” Disarmament, then, is the ultimate expression of arms control. When arms control efforts take place outside of the state system, when they are based on informal agreement, or when they are agreed to without any formal compliance or enforcement provisions, this chapter labels them as falling into the cooperative security category. The chapter, then, surveys arms control writ large—including disarmament and cooperative security along with controls—aimed at weapons elimination, regional demilitarization, and norms and rules development.

Elimination of Destructive Weapons Many of the earliest recorded disarmament efforts—for example, banning Israelite ironworking and the resulting iron weapons in the eleventh century BCE, an 1139 ban on crossbows, and a 1675 ban on poison gasses and toxins—involved elimination of destructive, destabilizing weapons. 2 In the modern era, these efforts have primarily focused on eliminating chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons, as well as more recent attempts to rid the world of landmines and cluster bombs. Most multilateral efforts are based in disarmament—total elimination is the goal—whereas most bilateral nuclear efforts have been between the United States and the Soviet Union or Russia and have been based in arms control. Multilateral Disarmament

Efforts to prevent the use of poison gas and chemical weapons have been a major focus of international efforts throughout history. The twentieth century, particularly after the disastrous consequences of chemical weapons in World War I, saw renewed attention to controlling the full range of chemical and biological weapons (CBW). After World War II the United Nations and its newly created UN Conference on Disarmament (CD) took up that effort, seeking conventions to ban and eliminate chemical and biological weapons and toxins. The 1925 Geneva Protocol prohibited the use of these weapons in war. However, the United States and other nations continued to test and develop them for combat use. A 1969 unilateral decision by President Richard Nixon renounced the United States’ possession of biological weapons, and the US program was ended. Following the United States’ unilateral decision to end its national program, the CD completed its work on the Biological and ToxinWeapons Convention (BTWC, 1972), which banned possession as well as use. Since 1972, however, the inability of the international com-

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munity to negotiate an acceptable compliance and verification regime has limited the treaty’s effectiveness.3 The Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC, 1993) bans the development, production, stockpiling, transfer, acquisition, and use of chemical weapons, and the treaty established the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) and an intrusive inspection regime to verify compliance. Actual destruction of existing chemical weapons stocks has been slower than initially pledged due to safety and environmental concerns. Outside of the CWC, an international export cooperative, the Australia Group, monitors and seeks to control trade in dual-use chemicals, materials, pathogens, and toxins that can be used in the production of chemical and biological and toxin weapons.4 While the United States unilaterally eliminated its biological weapons program prior to its signature of the BTWC, in other cases what has been called “involuntary reversal,” or “coercive disarmament,” has led to the elimination of a chemical or biological weapons program. A voluntary example is South Africa, where the apartheid government eliminated its nuclear weapons program in the early 1990s prior to turning power over to the government of Nelson Mandela.5 Coercive elimination examples include Iraq, where the UN Special Commission on Iraq (UNSCOM) sent inspection teams into Iraq after the Gulf War to find and eliminate what were believed to be active nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons programs. Syria also was the subject of UN-directed chemical weapons disposal in 2013–2014. Chemical and biological weapons remain a primary target of disarmament efforts today.6 Nuclear weapons have also been targeted for disarmament. At the beginning of the nuclear age, the United States saw the prospect of multiple atomic weapons states as a challenge to its vision of a stable and peaceful international order, and it proposed a novel type of disarmament in its Baruch Plan proposal to the United Nations (1946). Under this plan, the UN would create an atomic authority under the oversight of the Security Council to oversee all phases of development of atomic energy to ensure that this development would be peaceful. After this authority was well established, the United States would eliminate its atomic weapons program. The Soviet Union, seeing its own atomic weapons on the close horizon, objected, so the idea of pairing state disarmament with global prohibition went untested.7 The United States made another early attempt to involve the UN in atomic arms control through its Atoms for Peace plan (1953). The Dwight Eisenhower administration proposed that the new UN International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) be responsible for controlling fissile material. The United States and Soviet Union (by this time, the second atomic power) would deposit part of their fissile stocks with the IAEA to be given to

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nations for use in peaceful atomic research and development. The aim was to prevent further proliferation of atomic weapons and to limit the amount of fissile material in any state’s hands. This plan also failed to garner approval from the Soviet Union, and national control of nuclear activities remained (and remains) the norm.8 With the failure to internationalize control over atomic weapons, attention fell to addressing issues of national atomic weapons proliferation via a multinational solution. The stage was set for nonproliferation efforts that culminated in the completion of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in 1968. This treaty sought to freeze the number of nuclear weapons states while simultaneously sharing peaceful nuclear power technology, to prevent the spread of military nuclear capability, and eventually to eliminate nuclear weapons. It was at once a treaty to control and to disarm. It represents the early grand compromise of the Cold War: states could develop peaceful nuclear power for energy generation and prestige while safely foregoing a nuclear weapons program, while other states could possess a “legal” nuclear weapons program. The states that foreswore developing their own arsenals received the promise of eventual nuclear weapons elimination; and nuclear weapons states benefited from the bounded nuclear weapons landscape and from broad, if often reluctant, acceptance of the concept of controls that allowed time to securely address that landscape.9 Today, the five NPT nuclear weapons states still retain nuclear weapons, although at greatly reduced numbers compared to Cold War levels. But a few national nuclear programs have been “rolled back.” South Africa gave up its nuclear program and a handful of functioning weapons. Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine returned nuclear weapons that were deployed on their soil to Russia following the breakup of the Soviet Union. Libya gave up its nuclear program (along with its CBW program) when caught in the act of trying to create one. In addition, Israel bombed enrichment sites in Iraq and Syria, significantly setting back weapons programs in those countries, and the international community has been working to slow and hopefully reverse Iran’s weapons development.10 Bilateral Arms Control

During the Cold War, the arms control track took a distinct focus on the United States’ and Soviet nuclear arsenals that ran parallel to the efforts in the multilateral track. Multilateral nonproliferation, especially the NPT, had framed efforts to control existing nuclear weapons as a two-party, EastWest effort. Here the dangers of nuclear weapons were anything but abstract: nuclear weapons were seen as posing direct and survival-level threats by both sides of the confrontation. Distrust had to be overcome incrementally with slowly built confidence, reinforced by technical advances that allowed

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independent verification of compliance before meaningful controls could be contemplated. Indeed, early in the Cold War the United States recognized an expectation of limited transparency on verification of compliance, and so embarked on a staged, deliberate strategy of incremental arms control: take a small step forward as confidence building toward the next step.11 Only independent verification capability could allow larger steps forward. The early series of agreements limiting nuclear weapons testing was made possible by over-the-horizon detection of nuclear explosions by satellites and other verification technologies, and more significant limits on future force development and deployment were later enabled by the fielding of “national technical means” of independent surveillance. US-Soviet arms control, then, became a highly technical, formal process revolving around detailed negotiations to build agreements that centered on independent compliance verification regimens. To advance beyond limiting nuclear capabilities toward actual reductions in nuclear weapons numbers and capabilities, on-site inspection for verification would eventually be needed. It took until the very end of the Cold War to achieve the level of trust and confidence to allow such intrusive inspection. Restrictions on testing. Bilateral arms control efforts began with limits on the testing of weapons. Testing was important to Soviet efforts to enhance their atomic capabilities and to develop a thermonuclear capability, so testing limitations were a US attempt to slow those developments while also addressing public concerns over radiation in the atmosphere. It was also hoped that such testing limitations would be adhered to by other states with nuclear weapons ambitions. Ground-based testing detection and monitoring systems were developed by the United States to support national test monitoring. At that point, the two primary atomic states each agreed to a threeyear testing moratorium (1958). By 1962, with the US development of the Vela Hotel satellite test monitoring system, the United States was comfortable moving forward with formal nuclear testing limitations. In 1963, the Limited Test Ban Treaty was signed between the United States, the Soviet Union, and the United Kingdom (which had joined the atomic club in 1952) to eliminate atmospheric, space, and undersea detonations. This was followed by the Threshold Test Ban Treaty (1974), a US-Soviet agreement to regulate and limit underground testing, and the Peaceful Nuclear Explosions Treaty (1976), another bilateral agreement to similarly regulate and limit underground testing of nonmilitary nuclear devices.12 Eliminating atmospheric and then underground testing was strongly pushed as a universal standard regardless of who had signed these treaties. The ultimate agreement in this thread was the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT, 1996), a total ban on nuclear testing by any party. Although not ratified by all the central nuclear powers, the CTBT limitations have held among signatories to date.

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Bilateral limitations. The initial “bounding” phase of bilateral nuclear arms control—seeking to freeze capabilities and limit future growth in critical systems—was the period of the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT). The process was characterized by an extended period of preliminary negotiations and confidence- and security-building measures to narrow the focus of the future effort and set target number ranges for formal treaty negotiations. Formal negotiations were drawn out for years, resulting in a detailed agreement, literally hundreds of pages in length, with excruciatingly detailed reporting and verification measures. While this was a bilateral arrangement between the United States and the Soviet Union, the United States undertook consultation with the United Kingdom and France—both nuclear weapons states—and its broader North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) allies, several of which hosted US tactical nuclear weapons. Similarly, the Soviets would position nuclear weapons in Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine, and Moscow was presumed by the United States to also represent the positions of the fifth nuclear weapons state: China.13 The SALT I Treaty (1972), or “The Interim Agreement Between the United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics on Certain Measures with Respect to the Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms,” reflected the extensive detail of the negotiations and the agreement. It capped the future growth of land- and sea-based ballistic missile launchers. The initial SALT process also produced the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM Treaty, 1972) that limited antiballistic missile capabilities in terms of numbers of launchers, missiles, and the sites that they could be deployed to protect. The ABM Treaty was considered by many arms control advocates as the cornerstone of the bilateral negotiations effort since it effectively enforced a degree of societal vulnerability to ensure strategic stability.14 A final limitation treaty, SALT II, was signed in 1979. SALT II was even more detailed, and it was in negotiation for seven years. Like SALT I, it limited numbers of launch vehicles, but SALT II addressed all launch variants with detailed sublimits to ensure “essential equivalence” (a condition imposed on US negotiators by the Senate). International events intervened here, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan being most important, and SALT II was not ratified by the United States.15 SALT I and SALT II were in the end verified by “national technical means,” or overhead surveillance systems that could count launch and delivery vehicles, but could not provide verification on warheads. These systems could support limitations agreements, but they could not support effective verification of reductions. The final US-Soviet agreement of the Cold War, the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF Treaty, 1987), was enabled by on-site inspection.

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Bilateral reductions. The INF Treaty ushered in the reductions phase of bilateral nuclear arms control. The negotiations process matured in this phase. The process leading to a new treaty often started with a summit or other high-level talks, and the “final numbers” and broad outlines of the agreement were usually known going in. The talks then could focus directly on key issues of implementation and verification. The technologies available to each side for independent verification were improved, and a generation of experience and trust also streamlined the process. After the INF Treaty and the first Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START Treaty), the agreements became shorter, but they still served as the heart of each treaty by including counting rules and compliance and verification standards. The INF Treaty was unique in several ways. First, it not only reduced, but totally eliminated an entire class of nuclear delivery systems (groundlaunched ballistic and cruise missiles with a range of 500 to 5,500 kilometers). It did so with on-site inspection as its compliance and verification system. The INF Treaty had significant strategic and operational impacts, and it represented a partial fulfillment of the NPT disarmament promise to many disarmament advocates.16 Negotiations toward the first strategic nuclear reduction treaty started in 1982. However, the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty was not completed until 1991. It included a verification and compliance regime based on attribution of a number of warheads to each of the various classes of delivery vehicles. For several reasons, heavy bombers were deliberately under attributed at one weapon each. Most significantly, START ushered in the era of reductions, with agreed cuts to 1,600 launchers and 6,000 warheads on each side.17 Noteworthy in this reductions phase, the fall of the Soviet system and change in the form of government in Russia did not pose major disruptions to the arms control process. The non-Russian former Soviet republics that held strategic nuclear weapons agreed to consolidate those assets under Russian control (Lisbon Protocol, 1994), and the US-Russia Cooperative Threat Reduction Program was initiated to jointly account for, move, and control these weapons. In this environment, a series of unilateral Presidential Nuclear Initiatives (PNIs) by Presidents George H. W. Bush, Mikhail Gorbachev, and Boris Yeltsin addressed system numbers to be focused on in future treaties, new systems planned or under development, deployment status of systems, and strategic forces alert and targeting status. Thereafter, the START process resumed, resulting in START II (1993) and the Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty (SORT, 2002).18 After the PNIs in the early 1990s, a summit between Presidents George H.W. Bush and Yeltsin resulted in a Joint Understanding that set the framework for START II. START II basically applied the verification and compliance procedures from START I, and it implemented reductions

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in strategic systems, to 3,000–3,500 warheads. It also banned multiple warheads on intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs).19 However, START II never completed the ratification process in either the United States or the Russian Federation. Just as START II began with a summit and an understanding that framed the eventual agreement, in 2001 Presidents George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin agreed to cut strategic arsenals to 1,700–2,000 warheads by 2012. This agreement replaced a planned set of START III negotiations, and it resulted in the two-page SORT (also called the Moscow Treaty) that formalized those reductions.20 SORT was founded in the post–Cold War “new strategic framework” of cooperation and competition—not confrontation— between the United States and Russia. This changed the context of arms control from the cooperative side of conflict to an integral component of a more broadly cooperative security relationship. However, the degree of this “friendship” was still an open concern, and the sheer size of the nuclear inventories held by these two powers mandated continued caution. That redefined relationship, alongside his personal background of sponsorship of cooperative threat reduction programs, provided the context for President Barack Obama’s 2009 Prague Initiative. In his Prague speech, President Obama vowed to reduce the role of nuclear weapons in US policy with the ultimate goal of creating the conditions for eliminating global stockpiles of nuclear weapons altogether. He said that this outcome would likely not come in his lifetime, requiring the United States to maintain effective deterrence along the road to disarmament.21 With the original START agreement set to expire in 2009, the United States and Russia negotiated New START (2010). New START limits total launch vehicles (to 800), operationally deployed launch vehicles (700), and operationally deployed nuclear warheads (1,550). Attribution rules include actual numbers of warheads for intercontinental ballistic missiles and submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs), and one warhead each for strategic bombers. New START was set to expire early in 2021, but the incoming Joe Biden administration announced its plan to enact the fiveyear extension provided for in the treaty, and Russia agreed—thereby extending the treaty until 2026.22 However, with tensions from Russia’s 2022 incursion into Ukraine continuing to rise, Russia suspended its participation in New START in early 2023.23 Some disarmament advocates criticize the slow progress toward nuclear disarmament as called for in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty; on the other hand, arms control advocates point to the drawdown from Cold War highs of 35,000 warheads on each side to New START Treaty numbers of 1,550 deployed strategic warheads. Both sides have a point. And since these treaties address only deployed strategic weapons, not smaller, non-

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strategic nuclear weapons or those nondeployed but still in the stockpile, the agenda remains unfinished.

Demilitarization and Regional Arms Control The second area of historical focus in arms control and disarmament was the imposition of buffer zones and demilitarized regions as a means of conflict avoidance and control. The “poster child” for these efforts was the 1817 Rush-Bagot Agreement to effectively demilitarize the Great Lakes by limiting the number of naval vessels on each side. This agreement set in motion the broader demilitarization of the United States–Canada border.24 The traditional practice of demilitarized zones found early relevance in the nuclear age with the creation of nuclear-weapons-free zones (NWFZs). These were later expanded by voluntary regional bans on nuclear weapons, and at least one regional attempt at overall weapons controls. These efforts attempt to realize the disarmament promise of the Nuclear NonProliferation Treaty by requiring the nuclear weapons states to abide by the zones’ restrictions. The modern era of nuclear arms control and disarmament began with the Antarctic Treaty of 1959. The treaty largely bans militarization of Antarctica, and it designates the continent as the world’s first nuclearweapons-free zone. This treaty was relatively easy, with no state seeing a military future in Antarctica or harboring security interests there. Similarly, the Treaty on the Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, Including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies (1967) limited the militarization of space, and proscribed any state from deploying weapons of mass destruction to space or celestial bodies. The Seabed Treaty (1971) outlaws any state from placing weapons of mass destruction on or in the seabed outside of their twelve-mile limit.25 In addition to these treaties banning weapons from the global commons, certain regions have agreed among themselves to ban nuclear weapons. These nuclear-weapons-free zones are broadly recognized. The Treaty of Tlatelolco (1967) created the Latin America NWFZ. The Treaty of Rarotonga (1985) established an NWFZ in the South Pacific. The Treaty of Pelindaba (1996) set up an NWFZ for Africa. The Treaty of Bangkok (1995) created a Southeast Asia NWFZ. The Treaty on a Nuclear-WeaponFree Zone in Central Asia (2006) established that zone. And Mongolia (2012) designated itself as a now-recognized NWFZ.26 There have been discussions on establishing a Middle East NWFZ, but that discussion is still incomplete. Even so, much of the Southern Hemisphere is nuclear weapons free because of these NWFZs, and the signatory

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states to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW, 2017) similarly pledge not to develop, acquire, possess, or host nuclear weapons. This treaty basically creates a NWFZ in each of its states parties.27 As the five NPT nuclear weapons states plus Israel, India, Pakistan, and North Korea deploy naval forces carrying nuclear weapons, the NWFZ and TPNW maps will complicate their operations. The major example of a non-nuclear buffer zone is the Conventional Armed Forces in Europe Treaty (CFE Treaty, 1991) that limited military equipment deployment between the NATO states and members of the Warsaw Pact. The CFE Treaty is a complex treaty with nested zones and subregions, and with various categories of major military equipment plus specified exempted “minor” military equipment. It is also unique in that the Soviet Union and its allied Warsaw Pact were dissolved shortly after its signing, further complicating its implementation. A companion document, the Conventional Armed Forces in Europe 1A Agreement (CFE-1A, 1992) was negotiated to cover the distribution of military personnel across the treaty’s zones and subregions.28 Although not directly tied to CFE Treaty, the United States, Canada, and twenty-two European states signed the Open Skies Treaty (1992) as a confidence-building measure and security guarantor for post–Cold War Europe. Signatory states agreed to open their entire territories to observation.29 Demilitarized zones and arms-controlled buffers—nuclear and conventional —have been a hallmark of the current era. Particularly the areas of NWFZ have continued to grow as a consequence of continuing nonproliferation and disarmament efforts.

Norms, Rules, and Cooperative Security Most of what we have surveyed to this point has been formal conventions and treaties, with legally enforceable limits and conditions. However, other initiatives, continuing negotiations, and less formal agreements still establish rules and norms, some of which have lawlike effects. In addition, some treaties and conventions are intended to create broader norms, and some contemporary negotiations intend to establish only “rules of the road” in the absence of the ability to reach more formal, legal standards. The cornerstone for nuclear nonproliferation and disarmament is the 1968 NPT. Most would argue that it has created a norm of nonproliferation: no state should seek nuclear weapons and no state should help another state attain nuclear status. Further, many would argue, the NPT regime has also contributed to a taboo against nuclear weapons use. No nuclear weapon has been detonated (outside of testing) since Nagasaki in 1945, although there have been circumstances where nuclear use was a consideration. This norm

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of nonproliferation is today reinforced beyond the NPT with the CTBT, which effectively outlaws all nuclear testing. Nuclear aspirants find it almost impossible to “go nuclear” without at least some testing. And the norm against possession as well as the taboo against use are reinforced by efforts like the TPNW and NWFZs. Treaties and agreements such as the NPT also include review and consultation arrangements that have significance to the larger arms control processes. The NPT includes five-year review conferences that have, over the years, resulted in extending the NPT in perpetuity. The USSoviet and Russian bilateral arms control agreements establish regular high-level consultations as well as scientific community and militarymilitary meeting mechanisms that increase confidence and lower the chances for misinterpretation. The international community furthered the NPT initiative by forming the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG, 1975) to implement the export control provisions of the treaty. The NSG created a “trigger list” of covered materials, and limited exports of those materials, equipment, and technologies. Similarly, the Zangger Committee (1974) also created a trigger list and enforced NPT-derived export controls. The Australia Group (1985) provides similar support for dual-use chemical and biological materials trade, and the Wassenaar Arrangement (1995) seeks to regulate conventional and dual-use technologies. Further efforts on this track include the fifty-plus year effort to complete a Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty in the UN Conference on Disarmament.30 As the world encountered its first experiences with atomic weapons and the prospects of unfettered proliferation, it did recognize the need for organizations and infrastructure to facilitate negotiations and manage any agreements and actions that might be forthcoming. The UN responded, as noted, by creating the IAEA (1956) and ultimately creating a structural element for arms control and disarmament negotiations (CD, 1962). However, atomic weapons and materials, and the development and testing processes, remained the purview of the atomic weapons states. UN efforts on nonproliferation include the potentially powerful tool created through UN Security Council Resolution 1540 (UNSCR 1540, 2004). UNSCR 1540 requires that member states enact national laws for security and export control of weapons of mass destruction.31 Full implementation and compliance here could effectively end most proliferation network activity. Combating the possibility of nuclear terrorism has been a core theme in nonproliferation since 2001. An example here is the 2006 Global Initiative to Combat Nuclear Terrorism, a US-Russian initiative that now has almost 100 state participants dedicated to preventing, detecting, and responding to this threat. In addition, well over 100 states have signed on to the UN International Convention for the Suppression of Acts of Nuclear Terrorism (2007).32

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Several more multilateral nonproliferation efforts and activities continue, including formal diplomatic efforts like the Convention on the Physical Protection of Nuclear Material (1987) that safeguards nuclear materials trade and commerce, and the Group of 8 (G8) Global Partnership Against the Spread of Weapons and Materials of Mass Destruction (2002) that funds projects for disarmament, counterterrorism, and nonproliferation.33 The United States also has led a range of cooperative threat reduction programs, first with the former Soviet Union after the Cold War, and later expanding beyond the East-West focus. Sometimes called the Nunn-Lugar programs after the sponsors of the applicable legislation, cooperative efforts initially addressed dismantling, safeguarding, and disposal of delivery systems and warheads of the Soviet weapons deployed in Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine after the Cold War, and subsequent efforts have expanded geographically and beyond nuclear to biological threat reduction.34 Consistent with the aspirations in his Prague speech, and in an attempt to safeguard nuclear materials that may be vulnerable to theft or illegal transfer around the world, President Obama instituted a series of Nuclear Security Summits when he took office. These were high-level meetings where participating states made concrete pledges to secure vulnerable nuclear material, also identifying resources needed to comply.35 Cooperative coercive efforts predated Obama, including the Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI, 2003) under which participating states assist each other in intercepting illegal shipments of weapons and materials at sea, in the air, and on land. A PSI-related intercept was one factor driving Libya’s decision to give up its weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs in 2003. The Container Security Initiative (CSI, 2002) is a parallel intelligence initiative to target suspect shipping containers for investigation.36 Other developments point to continued expansion of cooperative disarmament. One example is the expansion of export controls from nuclear weapons materials and technology to efforts to control the means of weapon delivery. The Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR, 1987), and the Hague Code of Conduct Against Ballistic Missile Proliferation (HCOC, 2002), for example, add this dimension to the nonproliferation regime. The MTCR is a voluntary regime of exporters to impose a norm of missile nonproliferation. The HCOC is a broader code covering development, testing, and deployment as well as proliferation of delivery vehicles.37 Parallel efforts have also addressed creating an effective norm against the development, possession, and use of biological and toxin weapons and chemical weapons. The BTWC and the CWC provide the basis for these efforts. However, significant concerns about proprietary industrial and intellectual property surrounding national biomedical programs have thus far prevented completion of an effective BTWC compliance and verification inspection and enforcement system. The result is an uneven norm, with

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states such as the United States destroying their biological weapons programs while others such as Russia allowed their programs to continue well beyond agreed deadlines. The CWC does have a strong compliance and verification inspection regime, but some states such as the United States have still not eliminated all their declared chemical weapons stocks due to environmental concerns, and chemical weapons have been employed elsewhere in active conflict. The strength of the international response to remove and dispose of declared chemical weapons and materials from Syria in 2014 is testimony to the continuing promise of the norm, but the reality is that these norms are incomplete. Other approaches toward disarmament outlaw weapons such as antipersonnel landmines and focus on how to regulate and control other conventional weapons development and transfer. The Ottawa Convention (2008) calls on states to stop producing and using antipersonnel landmines. Likewise, the Oslo Convention on Cluster Munitions (CCM, 2008) aims to stop the use of cluster munitions (which if unexploded basically become landmines).38 Note that both Ottawa and Oslo were largely the products of strong personality positions voiced on social media and unofficial negotiations outside of the Conference on Disarmament processes that reflected the views of the “humanitarian disarmament” community. The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons was also facilitated by social media efforts and other offline efforts alongside government negotiations within established processes.39 The international community has long been concerned with dangerous weapons besides weapons of mass destruction. The Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCWC, 1981) addressed incendiary and explosive munitions as a basis for future efforts.40 The landmine and cluster bomb efforts above are direct follow-on results from this foundation. Other contemporary efforts address more novel areas. Military space issues and cyber conflict issues have focus today. On space treaty efforts, Russia and China have tabled a draft convention in the UN; however, the United States sees this agreement as an effort to lock in advantages from covert military space programs in those two countries and to block US efforts to counter those programs. 41 Similarly, the United States sees Russian and Chinese efforts to formalize an agreement on cybersecurity as an effort to negate US capabilities for cyber defense.42 There is no agreement to support formal conventions in these areas, but informal rules of the road are basically in effect between the major powers in these realms. Ratified treaty positions with the force of law, norms of broad agreement on the most dangerous of weapons, and rules of the road over behaviors and technologies in novel realms of conflict, all have resulted from disarmament and arms control. To complete this survey, consider efforts to control trade in small arms and a range of conventional munitions. Progress here is represented by the

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2014 Arms Trade Treaty that seeks to regulate international trade in conventional weapons.43 These efforts have not yet achieved full success, but they persist. Other efforts are just gaining attention, and these address emerging technologies and threats. Areas of concern include artificial intelligence, nanotechnologies, hypersonic systems, gene editing and broader biogenetics, among others. Academic papers and studies seek to define and frame the threat and key components, and conference discussions seek to compare notes and share findings. As these emerging threats are better understood, they must be screened for inclusion in existing agendas for arms control.

Conclusion With this broad summary of disarmament and arms control efforts over roughly the past century, where do we stand today? As can be expected, the record is mixed, with some notable successes and some noted failures, and work remains to be done. What some would count as success, others see as failure. Successes include the fact that almost eighty years into the atomic age, only nine nuclear weapons states exist, two states have given up their weapons/development programs, and three other states surrendered nuclear weapons they inherited after the breakup of the Soviet Union. The United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, France, and China are the recognized nuclear weapons states under the NPT. India, Pakistan, North Korea, and presumably Israel have also developed nuclear weapons. These four examples of proliferation may be seen as failures of the nonproliferation regime; however, early estimates were for far more weapons states, so others may declare at least a partial victory. South Africa developed a handful of nuclear weapons, but it voluntarily gave those weapons up. Libya had an active weapons development program, but relinquished those ambitions and ended that program. On the other hand, Iran today has an active development program fast approaching weapons capability, and Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Turkey are widely believed to be ready to follow if Iran attains the bomb. The NPT and CTBT remain in effect, but some call the NPT troubled because of these examples of proliferation and failure of the five nuclear power states to completely disarm, and the CTBT remains incomplete without several states ratifying it (primarily the United States, China, and since 2023, Russia).44 The TPNW aims for nuclear disarmament, but it lacks the signatures of far too many of the major world powers—including all nine of the actual nuclear weapons states—to have real effect. Again, the norm of nonproliferation and disarmament is strong, but it is not complete.

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Similarly, there have been several negotiated agreements, mostly covering nuclear weapons, with some notable success. However, the SALT treaties have expired, as have START I and SORT. The United States withdrew from the ABM Treaty in 2002 and the INF Treaty in 2019, and Russia has been in noncompliance with the CFE Treaty since at least 2007 and formally withdrew from it in 2023. It also left Open Skies in 2020. The result is that New START is the only remaining strategic treaty between the United States and Russia, but its future is uncertain since Russia suspended participation in 2023. And no agreement has addressed the United States’ or Russia’s nondeployed strategic stockpiles or their nonstrategic nuclear weapons inventories. Arms control efforts today incorporate space and cyber, and the agreements on landmines and cluster munitions stand as examples of what determined advocates can accomplish. However, the pace of technological development—including technologies with the potential to have significant military effects—continues, and it is unclear whether arms control will adapt to manage its most destabilizing effects. The history of arms control mechanisms is rich, and it offers many examples and paths forward. But it is incomplete, with reversals and some areas still to be addressed. The chapters that follow provide more detail on what has been done and what remains to be done. The journey is toward worthy ends, and it deserves major efforts.

Notes 1. Burns, Encyclopedia of Arms Control and Disarmament. 2. Ibid. 3. Chevrier and Smithson, “Preventing the Spread of Arms,” 209–220. 4. Ibid., 202–209. 5. Horton, “Out of (South) Africa.” 6. On South Africa, see Burgess and Purkitt, “The Rollback of South Africa’s Biological Warfare Program.” On Iraq, see Kay, “Actions to Reverse Proliferation.” 7. Wheeler, “International Security Negotiations,” 9–19. 8. Wheeler, “A History of Arms Control,” 25. 9. Wheeler, “International Security Negotiations,” 35–50. 10. On South Africa, see Horton, “Out of (South) Africa.” On Libya, see Joseph, Countering WMD. 11. Wheeler, “International Security Negotiations,” 20–21. 12. For details on the individual treaties, see Larsen and Smith, Historical Dictionary of Arms Control and Disarmament. 13. For a comprehensive discussion of alliance considerations and roles in USSoviet arms control, see Glitman, The Last Battle of the Cold War, especially chap. 3, “NATO Faces the Soviet Challenge.” 14. Wheeler, “A History of Arms Control,” 30–31. 15. Waller, “Strategic Nuclear Arms Control,” 105.

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16. On the INF Treaty, see Glitman, The Last Battle of the Cold War. 17. J. M. Smith, “A Brief History of Arms Control,” 32–33. 18. Waller, “Strategic Nuclear Arms Control,” 106–107. 19. Ibid., 107. 20. J. M. Smith, “A Brief History of Arms Control,” 33. 21. White House, “Remarks by President Barack Obama, Hradcany Square, Prague, Czech Republic, April 5, 2009.” 22. Woolf, Kerr, and Nikitin, Arms Control and Nonproliferation, 19–22. 23. US Department of State, “Russian Noncompliance with and Invalid Suspension of the New START Treaty.” 24. Burns, Encyclopedia of Arms Control and Disarmament. 25. Larsen and Smith, Historical Dictionary of Arms Control and Disarmament, 192. 26. Woolf, Kerr, and Nikitin, Arms Control and Nonproliferation, 27–28. 27. Ibid., 34–35. 28. McCausland, “Conventional Arms Control,” 144–149. 29. Larsen and Smith, Historical Dictionary of Arms Control and Disarmament, 220. 30. G. B. Roberts, “Beyond Arms Control,” 200. On FMCT, see Larsen and Wirtz, Arms Control and Cooperative Security, 251–252. 31. Moodie, “Regional Perspectives on Arms Control,” 166–168. 32. Woolf, Kerr, and Nikitin, Arms Control and Nonproliferation, 30–31, 36–37. 33. Ibid., 29, 35. 34. McCarthy, “Cooperative Threat Reduction,” 121–136. 35. Arms Control Association, “National Security Summit at a Glance.” 36. G. B. Roberts, “Beyond Arms Control,” 208. 37. Woolf, Kerr, and Nikitin, Arms Control and Nonproliferation, 44–46. For more detailed context on delivery systems, the MTCR, and the HCOC, see Gormley, Missile Contagion. 38. Woolf, Kerr, and Nikitin, Arms Control and Nonproliferation, 57–60. 39. UN, “Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.” 40. Larsen and Smith, Historical Dictionary of Arms Control and Disarmament, 44. 41. See, for example, McFate, “Arms Control in Outer Space,” 301–304; Bowman and Thompson, “Russia and China Seek to Tie America’s Hands in Space.” 42. See, for example, Holdorf, “Prospects for an International Cybersecurity Regime.” 43. “The Arms Trade Treaty.” 44. Lebedev and Trevelyan, “Russia Passes Law.”

PART 2 Perspectives of the Major Powers

4 United States Amy F. Woolf

ARMS CONTROL AND COLLABORATIVE SECURITY ENDEAVORS ARE among the tools that help strengthen US national security. They can restrain dangerous and destabilizing activities and weapons systems, while also providing transparency into emerging and potential threats. As such, they complement military, diplomatic, and economic measures in an integrated deterrence architecture. Experts differ on when, whether, and how to employ these tools, leading to sometimes acrimonious debates about the role of arms control in US national security policy. These debates often divide along political lines, with US policy priorities shifting sharply with changes in partisan control of the executive and legislative branches. But partisanship, alone, cannot explain the differing views on the role and value of arms control or the different outcomes when the United States pursues these policies. Variations also occur because the formulation and implementation of arms control policy occurs across multiple agencies in the US government. While the president often sets the overall goals and priorities for arms control, the different participants in the policy process seek to advance a range of more specific goals, priorities, and programs. Arms control and collaborative security endeavors are not the only priorities in these interagency and cross-government debates. Therefore, the proposals and policy options pursued by the United States often reflect negotiated outcomes pursued through the domestic policy and political processes. This chapter considers how competing geopolitical goals and policy priorities within the national security apparatus, differing definitions of strategic stability among policy elites, and competing goals and bureaucratic interests in the interagency process can combine to affect US arms control policy. It also reviews the role of Congress and the role of civil society in 51

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shaping the direction and goals of US policy. This explanation of “how” the United States develops and implements arms control policy offers insights into current debates within the policy community and the prospects for future support for arms control as a national security tool. While the chapter focuses primarily on bilateral nuclear arms control, these insights are also relevant in other arms control endeavors.

Arms Control and Strategic Stability Arms control and cooperative security support a range of goals in US national security policy. They include maintaining and strengthening strategic stability in ways that help manage nuclear competition and reduce the risk of war, promoting transparency and predictability into current and emerging threats, facilitating crisis management, and reducing the risk that crises or limited conflicts might escalate to nuclear war, either through miscalculation or intent. If the policy process followed an analytic model, the United States would seek to identify and control weapons and activities that might undermine stability and exacerbate crises, while protecting those forces and capabilities needed to maintain US security. The United States would then develop negotiating positions to maximize restrictions on an adversary’s destabilizing capabilities and engage with negotiating partners who had made similar calculations. The parties would seek to find common ground on an agreement that could mitigate risks, bolster transparency, and contribute to predictability without undermining the flexibility the United States needs to maintain security. US-Soviet arms control history contains several examples where negotiations sought to advance limits and restrictions consistent with the goal of bolstering strategic stability in ways deemed consistent with this analytic model. These include the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT), where the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty’s (ABM Treaty) limits on ballistic missile defense systems, when combined with the Interim Agreement’s limits on the numbers of offensive missile launchers, sought to dampen pressures for an offense-defense arms race and to ensure that both sides could execute a successful retaliatory strike after absorbing a nuclear attack. The 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty’s (START) limits on the largest models of Soviet intercontinental ballistic missiles (known as heavy ICBMs) and START II’s mutual ban on land-based missiles with multiple warheads also sought to address strategic stability by reducing the numbers of lucrative targets that might be vulnerable to a prompt first strike in a crisis. But the US policy process usually does not follow a clear path to this outcome. Efforts to enhance stability may be evident in the outcome of the arms control process, but they are not the only priorities or the singular

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objectives driving the development of US negotiating positions. The remainder of this chapter seeks to provide a more fulsome description of the bureaucratic politics and domestic policy processes that affect the development and implementation of US arms control policy.

The Domestic Politics and Process of Arms Control Competing Geopolitical Goals

Throughout the Cold War, the United States sized and structured its nuclear arsenal to deter conflict with the Soviet Union. It also championed arms control and cooperative security endeavors to reduce the numbers of US and Soviet nuclear weapons and to address the risks of nuclear proliferation. Even though the threat has evolved in the past thirty years, US concerns about nuclear weapons and nuclear war continue to animate US policy goals. As President Barack Obama noted in his address in Prague in April 2009, “The existence of thousands of nuclear weapons is the most dangerous legacy of the Cold War.”1 President Joe Biden has stated that “we will address the existential threat posed by nuclear weapons. We will head off costly arms races and re-establish our credibility as a leader in arms control.”2 Nevertheless, the US government has often set aside plans and policies designed to address the threats posed by nuclear weapons or nuclear proliferation to pursue other geopolitical goals. During the 1980s, the United States placed a high priority on discouraging, or at least slowing, Pakistan’s acquisition of nuclear weapons while it was, at the same time, actively engaged with Pakistan in responding to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. In 1985, Congress passed legislation, known as the Pressler Amendment, prohibiting US civilian and military aid to Pakistan unless the president certified “that Pakistan does not possess a nuclear explosive device.”3 President Ronald Reagan provided this certification even though US intelligence agencies reported that Pakistan was likely developing a nuclear device.4 President George H. W. Bush withheld this certification in 1990, triggering the amendment’s prohibitions on aid to Pakistan. While several factors influenced this decision, the change in US policy occurred after the Soviet Union’s 1989 withdrawal from Afghanistan.5 The United States had to balance similar, competing goals, in 2005. India, which is not a party to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, exploded nuclear devices in 1974 and 1998. After the 1974 test, the United States halted all nuclear exports to India and continued to seek to isolate India from nuclear commerce after the 1998 tests. However, in July 2005, President George W. Bush announced that he would “work with friends and allies to adjust international regimes to enable full civil nuclear energy cooperation and trade with India.”6 Congress then passed legislation allowing

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the president to waive portions of the US Atomic Energy Act and to sign a nuclear cooperation agreement with India.7 Critics expressed concerns about the risk that India might advance its nuclear program with knowledge or technologies acquired under the cooperation agreement. But supporters highlighted the potential commercial gains to American companies and the benefits of US-India security cooperation. Supporters prevailed, and geopolitical goals won out over US nonproliferation goals. Competing National Security Goals

Arms control can limit weapons and activities that can threaten US security while providing predictability and transparency into the capabilities of adversaries. But bilateral or multilateral agreements also impose limits on US capabilities and military operations, limiting US flexibility and its ability to respond to emerging security challenges. These two potential outcomes can create friction in the domestic policy process; the competing goals are evident in the content of US arms control proposals and the broader support for arms control as a tool of national security. The Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty. In 2002, the United States and Russia signed the Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty, known as the Moscow Treaty, where they agreed to limit their deployed strategic nuclear forces to between 1,700 and 2,200 warheads.8 This treaty did not include any of the definitions, counting rules, elimination procedures, or monitoring and verification provisions that were common in previous US-Soviet arms control treaties. The Moscow Treaty mandated that the parties would reduce to this level by December 31, 2012, at which time the treaty and its limits would lapse. The George W. Bush administration accepted a treaty that lacked the formal structure of the START Treaty because it did not see a need to impose formal limits on Russia’s forces and because it did not want to impose formal limits on US forces. Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith explained to Congress that “we see no reason to try to dictate the size and composition of Russia’s strategic forces by legal means” and “we do not believe it is prudent to set in stone the level and type of U.S. nuclear capabilities.”9 Thus, the limits in the Moscow Treaty codified the number of warheads the United States had identified as necessary during the 2001 Nuclear Posture Review. This echo of US plans and its expiration at the moment the limits became binding and allowed the United States full flexibility to size and structure its nuclear force. At the same time, with its lack of definitions and monitoring provisions, it offered virtually no transparency into or predictability about Russia’s forces. The Bush administration argued that, with the change in their political relationship,

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the United States and Russia no longer needed to negotiate complex treaties to manage strategic stability. According to President Bush, the United States and Russia did not need “endless hours of arms control discussions” and formal agreements “to reduce our weaponry in a significant way.”10 US withdrawal from the INF Treaty. The Donald Trump administration’s withdrawal from the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF Treaty) also shows how competing national security goals can affect arms control choices. Under the INF Treaty, the United States and Soviet Union agreed to destroy all intermediate-range and shorter-range ground-launched ballistic missiles, ground-launched cruise missiles, and their launchers. Neither party could produce or flight-test new ground-launched intermediaterange missiles or produce launchers for them. The INF Treaty was designed to bolster security and stability by removing the threat of prompt missile launches against US allies (and against Soviet cities) and reducing the threat of surprise attack in a crisis. It provided the United States and Soviet Union with unprecedented access to information about the banned missiles and their infrastructure.11 However, beginning in 2008, the United States detected several tests of a new Russian cruise missile that appeared to have intermediate range and the capability to deploy on ground-based launchers.12 Both the Obama and Trump administrations addressed this with Russia, but were unable to reach a resolution. When announcing the US withdrawal from the treaty in 2018, President Trump cited both Russia’s violation and the fact that China was not bound by its limits.13 In making this latter point, he echoed the views of analysts who argued that land-based intermediate-range missiles could provide the United States with added flexibility in countering Chinese efforts to restrict US operations in the Asia Pacific region.14 John Bolton, who served as Trump’s national security advisor, had long opposed continued US adherence to the treaty. He argued that it interfered with the United States’ ability “to preserve global security” and asserted that the United States “should see Moscow’s breach as an opportunity to withdraw” so that the United States could “have access to the full spectrum of conventional and nuclear options.”15 Although Russia’s INF Treaty violation was a sufficient reason for US withdrawal, the added concerns about China’s missile capabilities highlight how competing national security goals can affect the perceived value of arms control agreements. Even though US allies pressed the United States to take steps that would save the treaty and retain its benefits for stability and security, the pressure from those who advocated for the US deployment of intermediate range missiles in Asia helped determine the outcome. The United States has not yet deployed these systems in Asia but, for many analysts, growing concerns about China’s expanding missile programs more than justify the US withdrawal from a treaty that limited a potential US capability.

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Competing Views on Strategic Stability and the Role of Arms Control

US policy elites hold disparate views about the definition of strategic stability. They therefore differ in their assessments of which weapons systems, deployment patterns, and components of nuclear doctrine can be destabilizing and how or whether cooperative measures can promote stability. Career policy professionals remain in their positions across different administrations, but policy elites often move into and out of government, bringing their views with them. Their views can become the views of the agencies they represent, thus affecting the types of arms control measures and negotiating strategy preferred by different administrations. One view holds that strategic stability is best understood by considering the characteristics of different types of weapons, the mix of weapons in each side’s arsenal, and the potential interaction between the two sides’ weapons if either considered employing them in a conflict.16 Stable deterrence requires weapons that can survive a first strike and cause unacceptable damage in retaliation, thereby ensuring that neither side would believe that it could launch a successful disarming first strike. This view also considers weapons that are vulnerable to a first strike to be destabilizing because a nation might launch them promptly in a crisis before their potential destruction in a first strike. The emphasis on “secure second strike” creates a preference for seabased or other mobile nuclear forces and against the deployment of significant ballistic missile defenses that could protect a nation against a retaliatory strike. The concern about “use or lose” pressures not only creates a preference for more survivable mobile systems, but also argues against the deployment of large, fixed, multiple-warhead ballistic missiles.17 Arms control can play a key role in this construct of strategic stability by creating and maintaining the balance of forces that would ensure a secure second strike and mitigate the risks of use or lose pressure in a crisis. Thus, the 1972 ABM Treaty limited each side to 100 missile defense launchers, leaving both sides vulnerable to retaliation even if a first strike had degraded the number of surviving warheads. The 1991 START Treaty mandated a 50 percent reduction in the number of large, but vulnerable, Soviet SS-18 land-based missiles and allowed reductions in the numbers of warheads deployed and counted on all other multiple-warhead missiles. The 1993 START II Treaty, although it never entered into force, went further, banning all SS-18 ICBMs and mandating that all remaining ICBMs carry only one warhead. The United States and Soviet Union codified this definition of strategic stability in a 1990 Joint Statement, when they pledged to pursue talks that would ensure strategic stability and reduce the risk of nuclear war “by seeking agreements that improve survivability,

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remove incentives for a nuclear first strike and implement an appropriate relationship between strategic offenses and defenses.”18 A second view holds that strategic stability is less about the balance between adversaries’ forces than it is about the distinct capabilities of specific weapons systems. For the United States, a secure second strike is not sufficient; to ensure deterrence and strengthen stability, weapons would have to survive with sufficient numbers and capabilities to destroy an adversary’s high value targets.19 This view of strategic stability also identifies large, multiple-warhead, land-based missiles as destabilizing, but not because their vulnerability could create use or lose pressures in a crisis. Some experts argued that they undermined stability because the Soviet Union could use them to destroy US land-based missiles and other critical military facilities, while holding its remaining weapons in reserve. The Soviet Union could then seek to deter a US second strike by threatening a third strike against US cities, thus coercing the United States to surrender when faced with the threat of a Soviet first strike.20 Analysts have recently made similar arguments about Russia’s shorter-range nuclear weapons,21 suggesting that Russia might threaten to use these weapons in a regional conflict to coerce the United States and its allies to retreat.22 In this view of strategic stability, arms control can help “manage strategic competition among states”23 and can help restrict those forces that provide an advantage to the adversary. This was evident in the Reagan administration’s early proposals for the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks when President Reagan attributed the “growing instability of the nuclear balance” to “the increasingly destructive potential of the massive Soviet buildup in its ballistic missile force.”24 He stated that the US goal for arms control was to “enhance deterrence and achieve stability through significant reductions in the most destabilizing nuclear systems, ballistic missiles, and especially the giant intercontinental ballistic missiles.”25 Thus, the United States sought to reduce the numbers of these missiles with limits on both warheads and missile throw weight.26 The Trump administration also focused on specific Russian weapons systems in its concerns about strategic stability and approach to arms control, often criticizing the 2010 New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) because the treaty did not limit Russia’s new types of long-range delivery systems.27 Some officials in the administration argued that these weapons could provide Russia with a new way to launch a first strike against the United States.28 The administration also expressed concerns about Russia’s continuing reliance on shorter-range nonstrategic nuclear weapons and sought to impose direct limits on these weapons in its arms control proposals in 2020.29 Yet at the same time, the United States refused to engage with Russia in arms control discussions on US plans for missile defense, even

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though many experts outside government concluded that Russia’s newer delivery systems were being designed to counter US missile defenses.30 The Interagency Process

A number of executive branch agencies play a role in the development, negotiation, and implementation of US arms control policy. Each agency brings different priorities, authorities, and analytic tools to the process. Thus, the interagency process requires cooperation and compromise among the agencies and their principals throughout the process. This almost always produces negotiating positions and treaty language that diverge from an analytic assessment of the strategic stability goals of arms control policy. There are numerous examples from arms control history—such as the disputes among the State Department, Defense Department, and National Security Council (NSC) during the SALT II negotiations in 1977 and 1978 where interagency disputes complicated the negotiations.31 This history also includes negotiations—such as those that produced the New START Treaty in 2009 and 2010—where interagency cooperation helped the United States achieve its objectives.32 Executive Office of the President and the National Security Council.

The president of the United States is legally and constitutionally responsible for setting the priorities and exercising authority over US foreign policy. The president decides whether the United States should participate in negotiations on cooperative security measures and sets the policy direction for those negotiations. Many presidents have used public speeches to outline their views on arms control, describe their priorities for the negotiations, and explain the outcome of the negotiations in an effort to sway views in Congress and the general public.33 While some presidents have shown a great deal of interest in the details of these negotiations, few have had the time or interest to monitor and participate in the process throughout the negotiations. The structure of the National Security Council staff can vary between administrations, but most have included experts who focus on arms control and nonproliferation policy. These experts coordinate the development, implementation, and analysis of policy proposals and programs managed by the cabinet-level agencies. They can provide analysis and advice to the president and transmit the president’s preferences to the agencies. The role of the national security advisor also depends on the president’s preferences; some have served as “honest brokers” who help coordinate policy debates and resolve policy disputes between and among the agencies, while others have brought their own expertise and preferences to the development of US policy and negotiating strategy.

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Department of State. The president generally delegates the authority to

negotiate treaties and international agreements to the secretary of state, who further delegates this authority to specially appointed ambassadors, undersecretaries, or assistant secretaries. The State Department also maintains bureaus with expert staff who help develop US negotiating positions, provide analysis, evaluate the positions and priorities of other participating nations, and work to implement agreements after they enter into force. This expertise is currently resident in the State Department’s “T” bureaus, under the authority of the undersecretary of state for arms control and international security. The Bureau of Intelligence and Research also contributes to the arms control process, assessing the verifiability of potential treaty provisions and contributing to assessments of compliance during treaty implementation. Between 1961 and 1999, these responsibilities resided in the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA), an independent agency attached to the State Department, whose director served as the primary advisor to the president and the secretary of state on arms control issues. Several ACDA directors served as lead negotiators for arms control treaties. Nevertheless, ACDA did not always adopt the most progressive arms control positions or win all the policy debates in the interagency process. In addition, the president did not have to accept the counsel of the ACDA director; he could turn to other advisors whose views were more consistent with his own. Department of Defense. The Department of Defense (DOD) plays a significant role throughout the process of developing, negotiating, and implementing arms control and cooperative security agreements. The Office of the Secretary of Defense and the Joint Staff translate national guidance into requirements and employment plans for nuclear weapons. They provide analysis and recommendations into the weapons needed to meet these requirements and on changes that might be needed in these plans if the United States adopted certain arms control restrictions. Officials from DOD also participate in the US negotiating team, bringing the Pentagon’s insights and expertise to the negotiating table. Senior officials testify before Congress, offering assessments of whether and how the agreements bolster US national security. DOD also provides knowledge, expertise, and support during implementation, as the military services execute the mandated reductions in US forces and host cooperative monitoring visits at their facilities. Finally, DOD, through the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Nuclear, Chemical, and Biological Defense Programs, plays a role in evaluating US research, development, and acquisition programs to ensure that they comply with the terms of existing agreements. Because the Pentagon must ensure that the United States has the plans and capabilities needed to address challenges to US security, it has often

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been skeptical about agreements that would restrict US weapons programs.34 Nevertheless, the Pentagon has, occasionally, concluded that US force levels exceed requirements and, therefore, could be reduced. For example, in September 1991, President George H. W. Bush announced that the United States would implement unilateral reductions in its numbers of deployed shorter-range nuclear weapons. The Department of Defense identified and advocated for the specific reductions and force posture changes.35 DOD also took the lead in analyzing potential nuclear reductions during the Obama administration. Analysis conducted during the 2010 Nuclear Posture Review considered several potential force levels for the US negotiating position in New START; all allowed for reductions below the existing levels of approximately 2,200 deployed strategic warheads.36 In a follow-up study completed in 2013, leadership at DOD, the US Strategic Command, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff all supported the conclusion that “the number of nuclear warheads the U.S. military deploys could be cut by at least a third without harming national security.”37 Intelligence Community. The US Intelligence Community (IC) includes

seventeen separate agencies and organizations that support US foreign policy and national security.38 The Office of the Director of National Intelligence coordinates intelligence collection and sharing among these separate agencies. The IC participates at all stages of the arms control process and contributes to a broad range of activities that support cooperative security endeavors. It develops assessments and projections about threats from other countries, thus contributing to decisions about the necessary size, structure, and operations of US nuclear forces. This analysis can also identify adversary weapons and capabilities that might be restrained through arms control agreements. The IC provides analysis about how negotiating proposals might affect adversary capabilities and the potential balance of forces between the United States and its adversaries. Representatives from the IC also participate on the US negotiating team, providing their assessments and expertise as positions evolve during the negotiations. The IC plays a key role in monitoring treaty implementation and assessing whether US treaty partners are complying with their obligations. This process begins during the development of US negotiating positions, with assessments of whether the United States has the tools needed to verify compliance with potential proposals. It becomes an iterative process during the negotiations, as provisions evolve to incorporate proposals from other parties. The resulting assessments can help the United States develop additional monitoring tools or treaty provisions that might improve US confidence in its ability to assess compliance with the prospective treaty. After the treaty is complete, the intelligence community prepares a broader assessment of the verifiability of the agreement and presents conclusions

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about its confidence in the US ability to verify compliance to members of Congress during the treaty ratification process. This information has often been central to the congressional debate about the national security implications of arms control agreements. Congress

The role that Congress plays in US arms control policy and cooperative security engagements draws from the Constitution, statutes, the legislative process, oversight, and other levers of congressional influence. These formal and informal mechanisms provide Congress with several paths to influence the direction of US arms control efforts and to affect the implementation of these policies. Constitutional role, statutory language, and legislative review. Article II, Section 2, Clause 2 of the US Constitution provides that the president “shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur.” The Senate provides its advice and consent through a resolution of ratification. The president then ratifies a treaty by exchanging the instruments of ratification with the other parties to the treaty or depositing it at a central repository such as the United Nations. The resolution of ratification can be a simple paragraph affirming its consent to ratification or a longer document that contains a number of understandings, declarations, and conditions. While the Senate could seek to amend and change the text of the treaty, this is rare as it would require that the other party to the treaty accept the terms of the amendment. Instead, most of the understandings, declarations, and conditions incorporated in recent resolutions of ratification clarify statements and interpretations offered by the administration during Senate hearings on the treaty, require reports from the executive branch about treaty implementation and compliance, and direct the executive branch to pursue military programs or future arms control endeavors that the Senate believes are necessary to ensure US security under the terms of the treaty. The Arms Control and Disarmament Act of 1961 (22 USC 2573) provides further guidance, stating that “no action shall be taken . . . that would obligate the United States to reduce or limit the Armed Forces or armaments of the United States in a militarily significant manner, except pursuant to the treaty-making power of the President . . . , or unless authorized by the enactment of further affirmative legislation by the Congress of the United States.” This language does not state that the United States can reduce its nuclear weapons only by signing a treaty; it mandates that Congress approve any legal obligations that require militarily significant

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reductions. For example, the Richard Nixon administration submitted the Interim Agreement on Offensive Arms from the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks to Congress as a congressional-executive agreement, requiring a majority vote in both chambers. Some arms control agreements that did not affect force levels, including confidence-building measures like the 1963 Hot Line Agreement, have been concluded as legally binding executive agreements without approval by Congress. The United States has also entered into some agreements without a vote in Congress because they were considered “politically binding.” but not “legally binding” on the United States. Congress can, however, still review the agreements and vote to approve or disapprove its implementation. Congress took this path in 2015, when it enacted the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act of 2015, giving itself a role and right to review the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) negotiated with Iran. This legislation provided Congress with sixty days to review materials related to the JCPOA and then vote on resolutions of disapproval. Both the House and Senate considered these resolutions, but they failed to pass in both houses before the review process ended on September 17, 2015. Authorizations, appropriations, and oversight. Congress can also affect arms control through funding decisions on nuclear weapons. For example, in 1969, while the United States and Soviet Union were negotiating the ABM Treaty, the Senate narrowly defeated an amendment that would have denied funding for the planned Safeguard antiballistic missile system.39 Congress approved this funding again in 1970, but only after the administration argued that the program could serve as a bargaining chip in the ongoing negotiations.40 These votes reflected congressional concerns about the Safeguard program, but also signaled that Congress would likely support an arms control agreement that limited antiballistic missile systems.41 Congress also linked arms control with funding for nuclear weapons programs during the New START negotiations when it mandated that the Obama administration submit a report to Congress that described how the administration planned to “enhance the safety, security, and reliability of the nuclear weapons stockpile of the United States; modernize the nuclear weapons complex; and maintain the delivery platforms for nuclear weapons.”42 This report not only established most of the current modernization programs in the US nuclear enterprise, but also convinced several senators to vote for New START, likely providing the margin needed to ensure its ratification. Congress can also debate resolutions expressing support or opposition to US arms control policy. This allows members to engage in substantive

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debate about arms control issues and can signal the potential for conflict or concurrence with prospective treaties prior to their completion. For example, in 1982 and 1983, as the Reagan administration was seeking funds for nuclear modernization programs but delaying arms control negotiations, the House Foreign Affairs Committee adopted a resolution calling for a freeze in the development and deployment of new nuclear weapons. This resolution failed to pass in the House or Senate and was largely dismissed by the executive branch. Nevertheless, it provided Congress with a way to acknowledge growing public support for US-Soviet arms control and provided an opportunity for serious debate and discussion about nuclear weapons and arms control policy. During the Cold War, the Armed Services and Foreign Relations Committees held numerous hearings each year to evaluate US policies and to receive updates on the progress of ongoing negotiations. They also held hearings to monitor progress in treaty implementation, with frequent focus on compliance and potential violations. These types of hearings addressed numerous forms of arms control, including not only bilateral agreements on nuclear weapons, but also nonproliferation agreements, agreements addressing conventional weapons, and cooperative efforts at threat reduction and security cooperation. While Congress held far fewer of these hearings between the 1990s and early 2010s, they returned to the agenda in recent years when the United States began to identify concerns about Russia’s compliance with arms control agreements. Observation and advice to negotiators. Congress can also influence

arms control policy by acting as observers during negotiations. Congress established the Arms Control Observer Group (ACOG)—a bipartisan group of twelve senators—during the US-Soviet negotiations on START and the INF Treaty. The members received regular briefings from US negotiators and, although they did not observe the negotiations in progress, met informally with members of the Soviet delegations. The group helped build institutional knowledge in the Senate about the goals and details of the negotiations and bipartisan support for the INF Treaty and START, easing their way to ratification.43 Congress expanded the ACOG’s mandate when establishing the National Security Working Group in 1999. The members of this group began to engage actively with arms control negotiations in 2009 when the United States and Russia were negotiating New START. As they had in the 1980s, the members participated in meetings with administration officials and gained a deeper understanding of issues on the table in Geneva. However, this group did not serve as a venue for bipartisan cooperation or help build support for the emerging treaty. Senator Jon Kyl, who cochaired the

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committee, led Senate opposition to the treaty’s eventual ratification. Moreover, when he and Senator Dianne Feinstein visited the US negotiating team in Geneva, he hoped to do more than just observe the process. Ambassador Rose Gottemoeller noted that Senator Kyl sought to “sit at the negotiating table and participate in the plenary meetings.”44 He did not engage directly with the negotiations, but he did receive extensive briefings from the US team on the progress of the negotiations and held informal meetings with the Russian negotiating team. Civil Society

The United States has a rich history of engagement by experts outside government in the development and promotion of arms control policy. These experts are often affiliated with universities and academic research centers, nonpartisan think tanks, and advocacy organizations. Many cycle between these organizations and official government positions. Their work can be found in scholarly research, engagement with government officials in formal or informal settings, public advocacy, and, on occasion, public demonstrations. The groups involved in this process span a spectrum of views on arms control and nonproliferation. Some are known for expressing skepticism about the role that arms control can play in US national security, while others support measured engagements with adversaries and formal agreements that reduce the numbers of nuclear weapons and maintain strategic stability. Still others advocate for nuclear disarmament and the elimination of nuclear weapons. The participants in this process hope to educate and influence public views and bend government policies in ways that they believe will reduce the risk of nuclear war. For example, in January 2007, an editorial written by former secretaries of state Henry Kissinger and George Schulz, former secretary of defense William Perry, and retired senator Sam Nunn advocated for policies and programs that would reduce global numbers of nuclear weapons and mitigate the risks of nuclear use.45 Although some participants in the public debate dismissed the vision outlined in this editorial, it altered the terms of the debate and the research agendas at some think tanks.46 It also influenced President Obama, earning an endorsement in his speech in Prague in April 2009 and in his administration’s Nuclear Posture Review in 2010. Civil society can also engage with Congress by offering briefings and seminars for members and staff on general arms control issues and by testifying at hearings before and during the treaty ratification process. Advocacy groups can also meet with members of Congress to present their views on treaty provisions and lobby for or against its ratification. This lobbying effort can also reach into the members’ districts, where advocacy

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groups can hold public meetings and publish editorials in local media.47 While these local efforts may not change minds before senators vote on a treaty, they can provide cover for their votes by explaining the benefits or risks of the treaty to their constituents. Arms control policy has also responded to broader public movements in support of disarmament objectives. For example, in the early 1960s, public concerns about the fallout from atmospheric nuclear tests and the presence of radioactive strontium-90 in milk mobilized protests around the world in support of a ban on atmospheric nuclear tests.48 In June 1982, 1 million people gathered in New York’s Central Park to protest the deployment of intermediate range nuclear missiles and to press for a nuclear freeze.49 The nuclear freeze movement not only brought out public protests, but also influenced some members of Congress in their opposition to the Reagan administration’s nuclear weapons and arms control policies. Public advocacy has also influenced the international arms control agenda, with activists successfully advocating for the Ottawa Treaty banning landmines, the Convention on Cluster Munitions, and, more recently, the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.50

Current US Arms Control Policy Each of these components of domestic politics plays a role in the development, negotiation, and implementation of US arms control and collaborative security policies. Over the years, diverse groups with different geopolitical goals, national security policy priorities, and concepts of strategic stability have taken the lead in the internal debate and policy process. This pattern is evident in the formulation and implementation of US arms control policy over the past decade. During the latter years of the Obama administration, the interagency process and policy elites continued to support the implementation and extension of New START, even though questions about Russia’s compliance with the INF Treaty and concerns about its annexation of Crimea had affected US support for arms control. When the Trump administration took office, many of the policy elites who entered the interagency process were among those who had long questioned the national security value of arms control and were skeptical about the benefits of New START. At the same time, concerns about Russia’s development of new types of strategic delivery systems that did not count under New START and concerns about China’s growing nuclear arsenal accelerated a shift in US national security priorities. Thus, the Trump

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administration initially argued against extending New START, and suggested that it should, instead, be replaced with an agreement that limited China’s nuclear weapons and all types of Russian nuclear weapons. Russia and China both rejected this formula, but it was consistent with the priorities of senior officials in the interagency and many members of Congress. The Biden administration, staffed with policy elites who had long supported arms control, promptly altered several of the tenets of the Trump administration’s arms control policy. The United States and Russia extended the New START Treaty on February 3, 2021, two days before the treaty was due to expire. The two nations also agreed that they would engage in “an integrated bilateral Strategic Stability Dialogue” where they would “seek to lay the groundwork for future arms control and risk reduction measures.”51 However, the US position in these talks reflected many of the same concerns expressed during the Trump administration. As Mallory Stewart, assistant secretary of state for arms control, verification, and compliance, noted in June 2022, the United States wanted to “sustain limits beyond 2026 on the Russian systems covered under new START. . . limit the new kinds of nuclear systems Russia is developing; and . . . address all Russian nuclear weapons, including theater-range weapons.”52 The Biden administration also recognized the potential threat posed by China’s growing nuclear arsenal, but instead of insisting that China join the US-Russian arms control process, suggested that the United States and China begin a strategic stability dialogue to possibly establish communications channels and crisis management mechanisms that might mitigate the risk of misunderstanding and inadvertent escalation. Thus, the Biden administration returned to a policy approach that values arms control and cooperative security engagement as a tool of US national security. Nevertheless, competing national security and defense goals continue to impede progress toward the negotiation of a treaty to replace New START. The United States and Russia have not met to discuss arms control since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. In August 2022 Russia rejected the US request to resume on-site inspections under the treaty, and in November 2022 cancelled a planned meeting of the treaty’s Bilateral Consultative Commission. In response to these disruptions in New START’s monitoring and verification regime, the United States reported, in January 2023, that it could not certify that Russia was in compliance with New START.53 Following this determination, Russia announced that it would suspend its participation in New START.54 It has indicated that it would continue to comply with the treaty’s limits on the numbers of deployed missiles and warheads, but would no longer provide notifications or share data mandated by the treaty.

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Conclusion For the past fifty years, arms control outcomes have reflected a broad consensus that negotiations and agreements can help manage threats to US security, bolster stability, and strengthen deterrence. But arms control remains vulnerable to competing goals and priorities, differing views among policy elites, and competing priorities among the participants in the interagency process. Moreover, recent changes in the international security environment and the increase in partisanship on foreign policy may undermine support for these views and impede future efforts to use of cooperative measures to address US national security concerns.

Notes 1. White House, Office of the Press Secretary, “Remarks by President Barack Obama, Hradcany Square, Prague, Czech Republic, April 5, 2009.” 2. Biden, Interim National Security Strategic Guidance,” 13. 3. International Security and Development Cooperation Act of 1985. 4. A 1985 report by the National Intelligence Council concluded that Pakistan “probably [had] a workable design for a nuclear explosive device” and was “probably . . . a year or two away from a capacity to produce enough” highly enriched uranium for such a device. See The Dynamics of Nuclear Proliferation. 5. In 1991, the US Intelligence Community reported that Pakistan had “a viable nuclear weapons design and has components that it could assemble into nuclear devices on short notice.” See “Prospects for Special Weapons Proliferation and Control.” 6. White House, “Joint Statement Between President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.” 7. “United States and India Nuclear Cooperation.” 8. The treaty’s official title is “Treaty on Strategic Offensive Reductions” in English and “Agreement on the Reduction of Strategic Offensive Potentials” in Russian. 9. Bleek. “U.S., Russia Agree to Codify Nuclear Reductions.” 10. White House, Office of the Press Secretary, “President Bush and President Putin Discuss New Relationship.” 11. For a description of the benefits of the INF Treaty, see Sestanovich, “Bolton vs. INF.” 12. If the missile had only been capable of deployment on sea-based launchers, it would not have raised concerns about compliance with the INF Treaty. For details on the evidence and US conclusions, see “Director of National Intelligence Daniel Coats.” 13. Borger and Pengelly, “Trump Says U.S. Will Withdraw from Nuclear Arms Treaty with Russia.” 14. Colby, “The INF Treaty Hamstrings the U.S.”; also Denmark and Sayers, “Exiting the Russia Nuclear Treaty Impacts Military Strategy in Asia.” 15. Bolton and Yoo, “An Obsolete Nuclear Treaty Even Before Russia Cheated.”

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16. For an example of this argument, see Schelling, “What Went Wrong with Arms Control?“ See also Lodal, “Assuring Strategic Stability.” 17. The 1983 Scowcroft Commission Report highlighted the preference for single-warhead land-based missiles, arguing that “from the point of view of enhancing such stability, the Commission believes that there is considerable merit in moving toward an ICBM force structure in which potential targets are of comparatively low value—missiles containing only one warhead.” See Report of the President’s Commission on Strategic Forces, 1–4. 18. White House, “Soviet–United States Joint Statement on Future Negotiations.” 19. In testimony before the House Armed Services Committee in 2019, Frank Miller, who has served in several positions in the White House and Pentagon across multiple administrations, noted that “deterrence rests on the premise that we will maintain a capability to retaliate against the assets which potential enemy leaders value most.” House Committee on Armed Services, Hearing. 20. This concern became known as the “window of vulnerability” and was seen as particularly threating in the late 1970s because the United States did not have a similar large missile with multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles (MIRVs). See, for example, Nitze, “Assuring Strategic Stability in an Era of Détente.” 21. For details on the history and current status of these “nonstrategic” nuclear weapons, see Woolf, Nonstrategic Nuclear Weapons. 22. According to this view, this threat might be successful because the United States lacks a similar low-yield weapon that it could use in response. See US Department of Defense, Nuclear Posture Review, 30. 23. Ibid., 72. 24. Reagan, “Address at Commencement Exercises at Eureka College, Eureka, Illinois.” 25. Ibid. 26. Throw weight is a function of the size and fuel capacity of missile and measures the capacity of a missile to deliver warheads to a given range. Higher throw weight translates into the ability to deliver warheads to a greater range or to carry a larger number of heavier warheads. 27. Bolton, President Trump’s national security advisor, made this point in a 2019 interview, when he said it was “unlikely” that the administration would extend the treaty. Taheran and Kimball, “Bolton Declares New START Extension Unlikely.” 28. Russia’s new types of delivery systems include a hypersonic glide vehicle deployed on a land-based ballistic missile; a nuclear-armed, nuclear-propelled longrange cruise missile; a nuclear-armed, nuclear-propelled long-range underwater drone; and an air-delivered ballistic missile. For details, see Woolf, Russia’s Nuclear Weapons, 23–30. 29. For a summary of this last-minute rush toward a short-term extension of New START, see Woolf, The New START Treaty, 47–51. 30. In a hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 2018, Senator Barrasso received assurances from administration officials that “in any arms control discussions with Russia . . . the United States will not agree to limiting our own missile defense programs.” US Congress, Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, “Status of U.S.-Russia Arms Control Efforts.” 31. Krepon, Winning and Losing the Nuclear Peace, 177–178. This dynamic was also evident in the disputes between Richard Perle at DOD and Richard Burt at the State Department during the Reagan administration. See Atlas, “Rival Arms Control Advisers Make Peace.”

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32. In her memoir on the New START negotiations, Rose Gottemoeller highlights the interagency makeup of her negotiating team and credits the knowledge and skills of the agency representatives for the timely completion of the negotiations. See Gottemoeller, Negotiating the New START Treaty, 14–16. 33. White House, Office of the Press Secretary “Remarks By President Barack Obama, Hradcany Square, Prague, Czech Republic, April 5, 2009”; also Kennedy, “Commencement Address at American University”; Reagan, “Address at Commencement Exercises at Eureka College, Eureka, Illinois.” 34. In 1979, the Joint Chiefs damned the SALT II Treaty with faint praise, noting that it was “modest but useful.” Krepon, Winning and Losing the Nuclear Peace, 181. In 1999, during Senate debate on the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, several former secretaries of defense signed a statement opposing ratification of the treaty, while other former defense officials recommended delaying the vote. This opposition contributed to the Senate’s rejection of the treaty. See, Krepon, Winning and Losing the Nuclear Peace, 379. 35. For a detailed and authoritative review of the Presidential Nuclear Initiatives, see Koch, “The Presidential Nuclear Initiatives of 1991–1992.” 36. Nuclear Posture Review. 37. However, these cuts were not accomplished since Russia was uninterested in reciprocating. R. J. Smith, “Obama Administration Embraces Major New Nuclear Weapons Cut.” 38. These include stand-alone agencies like the Central Intelligence Agency and National Security Agency, as well as intelligence directorates and bureaus within other government entities such as the Defense Intelligence Agency and the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research. 39. Fifty senators voted for the amendment, but with the vice president joining the opposition, the amendment failed by a vote of 50–51. See Cameron, The Double Game, 116, 123. 40. Bresler and Gray, “The Bargaining Chip and SALT,” 71. 41. A similar dynamic occurred in the early 1980s, when Congress came close to canceling the ten-warhead MX ICBM, but approved the funding after the Reagan administration argued that the missile could serve as a bargaining chip to win Soviet acceptance of limits on its own large, multiple warhead ICBMs. See Reagan, “The MX.” 42. National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2010. 43. N. Roth, The Evolution of the Senate Arms Control Observer Group. 44. Gottemoeller, Negotiating the New START Treaty, 61. 45. The editorial asked whether “a world-wide consensus [can] be forged that defines a series of practical steps leading to major reductions in the nuclear danger” and, by endorsing and adopting these steps, whether the global community could embrace a “vision of a world free of nuclear weapons.“ See Shultz, Perry, Kissinger, and Nunn, ”A World Free of Nuclear Weapons.” 46. See, for example, Perkovich and Acton. Abolishing Nuclear Weapons. 47. Gottemoeller, Negotiating the New START Treaty, 153–154. 48. Center for Arms Control and Nonproliferation, “The Limited Test Ban Treaty, Fact Sheet.” See also Early, “How to Stop a Nuclear Bomb.” 49. P. L. Montgomery, “Throngs Fill Manhattan to Protest Nuclear Weapons.” Hundreds of thousands of people also took to the streets across Europe in October 1983. See Drozdiak, “More than a Million Protest Missiles in Western Europe.” 50. The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons grew out of a meeting in March 2013, when government officials from 128 nations, along with experts from

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international organizations and civil society, met in Norway to address the humanitarian consequences of the use of nuclear weapons. The participants met again in Mexico in 2014 and Austria in 2016 and 2022. The process led to the eventual negotiation of the treaty at the United Nations, entering into force in January 2021. 51. White House, “U.S.-Russia Presidential Joint Statement on Strategic Stability.” 52. US Department of State, “Keynote Address for the Commemoration of the 50th Anniversary of the Arms Control Association.” 53. US Department of State, Report to Congress on the Implementation of the New START Treaty. 54. Isachenkov, “Russia Suspends Only Remaining Major Nuclear Treaty with U.S.”

5 Russia Steven Pifer

THE KREMLIN’S 2022 INVASION OF UKRAINE PLUNGED RUSSIAN relations with the West to a post–Cold War nadir. While both Washington and Moscow professed interest in continuing their strategic stability and arms control discussions, the dialogue on strategic stability was not resumed after being paused in early 2022. Russia suspended its participation in the 2010 New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) in 2023. Restoring full implementation of New START and engaging in further discussions appear more important than before, but the Russia-Ukraine war has set back the prospects for US-Russia nuclear arms control. When—or if—discussions resume, US and Russian officials will find that key differences in their approaches remain—and perhaps increased. Washington has expressed a desire to address all US and Russian nuclear weapons, while Moscow has indicated its priorities are US missile defense and long-range conventional strike systems. As for third-country nuclear forces, China concerns the United States, but Russia seeks constraints on British and French forces. Members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) would like to see constraints applied to Russian nonstrategic nuclear weapons, but getting those weapons on the negotiating table will prove difficult. London and Paris will remain wary of Russian efforts to bring their nuclear arms into any negotiation. This chapter examines Russian perspectives on nuclear arms control and the difficult atmospherics in US-Russia relations, particularly resulting from the Russia-Ukraine war, and their implications for bilateral nuclear arms control. It reviews the issues that figure prominently in or will likely affect US-Russia negotiations, such as US and Russian nuclear arms, missile defense, long-range conventional strike, intermediate-range missiles, and 71

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third-country nuclear forces. Finally, the chapter examines the perspective of NATO allies, who will take a strong interest in US positions on these issues, particularly the question of nonstrategic nuclear weapons.

Russian Perspectives on Nuclear Arms Control: Difficult Atmospherics Moscow has shown interest since the late 1960s in constraining US nuclear forces that could strike Soviet or Russian territory, particularly in limits on strategic offensive nuclear forces. That underlays the Soviets’ approach to the first Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT), and they accepted the US position that strategic missile defenses should be constrained in parallel. The SALT process produced two agreements in 1972. The Interim Offensive Arms Agreement froze the number of US and Soviet intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) silos and submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM) launch tubes, but the Soviets did not succeed in limiting US forward-based systems that could strike Soviet territory from bases in Europe. The AntiBallistic Missile Treaty (ABM Treaty) prohibited the United States and Soviet Union from deploying nationwide antiballistic missile systems.1 The Soviets succeeded in constraining, and indeed eliminating, US intermediate-range missiles based in Europe in the 1987 IntermediateRange Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF Treaty), which provided for a worldwide ban on all US and Soviet intermediate-range missiles; that is, missiles with a range between 500 and 5,500 kilometers.2 However, the Ronald Reagan administration’s launch of the Strategic Defense Initiative, aimed at achieving a nationwide defense against a large-scale ballistic missile attack, raised significant concerns in Moscow.3 Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, constraining missile defenses became a major focus for Russian arms control negotiators, in particular after US withdrawal from the ABM Treaty in 2002. While the Russians in the past have shown strong interest in constraints on strategic offensive nuclear arms and have sought to limit missile defenses, they have shown little interest in arrangements that would constrain their nonstrategic nuclear weapons other than intermediate-range missiles. The Russian reluctance may be motivated in part by concerns about conventional force inferiorities vis-à-vis NATO and China, inferiorities that Russian nonstrategic nuclear weapons might offset. These interests likely will shape how Russian officials approach any future nuclear arms negotiation with the United States. Shortly after President Joe Biden took office in January 2021, US and Russian officials agreed to extend New START to February 2026. That continued the treaty’s three numerical limits—700 deployed ICBMs, SLBMs,

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and heavy bombers; 800 deployed and nondeployed ICBM launchers, SLBM launchers, and heavy bombers; and 1,550 deployed strategic warheads—as well as the treaty’s monitoring and verification provisions.4 Both countries seem to have maintained their strategic forces at or below those limits since they took full effect in 2018, as shown in the data exchange numbers from September 2022 (see Table 5.1). However, the lack of on-site inspections since 2020 lowers confidence that the sides adhere to the 1,550 deployed strategic warhead limit. At their June 2021 meeting in Geneva, Presidents Biden and Vladimir Putin agreed to build on the extension of New START by launching a strategic stability dialogue, picking up on earlier US-Russia discussions on strategic stability. They set the dialogue’s goals as “ensuring predictability in the strategic sphere, reducing the risk of armed conflicts and the threat of nuclear war.”5 In the fall of 2021, US and Russian officials characterized the dialogue as “intensive and substantive” and established working groups.6 However, in February 2022, one day after the Russian invasion of Ukraine began, the US government paused the dialogue.7 Both sides nevertheless made clear their interest in resuming at a future point. On June 2, 2022, Biden wrote that “our progress [on arms control] must continue beyond the New START extension. Even as we rally the world to hold Russia accountable for its brutal and unprovoked war on Ukraine, we must continue to engage Russia on issues of strategic stability.”8 On June 6, 2022, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Moscow was “interested in [such talks],” adding that “sooner or later we will need to return to this issue.”9 However, Russia declined later that summer to resume New START inspections, which had been suspended by mutual agreement in 2020 due to

Table 5.1

US and Russian Strategic Offensive Arms (as per the data exchange of September 1, 2022) United States

Deployed ICBMs, deployed SLBMs, and   deployed heavy bombers (limit = 700) Warheads on deployed ICBMs, on deployed   SLBMs, and nuclear warheads counted on   heavy bombers (limit = 1,550) Deployed and nondeployed launchers of ICBMs,   deployed and nondeployed launchers of SLBMs,   and deployed and nondeployed heavy bombers   (limit = 800)

Russia

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540

1,420

1,549

800

759

Source: “New START Treaty Aggregate Numbers of Strategic Offensive Arms.” Note: ICBMs: intercontinental ballistic missiles; SLBMs: submarine-launched ballistic missiles.

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Covid-19 concerns.10 The following November, Russian officials postponed a meeting of the Bilateral Consultative Commission, the body established by New START for addressing issues related to the treaty’s implementation.11 In January 2023, the State Department’s Report to Congress on Implementation of the New START Treaty stated that the US government could not certify that Russia was in compliance with New START’s terms, noting Russia’s failure to facilitate US inspections and its failure to convene a meeting of the Bilateral Consultative Commission. The report nevertheless assessed that “Russia was likely under the New START warhead limit at the end of 2022.”12 On February 21, 2023, Putin announced that Russia was “suspending its participation” in New START, citing the effort by the United States and NATO to ensure Russia’s defeat in its war against Ukraine.13 Putin sought to punish Washington for its support of Ukraine by disrupting the treaty. Russian officials subsequently indicated that Russia would continue to abide by the treaty’s three numerical limits.14 Still, the Russian position entailed two problems. First, New START makes no provision for suspension. Second, the more time that would pass without the data exchanges, notifications, and on-site inspections mandated by the treaty, the less confidence the United States would have that Russia is abiding by the treaty’s three numerical limits, the limit on deployed strategic warheads in particular (and vice versa). The atmospherics for convening a meeting of the Bilateral Consultative Commission to discuss New START’s full implementation or for a resumption of the dialogue on strategic stability questions will prove difficult. The US government has condemned Russia’s attack on Ukraine in the strongest terms, deployed additional combat troops to Europe, led a US–European Union effort that imposed heavy sanctions on the Russian economy, and provided defensive assistance, including heavy weapons, to Ukraine. The war severely strained relations at the top between Washington and Moscow. In the past, direct involvement of the US and Russian leaders has proven necessary to break arms control deadlocks, but bad blood between Biden and Putin could limit their possibility for direct engagement, especially now that the International Criminal Court has indicted Putin for war crimes. Another complicating factor could be Moscow’s rhetoric regarding nuclear weapons. Putin regularly refers to Russia’s nuclear arsenal; this appears due partially to his desire to project Russia as a great power, and that status depends heavily on the Russian nuclear arsenal. He and Russian officials have made nuclear threats before.15 And on February 27, 2022, Putin ordered a “special combat duty regime”—an alert—for Russian nuclear forces. Pentagon officials subsequently said they had seen no change in Russia’s nuclear posture.16 Putin continued nuclear saber-rattling later that year. On September 21, 2022, he said, “In the event of a threat to the territorial integrity to our

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country and to defend Russia and our people, we will certainly make use of all weapon systems available to us. This is not a bluff.”17 Nine days later, he stated, “We will defend our land with all the forces and resources we have.” He followed that with a reference to the nuclear strikes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 as having established a “precedent.”18 Such threats appeared to aim at intimidating both the West and Ukraine. However, Ukraine continued to resist, and the West continued its flow of support to Kyiv. Moreover, the nuclear saber-rattling raised concerns in other countries, including China. In October and November of 2022, Moscow attempted to lower the nuclear rhetoric.19 Still, Russian officials from time to time have continued to allude to the possible use of nuclear arms.

US and Russian Nuclear Arms The Biden administration early on made clear its desire to maintain “guardrails” to contain the competitive and adversarial aspects of the bilateral relationship. New START is one example of such guardrails. In 2021 and early 2022, Russian officials also appeared to value New START’s limits, even if they were concerned about the possible reversibility of conversion measures used by the US military to remove strategic systems from New START accountability. Looking beyond New START’s extension, the Biden administration made clear its desire to address all US and Russian nuclear weapons. In September 2021, Under Secretary of State Bonnie Jenkins stated that the United States sought “to capture new kinds of intercontinental-range nuclear delivery systems,” “to address all nuclear warheads,” including nonstrategic nuclear weapons, and “to retain limits” on Russian ICBMs, SLBMs, and heavy bombers after New START’s expiration in 2026.20 The United States currently is believed to have about 5,400 nuclear warheads, some 1,700 of which are retired and awaiting dismantlement, leaving 3,700 weapons in the active stockpile. Russia is believed to have about 6,000 nuclear warheads, with 1,500 retired and awaiting dismantlement, and some 4,500 in the active stockpile.21 The US desire to limit nonstrategic nuclear arms stems in part from the Russian numerical advantage in those weapons; Russia is believed to have some 1,900 nonstrategic nuclear warheads for air-, land-, and sea-based delivery systems, while about 200 US nuclear gravity bombs are considered nonstrategic (the United States has an advantage in nondeployed strategic nuclear warheads).22 Russian officials have shown no real interest in negotiating limits on nonstrategic nuclear arms, in part due to imbalances in conventional forces. They suggested the Russian military first had to complete its broad modernization program to close the gap with other countries in precision-guided

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conventional strike weapons.23 However, in September 2021, a senior official cast doubt on an inclusive “all warheads” approach to arms control for the foreseeable future, when he said, “As for [limiting] ‘all warheads,’ we believe that despite the importance of the subject of warheads as such, priority attention should still be given to delivery vehicles, that is, carriers. The position on non-strategic nuclear weapons in the form in which it is promoted by the Americans is unacceptable for us. We need to start with another one. And in general, the prospects for a conversation on this topic are more than vague.”24 In February 2022, a leaked Russian response to US ideas on arms control stressed the requirement that all nuclear weapons be based on national territory and that the infrastructure for US nuclear weapons in Europe be eliminated. It concluded, “Without eliminating this irritant [US nuclear weapons and infrastructure in Europe], discussion of the topic of nonstrategic nuclear weapons is impossible.”25 The Russian reference was to US nonstrategic nuclear weapons based on the territory of NATO member states. It is estimated that the US military maintains some 100 B61 nuclear gravity bombs in Europe under nuclearsharing arrangements for delivery, if necessary, by host government dualcapable aircraft as well as by US aircraft.26 Moscow used to claim that all its nuclear weapons were based on Russian territory. However, in February 2022, a controversial referendum in Belarus enacted changes to the Belarusian constitution that, among other things, would allow Belarus to host Russian military forces and nuclear weapons.27 In June 2022, Putin agreed to provide Belarus with dual-capable Iskander-M missiles.28 In March 2023 Putin stated that Russia would deploy nuclear warheads in Belarus for use by the Belarusian military, mimicking the nuclear-sharing arrangements that the United States has with certain NATO allies.29 Putin’s announcement, which came just four days after he and Chinese president Xi Jinping had issued a joint statement that, among other things, said nuclear arms should not be based in third countries, seemed mainly for show; the deployment of Russian nuclear weapons in Belarus would not increase the nuclear threat to Ukraine or NATO.30 In June 2023, Putin asserted that the first nuclear warheads had been placed in Belarus.31 The Russia-Ukraine war has also revealed a number of deficiencies in Russia’s conventional force capabilities that will likely make it even more difficult to reach agreements on nonstrategic nuclear weapons in any future negotiation. To the extent that Moscow believes it continues to lag behind NATO in conventional forces, Russian officials would be more reluctant to put nonstrategic nuclear arms on the negotiating table. Further, while Russian officials do not publicly discuss the need for nonstrategic nuclear weapons vis-à-vis China, and Moscow and Beijing currently enjoy warm relations, Russian strategists almost certainly understand that Russia will not be able to match the Chinese military in conventional forces.

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Even were Moscow prepared to negotiate on nonstrategic nuclear weapons, Russian negotiators would likely demand US concessions on other issues such as missile defense. Another difficult issue could be verification; limits on nuclear warheads in storage would require intrusive monitoring measures of a kind that the Russian military might be reluctant to accept (this also could be an issue for the United States and NATO allies). If Russian officials agreed to negotiate on nonstrategic nuclear arms, they would almost certainly continue to insist that all US and Russian nuclear weapons be based on national territory, while offering to remove their nuclear arms from Belarus, at least at the outset of any negotiation. That would have the effect of ending NATO’s long-standing nuclear-sharing arrangements, but changing assessments of Russian policy have increased the importance of maintaining European-based US nuclear weapons in the eyes of NATO allies. When the Senate gave its consent to ratification of New START in 2010, the resolution of ratification called for negotiations to “address the disparity between the non-strategic (tactical) nuclear weapons stockpiles” of Russia and the United States.32 The absence of such limits in any successor to New START could complicate the prospects for its ratification. Whether Moscow might be prepared to offer something on nonstrategic nuclear weapons, even just transparency measures, is not clear. Russian negotiators may be interested in trying to constrain nondeployed strategic nuclear warheads—that is, strategic nuclear warheads not mounted on deployed ICBMs and SLBMs—which New START does not limit. Nondeployed strategic nuclear warheads sit in storage sites, just as is the case for most, if not all, nonstrategic nuclear warheads. The US military is believed to have a numerical advantage in this category. Moreover, most US ICBMs and SLBMs were downloaded (i.e., they had some warheads removed to meet the New START limit on deployed strategic warheads); this gives the US military the potential to upload those missiles with additional warheads now in storage if the United States chose to exceed the deployed strategic warhead limit. This US numerical advantage may erode as Russia deploys more modern strategic ballistic missiles such as the multiple-warhead Yars ICBM.33 However, it would be difficult for Russian negotiators to put nondeployed strategic nuclear warheads on the table without also opening the negotiations to include nonstrategic nuclear warheads, which they would like to keep off the table. Were Moscow to return to the negotiating table, it would likely insist, as it has in the past, on a legally binding agreement, even though it may recognize the difficulty facing a US administration in securing a two-thirds vote in the Senate for consent to ratification of a treaty or even in getting simple majority votes in both houses of Congress for an executive agreement. If ratification of a treaty were to pose a challenge in the United States, less formal ways could limit strategic offensive forces such as parallel statements of

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unilateral policy to observe certain limits after New START expires. Such an approach elicited little interest in Moscow in 2001, when Putin insisted on a negotiation that resulted the next year in the Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty. Whether Moscow might accept something less than a treaty remains unknown. However, Russian acceptance of verification measures, particularly on-site inspections, on a basis other than a legally binding agreement would be a major—and surprising—change in Moscow’s position. One additional question concerns the treatment of the “exotic” new kinds of strategic offensive arms that Putin revealed in March 2018.34 Putin said these weapons had been developed to evade US missile defenses. The Russian government later indicated that the Avangard hypersonic boostglide vehicle would be subject to the limits of New START as an accountable warhead.35 In November 2019, for instance, it conducted an exhibit of the Avangard for US officials in the context of New START requirements. The Sarmat ICBM, a large heavy ballistic missile that may carry Avangards in the future, is captured by New START’s limits. The Kinzhal, an air-launched ballistic missile carried by a modified Mig-31, would appear to fall outside of New START’s limits, as the Mig31 does not qualify as a heavy bomber. Two other new weapons—the Burevestnik ground-launched nuclear-powered cruise missile and Poseidon nuclear-powered underwater drone, both of which will be nuclear armed— also fall outside of the treaty’s definitions. New START allows the sides to raise questions regarding new kinds of strategic offensive weapons in the Bilateral Consultative Commission, though the treaty does not specify how new kinds should be handled beyond that. If discussions in the Bilateral Consultative Commission resume, Russian officials may be prepared to discuss these systems, but they may seek concessions from the US side in return—perhaps on missile defense, which these systems, the Russians assert, were designed to defeat.

Missile Defense Russian interest in constraining US missile defenses dates back decades, and concern about its long-range precision-guided conventional strike systems goes back at least to the early 2000s. In December 2021, Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov described the Russian vision of a “new security equation,” in which particular attention would be paid to “nuclear and highprecision conventional systems that could be used in a counterforce strike” and missile defenses, given “the principle of the inseparable interrelationship between strategic offensive and strategic defensive arms.”36 Moscow sought, but failed, to constrain missile defenses in the negotiation of the New START Treaty (the treaty merely noted the interrelationship

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between strategic offense and defense in its preamble).37 Subsequently, Russian officials said they would require an agreement on missile defense. Russian officials have seemed as much or more concerned about the deployment of the US Navy’s SM-3 interceptors in Romania and Poland as about US ground-based interceptors (GBIs) deployed in Alaska and California. That is curious, as the GBIs were developed and deployed to intercept strategic ballistic missile warheads, while SM-3 Block IB interceptors in Romania and SM-3 Block IIA interceptors in Poland are intended to defend against intermediate-range ballistic missiles.38 Part of this Russian concern reflects Moscow’s unhappiness with any US or NATO military infrastructure on the territory of countries that joined the alliance after 1997. In 2011, Russian officials called for a “legal guarantee” that SM-3s deployed in Europe would not be directed against Russian ICBMs and for “objective criteria” regarding the number, velocity, and basing of those missile systems. Russian analysts explained this meant “non-deployment of tracking and interception instruments in certain areas, restrictions on the speed and effective range of interceptors, and limitation of the number of interceptors in defined areas.”39 Russian concerns include land-based Mk-41 launchers containing SM-3 missiles and navy ships deployed in Europe. Russian officials note that Mk41 launchers aboard warships carry a variety of missiles in addition to SM-3s and claim the United States could deploy similar offensive missiles, such as cruise missiles, in the Romania- and Poland-based Mk-41 launchers.40 US-Russian exploration of an agreement on a cooperative NATO-Russia missile defense broke down in the spring of 2011. While US and Russian officials reached agreement on the principles for missile defense cooperation, neither government was prepared to approve it.41 The Russian position on missile defense thereafter seemed to harden. In April 2013, Washington proposed an executive agreement on missile defense transparency under which the sides would annually exchange data regarding key components of their missile defense systems and projected numbers for each year looking out over a decade. Moscow did not respond to that proposal.42 While US officials argue that US missile defenses pose no serious threat to the ability of the large number of Russian ICBM and SLBM warheads that hold at risk targets in the United States, Russian government documents categorize US missile defenses as a threat. For example, the 2014 Russian Military Doctrine saw a risk of strategic missile defenses “undermining global stability and upsetting existing balances of forces in the nuclear and missile sphere.” The 2020 “Basic Principles of State Policy of the Russian Federation on Nuclear Deterrence” document reiterated that point, noting the critical importance of “being capable of inflicting guaranteed unacceptable damage on a potential adversary through employment of nuclear weapons in any circumstances.”43

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While Russia could overwhelm current numbers of US missile interceptors, the Russian military sees the possibility of the United States developing a robust missile defense program that could pose a threat in the future. The Next Generation Interceptor, an advanced GBI slated to be deployed by the end of the decade, may resolve problems experienced with current GBIs, which have had a mixed record in test flights. The Pentagon is also considering whether SM-3s and THAAD interceptor missiles could be configured to engage ICBM and SLBM warheads.44 In November 2020, the US Navy tested an SM-3 Block IIA interceptor from a ship and successfully engaged an ICBM warhead-class target. As of 2021, forty-seven US warships were ballistic missile defense capable, with the number expected to rise to sixty-five in fiscal year 2025.45 If the US Navy pursues this capability against ICBMs and its warships were properly placed, seabased SM-3 Block IIAs could pose a greater threat to Russian ICBM warheads than SM-3 Block IIAs in Poland. Uncertainties about the future course of US missile defense efforts will continue to concern Russian military officials. That said, Russia itself has pursued an increasingly active missile defense program. It includes the modernized A-135 system to defend Moscow against a strategic ballistic missile attack; S-300, S-350, and S-400 systems for intercepting shorterrange ballistic missiles as well as aircraft and cruise missiles; S-500 missile interceptors, capable of intercepting intermediate-range ballistic missile warheads and possibly strategic ballistic missile warheads; and the Nudol interceptor, believed intended to intercept warheads in space as well as satellites in low-earth orbit.46 As Russia bolsters its missile defense program, it also is expressing confidence that its new strategic offensive systems can defeat US missile defenses. For example, following the April 2022 test of the Sarmat ICBM, Putin said this new system “has the highest tactical and technical characteristics and is capable of overcoming all modern means of anti-missile defense.”47 In these circumstances, might Moscow’s interest in using arms control to constrain missile defenses wane? That would be a notable evolution in the Russian position, particularly as expressed over the past decade. Russian officials have not detailed a specific approach for limiting missile defenses, which raises questions about the depth of their concern and whether Russia’s own missile defense developments might lead them to seek something less than legally binding treaty limits. Still, at the outset of a future negotiation, Moscow likely would insist that a new agreement mandating reductions in US and Russian nuclear forces below those required by New START be accompanied by an agreement regarding missile defense. The seriousness of that insistence, and whether an agreement would need to be legally binding, would have to be tested in an actual negotiation.

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Long-Range Conventional Strike Russian officials and analysts have long expressed concern about US longrange precision-guided conventional strike systems, including conventionally armed sea- and air-launched cruise missiles. The US military has used these capabilities extensively over the past thirty years. The large numbers of these systems, their increasing accuracy, and past US interest in conventional prompt global strike systems have fueled Russian concerns. In June 2013, Putin noted the development “of high-precision conventional weapons systems that in their [the United States’] strike capabilities could come close to strategic nuclear weapons.”48 Some Russian nongovernmental experts even postulated a scenario in which the United States would launch a large-scale attack on Russian ICBMs, other strategic forces, and key command centers using only conventionally armed cruise missiles— sometimes referred to as “strategic conventional weapons”—on the assumption that Russia might not respond with nuclear weapons.49 (Other Russian experts disputed this, and it appears to be a dubious assumption on its face.) Over the past decade, the Russian military has deployed its own longrange precision-guided conventional and dual-capable strike missiles. These include the Kh-101, Kh-102, and Kh-50 air-launched cruise missiles, the Kinzhal hypersonic air-launched missile, the Kalibr sea-launched cruise missile, and the 9M729 ground-launched cruise missile. The Russian military first demonstrated a number of these air- and sea-launched weapons in combat in Syria and later in Ukraine.50 Russia’s 2014 Military Doctrine advanced the idea of non-nuclear deterrence as a component of deterrence along with nuclear deterrence and nonmilitary deterrence. The doctrine suggested that Russian conventional strike systems could conduct missions that previously required nonstrategic nuclear weapons. This coincided with Russia’s development of long-range precision-guided conventional strike capabilities seeking to match those of the US Navy and Air Force.51 This raised a possibility that, as Russia’s military began to catch up in terms of conventional strike capabilities, Moscow’s interest in constraining such systems might decline. However, there is no evidence to suggest this. Moreover, the performance of Russian conventional systems against Ukraine has seemed to fall short. One month into the war, US officials asserted that the failure rate of Russian strike missiles could be as high as 50 or 60 percent, depending on the type.52 Pentagon officials subsequently noted the Russians’ use of “dumb” bombs and speculated that the Russian military might have used up a significant portion of its stock of precision-guided weapons.53 If these observations are correct and Russia continues to lag behind the United States in long-range precision-guided conventional strike capabilities, Moscow could be expected to continue to press for constraints on such

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systems in a bid to reduce the US advantage. That said, Russian officials have not yet put forward concrete ideas on how they would limit these systems—or any subset such as hypersonic weapons. Such limits would invariably entail complex verification problems. For example, how should Tomahawk and Kalibr sea-launched cruise missiles be counted? Both sides’ navies would be reluctant to accept monitoring measures that would require disclosing weapon loads on individual warships.

Intermediate-Range Missiles In August 2019, the Donald Trump administration withdrew from the 1987 INF Treaty, citing Russia’s violation of the treaty by developing and deploying a prohibited ground-launched cruise missile, the 9M729. The US military subsequently tested ground-launched cruise and ballistic missiles to intermediate ranges.54 Following the INF Treaty’s demise, Putin offered a moratorium under which Russia would not deploy ground-launched intermediate-range missiles in Europe, provided that the United States showed similar restraint. NATO dismissed the proposal as not credible because Russia had already deployed 9M729 missile systems in Europe in violation of the INF Treaty.55 In October 2020, Putin reiterated the offer, saying Russia was prepared to consider verification provisions and would “continue not to deploy 9M729 missiles in the European part of the territory of Russia.”56 Putin has expressed concern about the prospect of US missiles being deployed to Europe, including to Ukraine—where he said in December 2021 they would be on “our doorstep.”57 In responding to Russian-proposed draft USRussia and NATO-Russia agreements, US and NATO officials in January 2022 indicated their readiness to discuss “reciprocal, verifiable limits on missiles in Europe,” but those exchanges ended when Russia invaded Ukraine the following month.58 The prospect of new ground-launched US missiles, even if conventionally armed only, appears to concern senior Russian ranks. Moscow may believe US missiles would offset whatever advantage it might hope to secure by deploying Russian intermediate-range missiles in Europe. In discussing future possible US-Russian arms negotiations, Russian officials might well reiterate the moratorium proposal or propose an agreement to prohibit the deployment of intermediate-range missiles in Europe, perhaps again including the 9M729 (without conceding that it was a violation of the INF Treaty). Concern about Russia’s violation of the INF Treaty would cast a shadow on such an offer, as would skepticism among NATO allies. Much might turn on the kind of verification measures that Moscow could accept and how it would address concerns that the mobility and range of intermediate-range

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missiles based east of the Ural Mountains would still be a threat to Europe. Moreover, any proposed arrangement would have to capture the 9M729.

Third-Country Nuclear Forces When it comes to the question of limits on third-country nuclear forces, Washington focuses on China, while Moscow’s attention centers on France and Britain. China, France, and Britain are believed to have 410, 290, and 225 total nuclear warheads respectively.59 In March 2021, London decided to raise its self-imposed nuclear warhead cap to 260, citing concerns about Russia (including Russian missile defenses), a decision that elicited a strong negative reaction from Moscow.60 The Pentagon believes that China is embarking on a major expansion of its nuclear forces and that it could have as many as 1,500 nuclear warheads by 2035.61 The Trump administration sought to bring China into US-Russian nuclear arms negotiations. However, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov firmly rejected pressuring Beijing, stating: They [the Chinese] said their strategic nuclear forces were incomparable to those of Russia and the United States, and they saw no reason to participate in such talks. We told the Americans that the Chinese had determined their position and we respect it. If Washington considers engaging China in talks to be crucial, it should speak with Beijing. . . . In theory, we are ready to discuss multilateral approaches, but in this case, France and the United Kingdom should also participate.62

The Biden administration would like to limit Chinese nuclear forces, though it appears this would be separate from a bilateral US-Russia negotiation. However, “the Chinese are very resistant to any sorts of conversations about restraints or arms control on their nuclear programs,” a State Department official noted in December 2021.63 In June 2020, Ryabkov stressed the importance of including Britain and France, saying that “as an essential element of our position on the future of nuclear arms control, we insist that the United States’ closest NATO allies possessing nuclear weapons should join these hypothetical talks.”64 Ryabkov went on to note that US and Russian reductions below New START’s limits would be possible only if third-country nuclear forces were considered. Moscow has long sought to constrain British and French nuclear forces. If negotiations with the United States were to get under way, Russian officials almost certainly would raise the issue of Britain and France, particularly if US officials pressed for reductions in US and Russian nuclear weapons levels. The expected increase in Chinese nuclear force

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numbers undoubtedly concerns the Kremlin as well, and the Russians would not object to constraints on China. Putin has suggested that a moratorium on intermediate-range missiles could apply to the Asia Pacific region and could be the subject of discussion among “all interested states.”65 However, given Moscow’s relationship with Beijing, Russian officials would leave efforts to bring China into the nuclear arms control process to their American counterparts. While Russian officials have indicated that British and French nuclear forces should be considered in a future negotiation, they have not explained how they would involve those two countries (or China). Given that the US and Russian nuclear arsenals each currently contain between eleven and twenty times as many weapons as the arsenals of China, France, and Britain, it is difficult to see a single treaty covering all five. It is most unlikely that either Washington or Moscow would be prepared to reduce to the levels of the other countries; nor would they be prepared to legitimize an increase to their levels. London, Paris, and Beijing presumably would not accept a proposal for unequal limits.

NATO Perspectives on Nuclear Arms Control Nuclear weapons play a key role in NATO’s deterrence and defense posture. NATO considers strategic forces, especially US strategic forces, to be the ultimate guarantor of the alliance’s security. While NATO regularly reiterates its commitment to further reduce nuclear arms on a reciprocal basis, the alliance also regularly makes clear that “as long as nuclear weapons exist, NATO will remain a nuclear alliance.”66 British and French nuclear forces also contribute to alliance security. Britain currently is believed to have a total of 120 nuclear warheads operationally available for use on Trident D5 missiles on four Vanguard-class ballistic missile submarines, each of which carries eight missiles with a total of no more than forty warheads (the submarines can carry up to sixteen missiles each, and Trident D5s can carry up to eight warheads each). In June 2021, the British government announced that, instead of reducing its nuclear arsenal to 180 warheads, it had set a new ceiling of 260. The British navy plans to replace its four current submarines with four Dreadnought-class submarines, each of which will be able to carry up to twelve missiles.67 British nuclear forces are committed to the defense of NATO, and Britain participates in the Nuclear Planning Group, the alliance’s senior body for discussing nuclear weapons policy issues.68 France currently is believed to have an arsenal of 240 ballistic missile warheads for its SLBMs. The French navy has four Triomphant-class ballistic missile submarines, each of which can carry up to twelve SLBMs. In

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addition, French Strategic Air and Naval Aviation pilots fly Rafael aircraft that can carry nuclear-armed air-launched cruise missiles.69 Unlike Britain, France’s nuclear forces are not committed to NATO, and France does not participate in the Nuclear Planning Group. NATO allies have traditionally supported US-Russia nuclear arms control efforts, though allies have had different interests in doing so. At the June 2021 summit, NATO leaders welcomed the agreement to extend the New START Treaty and added that allies “will welcome new strategic talks between the United States and Russia on future arms control measures, taking into account all Allies’ security.”70 NATO’s 2022 Strategic Concept, released at the alliance’s June 2022 summit, reiterated that “arms control, disarmament, and non-proliferation strongly contribute to the Alliance’s objectives.”71 However, likely reflecting concerns about Russia’s poor track record of compliance with previous agreements and the current absence of an arms control dialogue with Moscow, the document focused on risk reduction and confidence-building measures as well as effective conflict management rather than negotiated limits and reductions.72 NATO and European officials criticized Russia’s decision to suspend its participation in New START. NATO secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg called on Moscow to reconsider its decision.73 The president of the NATO Parliamentary Assembly termed the suspension “deeply disappointing and reckless.”74 While generally supportive, allied views regarding US-Russia arms control are not uniform in every respect. Most NATO allies will continue to support a revival of New START and continuing the strategic stability dialogue, particularly as Biden has indicated US interest in resuming that dialogue at some point, though some allies may express skepticism about any negotiations with Moscow. For many allies, support for arms control traditionally has been a politically necessary complement to NATO’s reiteration of its deterrence and defense posture—and particularly of its stance on nuclear weapons. While supportive of US efforts, allies will take a strong interest in the details of US positions, and regular US consultations within NATO will be essential for maintaining allied support for any future bilateral negotiations. This would be matched by intensive discussions on the future of any NATO-Russia arms control initiatives. A 2021 survey of experts from ten NATO European members, both governmental and nongovernmental, confirmed support for bilateral US-Russian nuclear arms negotiations accompanied by close consultations within NATO. However, the same survey also indicated that gaining consensus on any NATO arms control initiatives would be difficult for the foreseeable future.75 Russia’s war with Ukraine and nuclear rhetoric have increased the level of mistrust between NATO members and Moscow to new heights, which will mean that any future US-Russia agreement that affects NATO interests (as almost any nuclear arms agreement would) will receive close scrutiny

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from allies. While NATO members in Central and Eastern Europe traditionally have taken more skeptical views of Russian intentions, that skepticism now seems more widely shared. In any future US-Russia negotiation, NATO members, particularly allies on the alliance’s eastern flank, would want the United States to secure limits on, reductions in, and transparency regarding Russian nonstrategic nuclear arms, including on systems such as the Iskander missile, which has a range of approximately 500 kilometers and is being deployed in significant numbers. Any agreement limiting or reducing nonstrategic nuclear warheads would require intrusive verification measures. It is not clear NATO allies have thought through the complexities that such measures would entail with respect to Russian verification of any nonstrategic nuclear warhead limits on NATO member territories.76 Allies on the eastern flank regard the presence of US nuclear bombs in Europe as essential to NATO’s deterrence posture and as a signal of US commitment to their defense; they thus would staunchly oppose a Russian demand that all nuclear weapons be based on national territory.77 A Russian offer to end the deployment of Russian nuclear weapons in Belarus likely would not affect those allies’ views on retaining US nuclear bombs in Europe. Given Russian actions in 2022 and 2023, that opposition and the desire to preserve nuclear sharing now extends well beyond Central and Eastern Europe. In the past, political leaders in key allied countries, including those hosting US nuclear weapons, have expressed interest in discussing options for having those weapons withdrawn back to the United States. Russia’s seizure and annexation of Crimea in 2014 slowed such calls, and its 2022 invasion of Ukraine has dimmed such views even further. For example, in the spring of 2020 in Germany, the Social Democratic Party (SPD—the junior coalition partner) postponed a Bundestag vote on a proposal to purchase F/A-18 Super Hornets to replace aging Tornado fighter-bombers and sustain the German air force’s nuclear delivery capability. SPD parliamentary group leader Rolf Mützenich said that “the time has come for Germany to rule out future stationing [of US nuclear weapons].”78 However, in March 2022, soon after Russia began its assault on Ukraine, a German government led by an SPD chancellor announced that it would purchase F-35 fighters to sustain the nuclear delivery role.79 If the United States attempted but failed to secure Russian agreement to address nonstrategic nuclear weapons, NATO allies would support a US negotiating approach that covered only US and Russian strategic offensive forces. Their key concern would be that an agreement not leave US strategic forces inferior to those of Russia. However, the appetite for covering more than Russia’s strategic arsenal would likely endure. Many allies will remain dubious about the Russian proposal for a moratorium on deploying US and Russian intermediate-range missiles in Europe. Allies are skeptical of a regional approach, as mobile land-based missile sys-

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tems with considerable range could be relocated from east of the Ural Mountains to Europe without great difficulty.80 That said, the two draft agreements proposed by Russia in December 2021, a bilateral US-Russia treaty and a NATO-Russia agreement, included a reiteration of the moratorium proposal. In January 2022, leaked US and NATO responses indicated interest in US-Russia discussions on intermediate-range missiles.81 Verification and reciprocity would nonetheless remain central concerns within NATO. Moscow in the past tried to include British and French nuclear forces in bilateral US-Soviet negotiations, including in the early 1980s negotiation that produced the INF Treaty. In that case, the United States, Britain, France, and NATO as a whole staunchly rejected Soviet efforts to include or secure compensation for British and French nuclear forces. That approach retains solid support at NATO. That said, London has shown sensitivity to US-Russian nuclear arms negotiations. Following conclusion of the New START Treaty in 2010, the British government in 2011 said it would cut the number of its nuclear warheads to no more than 180 by the middle of the following decade.82 (As noted, the British government in 2021 raised its warhead cap to 260.) In 2007, British foreign secretary Margaret Beckett suggested London at some point would be prepared “willingly” to do its part in nuclear arms control. That sentiment has been maintained through the years, with ongoing work on warhead transparency through the UK-Norway Initiative, the Quad Nuclear Verification Partnership, and Britain’s contributions to the International Partnership for Nuclear Disarmament Verification (IPNDV). By contrast, in France, where the nuclear deterrent has broader political support, the government appears to see no place for its nuclear forces in arms control negotiations, at least not for the foreseeable future.83 France participates in dialogue in the UN Security Council Permanent Five, along with Britain, and in nuclear warhead transparency efforts, including the IPNDV and the Franco-German Nuclear Disarmament Verification experiments, but it continues to reject the idea that it needs to go further than its current posture of strict sufficiency regarding its deterrent.

Conclusion While senior US and Russian officials in the first half of 2022 reiterated their interest in discussing strategic stability issues, Moscow’s decision to suspend its participation in New START, the last bilateral agreement limiting US and Russian nuclear arms, has cast a cloud over the prospects for future dialogue. Resuming that dialogue may not prove easy, particularly as Russian officials seem to condition a change in their view regarding New START and further stability discussions on Washington cutting its support for Ukraine, a demand to which Washington will not accede.

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Even when—or if—US and Russian officials resume discussions, getting from that point to actual negotiations will prove difficult given the different priorities that Washington and Moscow attach to dealing with issues such as missile defense, nonstrategic nuclear weapons, and conventionally armed precision-guided strike systems. Finding a formula that balances the two sides’ desires would be difficult even in a time of good USRussia relations, let alone in the current situation. Moreover, that discussion would take place against a backdrop of a sizable buildup of Chinese nuclear weapons. Further, US officials would be consulting with and would factor in the views of NATO (and other allies) whose security interests would be impacted by US negotiating positions and any resulting agreements. This suggests that future US-Russia bilateral exchanges on nuclear arms and related issues, when or if they occur, will prove more complex than previous bilateral negotiations.

Notes The author is grateful to William Alberque, Andrey Baklitskiy, Oliver Meier, Victor Mizin, Pavel Podvig, Nikolai Sokov, and Andrei Zagorski for comments received on drafts of this chapter. The author is solely responsible for its contents. 1. Newhouse, Cold Dawn. 2. “The Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty at a Glance.” 3. US Department of State Archives, “Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), 1983.” 4. US Department of State, “New START Treaty.” 5. White House, “U.S.-Russia Presidential Joint Statement on Strategic Stability.” 6. Department of State, Office of the Spokesperson, “Joint Statement on the Outcomes of the U.S.-Russia Strategic Stability Dialogue in Geneva on September 30.” 7. Gordon and Salama, “U.S. Halts Arms-Control Talks with Russia.” 8. Biden, “Message from the President on ACA’s 50th Anniversary.” 9. “Russia Interested in Nuclear Arms Talks with U.S.” 10. “Russia Halts US Inspections on Nuclear Arsenal Under New START Treaty.” 11. Bugos, “Russia Delays Meeting on New START.” 12. US Department of State, Report to Congress on Implementation of the New START Treaty. 13. Isachenkov, “Russia Suspends Only Remaining Nuclear Treaty with U.S.” 14. Trevelyan and Cordell, “Russia Says It Will Play by Nuclear Treaty Rules Despite Suspending Deal with U.S.” 15. “Are Vladimir Putin’s Nuclear Threats a Bluff?” 16. Sevastopulo and Quino, “Putin Puts World on Alert with High-Stakes Nuclear Posturing.” 17. Office of the President of Russia, “Address by the President of the Russian Federation.” 18. Office of the President of Russia, “Signing of Treaties of Accession of the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics and Zaporozhye and Kherson Regions to Russia.” 19. Pifer, “The Kremlin Tones Down the Nuclear Rhetoric.” 20. Jenkins, “Nuclear Arms Control: A New Era?”

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21. The active stockpiles of both sides include deployed strategic warheads on ICBMs and SLBMs, reserve strategic warheads in storage, and nonstrategic warheads that are generally thought to not be mounted on delivery systems and kept in storage. 22. “Status of World Nuclear Forces.” 23. Hudson and Buzhinski, “Influences on Russian Policy and Possibilities for Reduction in Non-Strategic Nuclear Weapons,” 192. 24. “Ryabkov Said that the U.S. Position on the Inclusion of Non-Strategic Nuclear Weapons in Future Agreements Is Unacceptable for the Russian Federation.” 25. “Russia Will Be Forced to Respond, Including with the Implementation of Military-Technical Measures.” 26. Kristensen and Korda, “United States Nuclear Weapons, 2021,” 43–63. 27. “Belarus Approves Hosting Nuclear Weapons, Russian Forces Permanently.” 28. “Putin Promises Belarus Nuclear-Capable Missiles to Counter ‘Aggressive’ West.” 29. “Putin: Russia to Station Nuclear Weapons in Belarus.” 30. Pifer, “Russian Nukes in Belarus—Much Ado About Little?” 31. “First Nuclear Warheads Already in Belarus, Putin Claims,” EuroradioFM, June 18, 2023. 32. “Treaty with Russia on Measures for Further Reduction and Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms.” 33. “RS-24 Yars.” 34. Hruby, “Russia’s New Nuclear Weapons Delivery Systems, an Open-Source Technical Review.” 35. “Foreign Ministry: Sarmat, Avangard Systems may be Included in New START Treaty.” 36. Ryabkov, “Russia’s Non-Proliferation Policy and Global Strategic Security.” 37. Gottemoeller, Negotiating the New START Treaty, 93–94, 115–117, 123–126. 38. The SM-3 Block IB and IIA interceptors, if launched from Romania and Poland, would have to “chase” Russian ICBMs launched toward the United States. They lack the velocity to catch and engage warheads carried by those ICBMs. 39. Trubnikov et al, “Problems and Prospects of Russia’s Cooperation with U.S./NATO in the Field of Missile Defense.” 40. Detsch, “Putin’s Fixation with an Old-School U.S. Missile Launcher.” 41. Author’s conversations with US and Russian officials, May 2011. 42. Pifer, “Nuclear Arms Control Choices for the Next Administration,” 14–15. 43. “Military Doctrine of the Russian Federation”; “Basic Principles of State Policy of the Russian Federation on Nuclear Deterrence,” 18. 44. Baklitskiy, Cameron, and Pifer, “Missile Defense and the Offense-Defense Relationship,” 17–18. 45. Congressional Research Service, “Navy Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD) Program.” 46. Baklitskiy, Cameron, and Pifer, “Missile Defense and the Offense-Defense Relationship,” 13–14. 47. Trevelyan, “Russia Tests Nuclear-Capable Missile that Putin Calls the World’s Best.” 48. Acton, “Conventional Prompt Global Strike and Russia’s Nuclear Forces.” 49. Author’s conversations with Russian scholars, Moscow, June 2010. When the author raised this concern with US Strategic Command officers in August 2010, they expressed doubt that US conventionally armed cruise missiles had the explosive force to disable hardened Russian ICBM silos. 50. Bosbotinis, “‘Fire for Effect.’” 51. ven Bruusgaard, “Russian Strategic Deterrence,” 11–15.

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52. Stewart, “Exclusive: U.S. Assesses Up to 60% Failure Rate for Some Russian Missiles.” 53. Jackson, “Russia’s Guided-Missile Shortage Has Been Deadly for Ukraine’s Citizens.” 54. Woolf, U.S. Withdrawal from the INF Treaty. 55. Peel and Foy, “NATO Rejects Russian Offer on Nuclear Missiles Freeze.” 56. President of Russia, “Statement by Vladimir Putin on Additional Steps to De-escalate the Situation in Europe.” 57. A. Roth, “Putin Accuses West of ‘Coming with Missiles to Our Doorstep.’” 58. Deveraux, “Why Intermediate-Range Missiles Are a Focal Point in the Ukraine Crisis.” 59. “Status of World Nuclear Forces.” 60. “Russia Warns UK Nuclear Arsenal Plan Harms Global Security.” 61. Lieberman, “China Could Have 1,500 Nuclear Warheads by 2035.” 62. “Lavrov Says No Plans to Force China into Arms Talks.” 63. O’Connor, “China Won’t Talk Arms Control with U.S. on Earth, Biden Seeks a Deal in Space.” 64. “Russia’s Priority Is to Involve UK, France in Future Nuclear Arms Control Talks.” 65. “Russia’s Missile Moratorium Proposal Still on the Table, Says Putin.” 66. “NATO 2022 Strategic Concept,” 1. 67. Kristensen and Korda, “United Kingdom Nuclear Weapons, 2021,” 153–158. 68. Bond, “Bridging the Channel, the UK Nuclear Deterrent and Its Role in European Security.” 69. Kristensen and Korda, “French Nuclear Forces, 2019,” 51–55. 70. “Brussels Summit Communiqué Issued by the Heads of State and Government Participating in the Meeting of the North Atlantic Council in Brussels, 14 June 2021,” para. 45. 71. “NATO 2022 Strategic Concept,” 8. 72. Alberque, “The New NATO Strategic Concept and the End of Arms Control.” 73. “NATO’s Stoltenberg: World More Dangerous with Russia Suspending START Treaty.” 74. “NATO PA President on Russia’s Suspension of New START.” 75. Pomper et al., “Everything Counts,” 52. 76. Ibid., 53, 57–58. 77. Congressional Research Service, “Nonstrategic Nuclear Weapons,” 37–38. 78. Gruell and Brzozowski, “SPD Leadership Reignites German Debate on U.S. Nuclear Weapons.” 79. Sprenger, “Germany to Buy F-35 Warplanes for Nuclear Deterrence.” 80. Pomper et al., “Everything Counts,” 53. 81. Aza and Gonzalez, “U.S. Offered Disarmament Measures to Russia in Return for De-escalation of Military Threat in Ukraine.” 82. “Reduction in UK Nuclear Warheads Begins.” 83. Arbatov, Acton, and Dvorkin, “Prospects for Engaging the United Kingdom and France in Nuclear Arms Control.”

6 China Phillip C. Saunders

THIS CHAPTER EXPLORES ARMS CONTROL IN ASIA, WITH A PARTICular focus on the People’s Republic of China (PRC). It surveys China’s positions across the nuclear, chemical, biological, missile, space, and cyber arenas and reviews Beijing’s record of compliance with its commitments. It also explores China’s ongoing nuclear force modernization and expansion. The chapter examines North Korea’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD), the failure of nonproliferation tools to restrain those programs, and the impact on Japan and South Korea. It concludes with a review of current challenges and opportunities for arms control in Asia and the potential impact of these developments on global arms control efforts.

China’s Entry into the Global Nonproliferation Regime China has had a peculiar relationship with the international arms control and nonproliferation regime due to its isolated position during the early Cold War. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) defeated the Republic of China (ROC) military in 1949, but the ROC government retreated to Taiwan and claimed to govern all China. China’s intervention in the Korean War led the United States to back the ROC claim, allowing it to continue to fill the Chinese seat in the United Nations and on the UN Security Council until 1971. Even after the PRC conducted its first nuclear weapons test in 1964, it remained excluded from key international institutions. As a revolutionary power at odds with the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), PRC leaders regarded nuclear weapons as an important means for developing countries to protect themselves against the two superpowers. China’s rapprochement with Washington in the early 1970s, 91

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based on common concerns about Soviet expansionism, turned the United States into an advocate for Beijing’s integration into global institutions. As Chinese officials and scholars learned more about the key treaties, organizations, and norms that make up the arms control and nonproliferation regime by participating in UN activities, they reevaluated China’s interests as a nuclear weapons state and emerging major power. Other major countries welcomed China’s participation in the international system, allowing China to accede to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) as a nuclear weapons state. The United States played an important role in this process in the 1980s and 1990s by combining education and persuasion, economic and technology incentives for joining key organizations and regimes, and pressure, including through economic sanctions.1 China staked out its initial nuclear policy positions from outside the nonproliferation regime. The CCP’s 1958 guidelines for developing nuclear weapons couched the decision in terms of defending peace, saving mankind from a nuclear holocaust, and facilitating agreement on nuclear disarmament and complete abolition of nuclear weapons. China’s goal was to deter nuclear coercion, especially from the United States, rather than to seek coercive advantage or strive for deterrence based on parity of forces. As such, it focused on developing nuclear and thermonuclear weapons with high yields and long-range delivery systems while eschewing tactical nuclear weapons.2 Beijing’s statement after its 1964 test committed China to the principle of no-first use of nuclear weapons and to the ultimate goals of global nuclear disarmament and the abolition of nuclear weapons.3 China’s development of nuclear weapons occurred at a time when the US-Soviet arms race was accelerating. For decades, China’s leaders would be satisfied with a modest force of nuclear intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) focused on the United States and the Soviet Union and shorter-range systems aimed at regional nuclear powers such as India (which tested its own nuclear device in 1974). This reflected the CCP leadership’s belief that the possibility of even a few nuclear weapons striking an adversary’s homeland was sufficient to deter nuclear threats. Accordingly, a small arsenal at a low level of readiness was deemed sufficient. Retaliation need not be rapid, but must be assured.4 This nuclear posture was consistent with China’s technological and financial limitations and differentiated China from the two superpowers. Chinese statements highlighted its responsible posture and called on the United States and Soviet Union to restrain their arms buildup, adopt a no-first use policy, and work toward the goal of nuclear disarmament.5 As the superpowers explored the possibilities of nuclear arms control in the 1960s and 1970s, China faced international pressure to participate in an atmospheric test ban, which might have constrained China’s weapons development.6 However, most antinuclear sentiment focused on the expanding US and Soviet arsenals, which were kept on high alert and reaching a

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size that could produce planet-wide consequences in the event of a nuclear war. The smaller size and relaxed posture of China’s nuclear forces helped insulate Beijing from pressure to limit testing or participate in arms limitation talks. After joining the United Nations in 1971, the PRC began to participate in multilateral discussions about disarmament, learning how the nonproliferation regime worked, and espousing China’s preferred approach to nuclear disarmament. China’s approach centered on its commitment to no-first use and the ultimate goal of nuclear disarmament. However, CCP leaders recognized that the superpowers would not readily give up their nuclear weapons, so in the interim China would need to maintain an arsenal for self-defense and strive to be a more “responsible” nuclear power than the superpowers. Beijing refused to sign the NPT in 1968 due to its discriminatory nature—it divided the world into nuclear haves and have-nots—and an emphasis on equal treatment and opposition to double standards have remained important pillars of China’s policy. However, as Deng Xiaoping’s reform and opening-up policy took hold in the 1980s and China established more normal relations with its neighbors, its attitude toward proliferation began to shift. China reduced its criticism of the discriminatory nature of the NPT and committed itself to a “three no’s” nonproliferation policy—no advocating, encouraging, or engaging in proliferation of nuclear weapons.7 China’s decision to accede to the NPT highlights how integration into global institutions and economy changed Beijing’s incentives and attitude toward arms control and nonproliferation. China sought nuclear power technology from the United States, but US officials made clear that NPT membership would be necessary for full implementation of the 1985 USChina nuclear cooperation agreement. China joined the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in 1984 and signed a safeguards agreement in 1989, but it did not join the NPT until 1992, after the Cold War ended and the superpowers began to engage in more serious nuclear disarmament efforts. Beijing’s desire to influence international rules and norms, and potential economic and technology benefits were also factors.8 A similar confluence of motives led China to join the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention (BTWC) in 1984, to participate in negotiations and sign the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) in 1993, and to join the Zangger Committee for coordinating nuclear export controls in 1997 and the Nuclear Supplier’s Group in 2004. The BTWC and CWC both called for complete elimination of whole classes of biological and chemical weapons, a goal that accorded with China’s preferred principles of disarmament and non-discriminatory treatment. The CWC included declarations and inspections that clashed with China’s reluctance to provide details about its military capabilities, but China was able to negotiate satisfactory terms and agreed to join the CWC.

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China’s exports of ballistic missiles and missile technology became a contentious issue in US-China relations in the 1980s and 1990s. The Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR) placed limits on sales of ballistic and cruise missiles systems and related technologies that could be used to deliver nuclear weapons; the MTCR and its annex call for a “strong presumption of denial” of systems that can deliver a 500-kilogram payload over a distance of 300 kilometers.9 China had several issues with the MTCR. It explicitly discriminates between missile suppliers and developing country purchasers and covers dual-use technology with military applications unrelated to WMD delivery, as demonstrated by China’s development and deployment of accurate conventional ballistic and cruise missiles.10 Exports of missiles and missile technology were also a lucrative business for Chinese defense companies. In the face of US diplomatic pressure and sanctions, China eventually committed to adhere to MTCR restrictions, but used loopholes to continue some exports. This was the area where the gap between China’s stated nonproliferation commitments and its compliance was widest.11 Economic factors were not prominent in China’s decision to sign the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) in 1996, but prospects for progress on disarmament and a desire to shape the treaty to protect China’s security interests played important roles. China had opposed a test ban treaty unconnected to nuclear disarmament, but Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s announcement of a nuclear test moratorium in 1985 changed the political environment. China voluntarily ended atmospheric testing in 1986 and began to participate in international discussions about test ban verification. Prospects for a CTBT improved when Congress mandated a US moratorium on testing in 1992 and directed the executive branch to seek a multilateral test ban treaty.12 China actively participated in CTBT negotiations while continuing work to complete its next-generation nuclear warhead designs. The negotiations took several years, with China advocating provisions to allow peaceful nuclear explosions and seeking restrictions on monitoring using national technical means. Pressure gradually mounted on China and France as both continued to conduct nuclear weapons tests. China made significant compromises that allowed the treaty to be finalized and signed in 1996. It is not clear whether Chinese nuclear weapons laboratories were able to complete all their desired tests before this deadline, so the extent to which the CTBT constrains Chinese nuclear modernization is uncertain.13 By 1998, US and Chinese officials could cite several significant arms control and nonproliferation achievements. These included indefinite extension of the NPT in May 1995, the entry into force of the CWC in April 1997, successful negotiation and signing of the CTBT in September 1998, and a coordinated response to Indian and Pakistani nuclear tests in May

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1998.14 China was an active participant in the negotiations and diplomacy that produced these accomplishments. This would prove to be the high-water mark of US-China arms control and nonproliferation cooperation. The George W. Bush administration was skeptical about the value of arms control and viewed China as a strategic competitor rather than a partner. It signed a nuclear energy cooperation agreement with India without obtaining an Indian commitment to sign the CTBT, leaving China committed to a nuclear test moratorium while a nuclear rival continued weapons development outside the NPT and CTBT framework.15 The Bush administration withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM Treaty) in June 2002, ending constraints on US ballistic missile defense (BMD) development. Although the administration insisted that BMD was aimed at Iran and North Korea, some US experts who later became senior administration officials privately told Chinese officials that US BMD systems should also be able to defeat Chinese ICBMs.16 The breakdown of the Cold War arms control framework further reduced Beijing’s interest in cooperation with Washington. The 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) and its successor, the 2011 New START Treaty, placed numerical limits on US and Russian ICBMs and deployed warheads, providing a degree of certainty about China’s strategic environment. The ABM Treaty had placed limits on BMD development and deployment, a matter of great importance given China’s smaller nuclear arsenal. Chinese experts now worried that US advances in missile defense capabilities, combined with sophisticated conventional precision-guided munitions, could threaten China’s nuclear deterrent.17 China had also benefited from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF Treaty), which prohibited US and Russian deployments of nuclear and conventional ground-launched missiles with ranges of 500 to 5,500 kilometers while leaving China free to deploy unlimited quantities of these missiles.18 The Donald Trump administration withdrew from the INF Treaty in August 2019, citing concerns about Russia’s noncompliance and China’s missile arsenal.

Chinese Nonproliferation and Arms Control Commitments and Compliance China’s positive attitude toward global arms control and nonproliferation rests partly on its relative compatibility with China’s preferred principles and partly on the expectation that China’s growing diplomatic power can be used to shape future agreements to serve its interests. China’s rhetorical commitment to arms control and disarmament today comes at a time when it is engaged in a major expansion of its nuclear forces that may quadruple the number of deployed Chinese warheads. Chinese officials have not

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acknowledged this buildup nor announced changes in Chinese nuclear policy or the desired end state for its nuclear force, and have resisted pressure to join US-Russian arms control discussions. Nuclear Arms Control and Nonproliferation

Prior to joining the IAEA and acceding to the NPT, China provided Pakistan with a nuclear weapons design and with assistance in mastering uranium enrichment to produce fissile material for nuclear weapons.19 China’s economic reforms imposed significant budget constraints on the Chinese military and defense establishment, leading some companies to export nuclear materials to countries such as Iran and Pakistan. By the late 1990s, the Chinese government had curbed these exports and put in place a reasonably effective export control regime to prevent unauthorized exports of nuclear materials.20 The structure of the Chinese nuclear industry, which is dominated by a small number of regulated state-owned enterprises, facilitated these efforts. China also joined the Nuclear Suppliers Group and the Zangger Committee. Recent State Department reports on compliance with arms control, nonproliferation, and disarmament commitments notably do not include complaints about Chinese nuclear proliferation activities.21 In terms of nuclear arms control, in 1982 China expressed willingness to participate in trilateral talks once the superpowers reduced their nuclear arsenals by half and permanently stopped nuclear weapons development and testing.22 However, Beijing subsequently changed its position to state that it would be willing to negotiate once Russia and the United States reduced their number of warheads to China’s level. An August 2022 Chinese statement called on the United States and Russia to “make significant and substantive reduction of their nuclear arsenals in a verifiable, irreversible and legally binding manner, so as to create necessary conditions for general and complete nuclear disarmament.”23 China has resisted US pressure to participate in trilateral arms limitations talks and has not acknowledged the significant ongoing expansion of its nuclear arsenal. While China continues to adhere to its moratorium on nuclear testing, the US State Department has accused it of conducting nuclear test activities that conflict with the US “zero-yield” standard discussed during CTBT negotiations, but not included in the text of the treaty.24 China supports starting negotiations on a Fissile Material Cut-Off Treaty (FMCT) in the Conference on Disarmament, but such negotiations are currently being blocked by Pakistan. China continues to resist joining the United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, and France in a moratorium on fissile material production.25 China stopped reporting details of its stockpile of separated plutonium to the IAEA in 2017 and is constructing two fast-breeder reactors that could potentially produce enough plutonium for 100 nuclear

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warheads per year.26 A 2022 US Department of Defense (DOD) report states that China is establishing new nuclear material production and reprocessing facilities and judges that “Beijing intends to use this infrastructure to produce nuclear warhead materials for its military in the near future.”27 Chemical Weapons Arms Control and Nonproliferation

China participated in negotiations for the CWC, making important contributions to the negotiating text and signing once the treaty was finalized. The CWC posed challenges for China, including the requirement for declarations of chemical production facilities and production of controlled chemicals, the need for extensive export controls, and provisions for scheduled and challenge inspections of chemical facilities. Chinese negotiators ensured that the treaty offered some benefits such as the requirement that countries that abandoned chemical weapons on foreign territory (e.g., Japan) must destroy them. Although Beijing has not publicly acknowledged ever possessing any chemical weapons stockpiles or facilities, at least two former production sites in China were visited by the Organisation for the Prevention of Chemical Weapons, the CWC implementing body.28 A 1997 US DOD report stated that China has “an advanced chemical weapons program, including research and development, production, and weaponization capabilities.”29 These claims were not repeated in the 2001 report after China’s CWC ratification. A 2021 State Department report stated that the United States cannot certify that the PRC is in compliance with its CWC obligations due to concerns about “the PRC’s research of pharmaceutical-based agents . . . and toxins with potential dual-use applications.”30 China’s compliance with the export control aspects of the CWC was initially problematic, partly due to its large number of chemical production facilities and incentives for their operators to ignore export controls in pursuit of profits. The United States found repeated Chinese violations of CWC export restrictions and imposed sanctions on Chinese entities several times in the late 1990s and early 2000s.31 Over time, the Chinese government passed export control laws and regulations that greatly improved compliance with its CWC obligations.32 China has not formally joined the Australia Group, a coordinating body for chemical export controls, but has incorporated its standards into its domestic laws and regulations. Biological Weapons Arms Control and Nonproliferation

China acceded to the BTWC in 1984 and has regularly submitted declarations. The United States “assesses that the PRC possessed an offensive biological warfare (BW) program from the 1950s to at least the late 1980s. Reporting suggests that the PRC’s BW production occurred at two facilities, in Beijing

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and Lingbao, prior to the PRC’s signing of the BWC [Biological Weapons Convention].”33 The last assessed facility ceased operations in 1987, but China has never declared these facilities or acknowledged its past program. A State Department report noted that China’s program “reportedly weaponized ricin, botulinum toxins, and the causative agents of anthrax, cholera, plague, and tularemia.”34 The United States has concerns that China’s extensive military biological research establishment may be involved in offensive BW research, although a definitive assessment is difficult due to the close relationship between (permitted) defensive BW research and (prohibited) offensive BW research.35 Some Trump administration officials accused Chinese BW laboratories of responsibility for the Covid pandemic, but the State Department’s 2022 compliance report states: “The United States assesses that there is no connection between the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic and the PRC’s compliance with the BWC.”36 Although China has not joined the Australia Group, it has engaged in regular consultations on chemical weapons and BW issues and updated its export control regulations to include dual-use biological agents and technologies.37

Missile Arms Control and Nonproliferation

China has no treaty restrictions on the development and deployment of ballistic and cruise missiles, and People’s Liberation Army (PLA) forces operate missiles ranging from short-range cruise missiles to ICBMs with multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles (MIRVs).38 China participated in negotiations for the Hague Code of Conduct Against Ballistic Missile Proliferation, which includes notification requirements for ballistic missile flight tests and space launches, but ultimately declined to sign the agreement. China has a bilateral agreement with Russia that includes prelaunch notification, which was signed in 2009 and renewed in 2020.39 China made a bilateral commitment to the United States to adhere to MTCR restrictions on the transfer of missile systems and components capable of serving as nuclear weapons delivery systems. This commitment was given grudgingly in the face of repeated US sanctions, and Chinese compliance has been problematic. In addition to exports of missile systems and missile technology to Pakistan in the late 1980s and early 1990s, China sold DF-3A ballistic missiles to Saudi Arabia in 1988. Press reports also claim that China sold DF-21 missiles with conventional warheads to Saudi Arabia in 2014 and that Beijing is helping Riyadh develop its own ballistic missile production capability.40 US government reports state that the Chinese government has ceased direct involvement in transfers of complete missiles, but express concern that “PRC-based entities continued to supply MTCR-controlled goods to missile programs of proliferation concern.”41

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Space and Cyber Arms Control

China’s 2015 defense white paper stated that “outer space and cyber space have become new commanding heights in strategic competition among all parties.”42 China has sought to exploit US military dependence on space systems by developing a range of antisatellite (ASAT) capabilities that could degrade, interfere with, or directly attack US satellites and their ground stations. The PLA has invested significant resources in developing its own space-based intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR), communications, and global positioning satellites and become increasingly reliant on networked command, control, communications, and computer systems as part of efforts to prepare to fight and win “informationized” wars. It has also developed offensive cyber capabilities that can attack a range of military and civilian targets. Indeed, US-China military competition is increasingly characterized by competition for dominance in the space and cyber domains.43 China’s interest in space arms control centers on the negotiation of a treaty for the prevention of the placement of weapons in outer space. The treaty’s focus is preventing deployment of weapons, including space-based BMD components. The Chinese-Russian draft defines a “space weapon” as an object placed into orbit with the intent of harming other space objects, and does not address ground-based ASAT systems, including the direct-ascent ASAT China tested in 2007. The United States has blocked negotiations on a space weapons treaty, but did not object to a compromise resolution that established a new UN working group to develop rules of the road for military activities in space.44 In April 2022, the United States announced a ban on destructive testing of direct-ascent ASAT missiles.45 In November 2022, the UN First Committee on Disarmament and International Security adopted a non-binding resolution calling for all countries to ban “destructive directascent anti-missile testing.”46 China voted against the resolution, with the Chinese representative stating that a test ban would not constrain US space strategy and was an effort to expand “unilateral military superiority under the pretext of arms control.”47 The cyber domain is a complicated arena for arms control given the difficulty in distinguishing between cyber intelligence collection and attacks on computer networks and the challenges in attributing malicious cyber activity. These issues pose major challenges for verification of cyber agreements. China has worked with Russia and other countries to promote “cyber sovereignty” and the right of states to control the flow of information across and within their borders. China has promoted international cooperation against cyber criminals and nonstate actors who conduct illicit attacks on computer networks. These measures would do little to restrict state-sponsored attacks against government and military networks and

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against critical infrastructure. Chinese experts participated in the UN Group of Governmental Experts process that produced a 2015 consensus report on norms of behavior in cyberspace, including the norm that “states should not conduct or knowingly support ICT [information and computer technology] activity that intentionally damages critical infrastructure.”48 China participated in UN cybersecurity expert discussions that produced a 2021 consensus report reiterating and expanding on the 2015 norms.49 In sum, China is now actively engaged in most arms control and nonproliferation treaties, regimes, organizations, and discussions. Beijing has accepted nonproliferation as a basic norm and appears to generally be in compliance with its treaty commitments, albeit not always in the manner that the United States desires. Neither has it been willing to consider joining trilateral negotiations on strategic weapons, as the United States has requested.

China’s Nuclear Modernization and Expansion China has historically been satisfied with a “lean and effective” nuclear force significantly smaller than the US and Soviet nuclear arsenals. 50 Although China has never provided official numbers for its nuclear forces, the contours of its modernization over the past decade were broadly understood. China was thought to be pursuing a more survivable nuclear deterrent that would supplement its vulnerable silo-based ICBMs with mobile ICBMs and intermediate-range ballistic missiles (IRBMs) and a nuclear triad that included nuclear submarines and strategic bombers.51 This modernization was expected to produce a larger, more diversified, and more sophisticated nuclear force that might double the number of deployed Chinese warheads.52 This understanding was overturned by the discovery in 2021 that China is constructing as many as 360 new ICBM silos.53 This would constitute the largest expansion of China’s nuclear forces in history.54 The decision to rely on vulnerable silo-based ICBMs to expand China’s nuclear arsenal is puzzling and represents a significant shift in the pattern of China’s nuclear modernization. In addition, China is developing and deploying new nuclear-capable theater missile systems, including the dual-capable DF-26 IRBM, the nuclear DF-21E medium-range ballistic missile (MRBM), and the DF-17 hypersonic boost-glide MRBM, which some US government sources have described as potentially being nuclear capable.55 China has also developed non-nuclear strategic systems, including advanced conventional ballistic missiles, ASAT weapons, offensive cyber capabilities, and BMD systems. Although these systems are non-nuclear, they can generate strategic effects with implications for nuclear deterrence and conventional warfighting.56 These developments have caused the US government to update estimates of China’s future nuclear forces. The Department of Defense estimated in

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2021 that the “accelerating pace of the PRC’s nuclear expansion may enable the PRC to have up to 700 deliverable nuclear warheads by 2027.”57 DOD now estimates that if the current pace of nuclear expansion continues, China will likely field 1,500 warheads by 2035.58 The Chinese government has not acknowledged the existence of the new ICBM silos or provided any explanation for this significant expansion of its nuclear forces. Western analysts are left to ponder whether this represents an updated Chinese estimate of how many warheads are necessary for a survivable second strike, a new judgment by Chinese leaders that a larger nuclear arsenal will have significant status or military benefits, or a change in China’s nuclear policy, strategy, or operational doctrine.59 In any case, the expectation of a much-larger Chinese nuclear arsenal is already having a significant impact on debates about US nuclear modernization, on regional security, and on prospects for regional and global arms control.

The North Korean Factor North Korea’s pursuit of nuclear weapons is a destabilizing factor in Asia with a major impact on regional arms control and nonproliferation dynamics.60 The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) nuclear program began in the late 1950s, when it built a research reactor with Soviet assistance that was eventually followed by an indigenous 5-megawatt reactor that became operational in 1986. Under pressure from the Soviet Union, North Korea acceded to the NPT in 1985 and submitted an initial report under its IAEA safeguards agreement in May 1992. IAEA inspectors discovered significant discrepancies and called for special inspections to resolve suspicions about a covert DPRK weapons program. Pyongyang refused to allow inspections, leading the IAEA to declare North Korea in noncompliance with its obligations.61 This triggered the first of three crises where the United States used international pressure and threats of force to try to eliminate the DPRK nuclear program. In the first two cases, pressure brought Pyongyang to the negotiation table and yielded agreements that committed the DPRK to denuclearization. However, both the 1994 Agreed Framework and the 2005 SixParty Talks joint statement eventually collapsed due to evidence that the DPRK was continuing to pursue nuclear weapons despite its disarmament pledges.62 North Korea walked away from the Six-Party Talks in late 2005 and conducted its first nuclear weapons test on October 9, 2006. Although the Six-Party Talks later resumed, disagreements over the DPRK’s declaration of nuclear facilities caused the talks to stall. When North Korea launched a three-stage Taepo Dong-2 rocket in April 2009, the UN Security Council imposed sanctions and Pyongyang declared that it would no longer participate in the talks or be bound by its previous agreements.63

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Despite periodic interest in reviving the Six-Party Talks and sporadic US efforts to negotiate an updated nuclear deal with DPRK leaders (including two US-DPRK summits following the Trump administration’s 2017 “maximum pressure” campaign), there is little prospect for negotiated denuclearization. In September 2022 Kim Jong-Un announced that North Korea would not give up its nuclear weapons absent fundamental changes in the “political and military environment around the Korean Peninsula,” declaring there would be “absolutely no denuclearization, no negotiation and no bargaining chip to trade.”64 North Korea has worked steadily to improve its nuclear weapons capabilities and develop long-range missiles that can hold the United States at risk. Pyongyang has conducted six nuclear tests with progressively larger yields, including a September 2017 test that the DPRK claims was a thermonuclear weapon.65 A 2021 report by the Defense Intelligence Agency states that North Korea “retains a stockpile of nuclear weapons” and outside observers estimate that Pyongyang may have enough fissile material for between twenty and sixty warheads.66 The DPRK has made sustained efforts to develop an ICBM capable of striking the United States with a nuclear weapon, including road-mobile, liquid-fueled ICBMs that have demonstrated the necessary range, albeit with uncertain reliability. 67 North Korea also has long-standing biological and chemical weapons programs that pose a threat to US allies and US troops on the Korean Peninsula.68 The failure of diplomacy to eliminate or restrain North Korea’s expanding nuclear arsenal has led Japan and South Korea to increase reliance on the United States to deter a DPRK attack. However, Japanese and Korean experts worry about the credibility of US nuclear guarantees if Pyongyang can hold the US homeland at risk. Both countries are developing independent conventional strike capabilities and are believed to have the ability to develop and deploy nuclear weapons quickly. There are active debates in Tokyo and Seoul about whether to ask the United States to deploy nuclear weapons on their territory to reinforce the US nuclear umbrella. These concerns highlight the potential for North Korea’s nuclear decisions to profoundly shape proliferation dynamics in Asia and prospects for regional arms control.

Obstacles for Arms Control in Asia Quantitative and qualitative improvements in the Chinese and North Korean nuclear arsenals and how Beijing and Pyongyang choose to employ their strategic capabilities will be key drivers of regional arms control efforts, but several other factors will complicate efforts to negotiate agreements.

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The deterioration in US-China relations will be a major obstacle. Chinese leaders have harbored deep suspicions of US strategic intentions since the accidental US bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in 1999, which they believe was a deliberate effort to intimidate Beijing.69 US views of China have turned sharply negative since 2015, a development reflected in US policy and official strategy documents.70 Mutual suspicions and competitive dynamics reduce the political space for arms control agreements. This will be aggravated by differences in how China and the United States approach arms control. China looks to arms control agreements to develop positive political relationships and build strategic trust between countries; the United States views them in legalistic terms as a means to regulate competition between potential adversaries.71 Beijing will be seeking political reassurances that Washington will be unwilling or unable to provide, while Washington will want strict verification measures that Beijing will be reluctant to accept. This suggests progress will be especially difficult in areas such as nuclear no-first use pledges and restrictions on the use of ASAT and offensive cyber systems that would be hard to verify. US political leaders are also competing to see who can be tougher on China; this increases domestic political obstacles to arms control agreements, especially those that must be ratified by the Senate. A second major obstacle is imbalances between the major powers in Asia. China’s rising economic and military power poses a challenge to traditional US regional dominance, but it also complicates relations with Japan and South Korea, who cannot compete with China on their own. Both countries have relied on their alliances with Washington and the US nuclear umbrella to remedy this power imbalance, but experts in each country have expressed concerns about US staying power and the credibility of US security guarantees.72 Moreover, China is actively trying to weaken US alliances and reduce the US regional security role. These dynamics complicate USChina bilateral arms control efforts, while the power imbalances make multilateral regional arms limitations unlikely. A similar dynamic applies to North Korea, which increasingly relies on nuclear capabilities to compensate for its conventional inferiority to the United States and South Korea. A third obstacle is US concern about Sino-Russian strategic cooperation. The United States has traditionally been more concerned with Russia’s nuclear arsenal than China’s, but has increasingly treated China as a greater long-term strategic threat due to its economic and military potential. In arms control, the US focus has been on enticing Beijing to join ongoing US-Russia arms control discussions. Washington has also become unwilling to continue bilateral arms control agreements with Russia such as the ABM and INF Treaties, in part because they constrain US options while leaving China free to develop its capabilities.73 Given the expansion of China’s nuclear forces, US policymakers are no longer willing to treat

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China as a lesser included case in US nuclear force structure calculations and are also becoming concerned about the three body problem where China and Russia might cooperate to use their nuclear forces against the United States. At the same time, Beijing is unlikely to accept any agreements that formally limit its forces to numbers below US and Russian limits. These dynamics will complicate global and regional arms control efforts. A fourth challenge is increasing interactivity between US and Chinese conventional and nuclear forces and the growing importance of the space and cyber domains for both militaries. The PLA Rocket Force operates a variety of accurate conventional missiles that would target US carriers, ports, air bases, and headquarters in a conflict; US and allied BMD systems that will defend these targets may also have some capability against Chinese ICBMs. The US and Chinese militaries are both increasingly dependent on space and computer systems that are vulnerable to each other’s ASAT and offensive cyber capabilities.74 Both sides are increasingly thinking of deterrence in ways that integrate conventional and nuclear capabilities, which will make it harder to craft arms control solutions focused on individual systems or domains.75 The potentially critical strategic impact of untested ASAT and offensive cyber capabilities also complicates net assessments used to calculate the impact of arms control agreements.76

Opportunities for Arms Control in Asia This chapter highlights significant challenges to traditional arms control agreements focused on capability constraints. However, opportunities do exist for increased transparency to limit arms races, improvements in crisis communications, understandings on operational practices to improve crisis stability, and confidence-building measures. The dramatic expansion of China’s nuclear arsenal, coupled with US efforts to design and deploy a new generation of nuclear delivery systems, suggests a high potential for a nuclear arms race. China’s nuclear policy insists that China will never engage in nuclear arms races, but US-China competitive dynamics will make that goal hard to achieve. Prospects for formal arms control limitations are dim, but transparency could help and be achievable.77 China has traditionally regarded transparency as favoring strong countries over weak ones, but its nuclear expansion is changing China’s position and its incentives. A larger and more survivable Chinese nuclear force will be much less vulnerable; Beijing can afford to be more transparent about its force structure plans to avoid the consequences of US worst case analyses.78 Some Chinese analysts have recognized this change in incentives, but the PLA has not altered its traditional lack of transparency about nuclear capabilities.79 The United States should pursue official and

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semiofficial dialogues with China to press this argument and encourage greater Chinese transparency on nuclear capabilities and policies. The United States has already established crisis communications mechanisms with Chinese civilian and military authorities; the question is how effective these mechanisms would be in an actual crisis. The two militaries have had some preliminary discussions about this topic, and US and Chinese experts have addressed this issue in semiofficial dialogues. It demands more attention, especially because changes to the operational practices of Chinese nuclear forces may increase the risk of accidental or unauthorized launches in a crisis. PLA Rocket Force nuclear units have begun conducting regular alerts and there are indications that China may move toward a “launch on warning” posture as it develops the necessary launch detection and tracking capabilities.80 Chinese nuclear missile submarines have also begun conducting operational patrols, increasing the risks of dangerous encounters with US forces.81 US and Chinese experts should find ways to discuss these operational practices and how to avoid nuclear postures or practices that would increase risks in a crisis.82 Topics should include limiting the number of forces on alert, ensuring tight control over deployed nuclear forces, avoiding launchon-warning postures, limiting the risks of conventional nuclear entanglement, and avoiding actions that pose unnecessary escalation risks in a crisis. China’s increasingly large and diversified nuclear forces are less vulnerable to attack, reducing past imperatives to deploy quickly to preserve forces and signal resolve.83 The United States and China may also have common interests in avoiding widespread deployment of tactical nuclear weapons or the adoption of doctrines that contemplate early nuclear use in a conventional conflict. Discussions on these issues would be most useful in official channels, but would still have value in semiofficial settings. Confidence-building measures could complement strategic discussions. One useful measure would be advance notification of space and missile launches to reduce the risk of misinterpreting a test as an attack. This could be achieved by bilateral agreement, a trilateral agreement that includes Russia, or by China joining the Hague Code of Conduct Against Ballistic Missile Proliferation.84 Another area of discussion could focus on agreement to avoid attacks on nuclear command and control systems and associated space and cyber capabilities.85 China is currently deploying a constellation of launch detection satellites and radars with Russian assistance. As Chinese leaders and the Chinese military become more used to the situational awareness such systems provide, they may become more interested in discussing agreements to place such systems off limits to attacks in the case of a conflict.86 More broadly, both sides should discuss limits to attacks on satellites and on offensive cyber attacks against critical infrastructure based on a foundation of mutual deterrence.87

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Conclusion The world faces an emerging strategic environment where arms control will be increasingly valuable in placing limits on US-China strategic competition, but where the obstacles to traditional agreements are increasing. Any successes will likely be reached through bilateral understandings rather than formal treaties and will include less verification than the United States has traditionally wanted. Progress will require a degree of mutual restraint and accommodation of the other side’s interests that will be difficult to achieve and maintain. The United States would need to accept the reality of its vulnerability to China’s nuclear arsenal, even if it does not formally acknowledge this fact. China would need to shift from the mind-set of a small vulnerable power to acknowledge its status as a great power whose military capabilities frighten other countries regardless of its no-first use policy and assurances of China’s inherently peaceful nature. It is unclear whether either country can make that mental transition and adapt its policies and practices appropriately. Even if the two countries can make progress on nuclear arms control, their competition in the conventional realm appears likely to intensify.88 Despite shared US, Chinese, Japanese, and South Korean interest in denuclearizing the Korean peninsula, North Korea is unlikely to get rid of its nuclear weapons absent regime change or collapse.89 Pyongyang will remain a source of regional instability with the potential to drive the nuclear choices of Japan and South Korea. This will influence US-China bilateral relations, regional security and arms control dynamics, and the health of the global nonproliferation regime. North Korea’s nuclear arsenal is an issue that will need to be managed rather than resolved, with attention devoted to providing Japan and South Korea with robust security guarantees that prevent them from pursuing nuclear weapons of their own. This implies continuation of their alliances with the United States and maintenance of a viable US nuclear umbrella, a situation China has tolerated in the past but increasingly views as an unacceptable long-term solution. Interactions between US-China strategic competition and North Korea’s decisions about how to wield its nuclear arsenal promise to make an already tense regional security environment even more fraught.

Notes The views expressed in this chapter are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of National Defense University, the Department of Defense, or the US government. 1. Medeiros, Reluctant Restraint; Johnston, Social States.

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2. See Lewis, Paper Tigers, 13–23. 3. For a Chinese analysis see Weidi, “China’s Security Environment and the Role of Nuclear Weapons.” 4. Fravel and Medeiros, “China’s Search for Assured Retaliation”; Riqiang, “Certainty of Uncertainty.” 5. Jia, “China’s Views on the Road Map to Nuclear Disarmament,” 105–106. 6. Gallagher, “China on Arms Control, Nonproliferation, and Strategic Stability,” 202–208. 7. Jia, “China’s Views on the Road Map to Nuclear Disarmament,” 106. 8. Gallagher, “China on Arms Control, Nonproliferation, and Strategic Stability,” 204–208. 9. Nuclear Threat Initiative, “Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR).” 10. For an overview, see Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China, 2021, 60–63; Ballistic and Cruise Missile Threat 2020. 11. See Medeiros, Reluctant Restraint, 97–174; Frieman, China, Arms Control, and Nonproliferation, 85–109. 12. Gallagher, “China on Arms Control, Nonproliferation, and Strategic Stability,” 212–216. 13. For a discussion see Johnston, “Learning Versus Adaptation.” 14. Krepon, “Looking Back.” 15. Gallagher, “China on Arms Control, Nonproliferation, and Strategic Stability,” 216–222. 16. Author’s observation of private meetings between Chinese Foreign Ministry officials and US arms control experts, December 2000. 17. For a historical assessment of Chinese concerns see Medeiros, Reluctant Restraint, 175–209. For a recent assessment see Riqiang, “Living with Uncertainty.” 18. Arms Control Association, “The Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty at a Glance.” 19. See Weiner, “U.S. and China Helped Pakistan Build the Bomb”; Burr, “China, Pakistan, and the Bomb.” 20. Medeiros, Reluctant Restraint, 30–96; Frieman, China, Arms Control, and Nonproliferation, 7–37; Kerr, “Chinese Nuclear and Missile Proliferation.” 21. Adherence to and Compliance with Arms Control, Nonproliferation, and Disarmament Agreements and Commitments. 22. Gallagher, “China on Arms Control, Nonproliferation, and Strategic Stability,” 205–206. 23. Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China, “Statement by H.E. Amb. Li Song on Nuclear Disarmament at the Tenth NPT Review Conference.” 24. Adherence to and Compliance with Arms Control, Nonproliferation, and Disarmament Agreements and Commitments, 28–29. 25. “No Clear Path Forward for Fissile Material Cut-Off Treaty,” 26. Zhang, “China’s Uranium Enrichment and Plutonium Recycling 2020– 2040,” 41–45. 27. Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China, 2022, 96–97. 28. Frieman, China, Arms Control, and Nonproliferation, 71–84. 29. Proliferation: Threat and Response, 10 30. Compliance with the Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production, Stockpiling and Use of Chemical Weapons and on their Destruction. 31. Nuclear Threat Initiative, “China Chemical Overview.” 32. Frieman, China, Arms Control, and Nonproliferation, 78–82.

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33. Adherence to and Compliance with Arms Control, Nonproliferation, and Disarmament Agreements and Commitments, 35. 34. Compliance with the Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production, Stockpiling and Use of Chemical Weapons and on their Destruction, 34–36. 35. Ibid., 34–36. 36. Ibid., 36. 37. Nuclear Threat Initiative, “China Biological Overview.” 38. Ballistic and Cruise Missile Threat 2020. 39. Champlin, “China, Russia Agree on Launch Notification”; “China, Russia Extend Notification Agreement for Ballistic Missile, Carrier Rocket Launches.” 40. See Meick, China’s Reported Ballistic Missile Sale to Saudi Arabia; Masterson, “Saudi Arabia Said to Produce Ballistic Missiles.” 41. Adherence to and Compliance with Arms Control, Nonproliferation, and Disarmament Agreements and Commitments, 31–32. 42. China’s Military Strategy online. 43. See Saunders and Logan, “China’s Regional Nuclear Capability, Nonnuclear Strategic Systems, and Integration of Concepts and Operations,” 135–139. 44. Kimball, “A Small Step Toward an ASAT Ban.” 45. White House, “Fact Sheet: Vice President Harris Advances National Security Norms in Space.” 46. Foye and Hernández, “UN First Committee Calls for ASAT Test Ban.” 47. UN, “Approving 21 Drafts, First Committee Asks General Assembly to Halt Destructive Direct-Ascent Anti-Satellite Missile Tests in Outer Space.” 48. NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence, 2015 UN GGE Report online. 49. Gold, “Unexpectedly, All UN Countries Agreed on a Cybersecurity Report.” 50. Fravel and Medeiros, “China’s Search for Assured Retaliation”; Cunningham and Fravel, “Assuring Assured Retaliation.” 51. Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China, 2021, 90–92; Chase, “Nuclear Bomber Could Boost PLAAF Strategic Role, Create Credible Triad,”; Zhao, Tides of Change. 52. For an example see Kristensen, “China’s Strategic Systems and Programs.” 53. Warrick, “China Is Building More Than 100 New Missile Silos in Its Western Desert”; Broad and Sanger, “A 2nd New Nuclear Missile Base for China, and Many Questions About Strategy”; R. Lee, “PLA Likely Begins Construction of an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile Silo Site near Hanggin Banner.” 54. See, for example, Lewis, “China Is Radically Expanding Its Nuclear Missile Silos”; O’Connor, “Questions Remain over Identification of China’s Missile Silos”; Kroenig, “China’s Nuclear Silos and the Arms-Control Fantasy”; Cameron, “China’s Silos.” 55. The DF-26 and DF-21E were first fielded in 2016. See Richard, Statement Before the Senate Committee on Armed Services, 4; also Huang, “China’s Hypersonic DF-17 Missile Threatens Regional Stability, Analyst Warns.” 56. See Saunders and Logan, “China’s Regional Nuclear Capability, Nonnuclear Strategic Systems, and Integration of Concepts and Operations”; Cunningham, “Strategic Substitution.” 57. Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China, 2021, 90. 58. Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China, 2022, 94.

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59. For analysis of these alternative explanations see Logan and Saunders, Discerning the Drivers of China’s Nuclear Force Development. 60. Pollack, No Exit. 61. IAEA, “IAEA Fact Sheet on DPRK Nuclear Safeguards.” 62. For details on the agreements see Arms Control Association, “The U.S.North Korean Agreed Framework at a Glance”; Arms Control Association, “The Six-Party Talks at a Glance.” For analysis of the negotiations and the failure of the agreements see Segal, Disarming Strangers; Pollack, No Exit. 63. Arms Control Association, “The Six-Party Talks at a Glance.” 64. Sang-Hun, “North Korea Adopts New Law Hardening Its Nuclear Doctrine”; E. Kim, “North Korea States It Will Never Give Up Nuclear Weapons.” 65. Nikitin, “North Korea’s Nuclear Weapons and Missile Programs.” 66. North Korea Military Power, 21; Nikitin, “North Korea’s Nuclear Weapons and Missile Programs,” 1. 67. North Korea Military Power, 22–27. 68. Ibid., 28. 69. Liu and Ren, “An Emerging Consensus on the U.S. Threat.” 70. See National Security Strategy of the United States of America. 2017; Interim National Security Strategic Guidance, 2021; US Department of Defense, “Fact Sheet: 2022 National Military Strategy.” For analysis of these shifts see Lynch and Saunders, “Contemporary Great Power Geostrategic Dynamics.” 71. Gallagher, “China on Arms Control, Nonproliferation, and Strategic Stability,” 195–239. 72. Takahashi, “Strategic Stability and the Impact of China’s Modernizing Strategic Strike Forces.” 73. China played a minor role in the 2002 US decision to withdraw from the ABM Treaty, but it was an important factor in US withdrawal from the INF Treaty in 2019. 74. Saunders and Logan, “China’s Regional Nuclear Capability, Nonnuclear Strategic Systems, and Integration of Concepts and Operations.” 75. Chase and Chan, China’s Evolving Approach to “Integrated Strategic Deterrence.” 76. Saunders, “The Military Factor in U.S.-China Strategic Competition.” 77. For a more optimistic take see Meier and Staack, “Engaging China on Multilateral Arms Control.” 78. Saunders and Logan, “The Implications of the PLA’s Nuclear Expansion and Modernization for China’s Crisis Behavior.” 79. Author’s impression based on dialogues with Chinese officials, military officers, and scholars. 80. Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China, 2021, 90–94. 81. Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China, 2022, 94. 82. Goldstein, “First Things First.” 83. Saunders and Logan, “The Implications of the PLA’s Nuclear Expansion and Modernization for China’s Crisis Behavior.” 84. For one specific proposal see Acton, MacDonald, and Vaddi, Reimagining Nuclear Arms Control, 53–59. 85. See MacDonald, Freeman, and McFarland, China and Strategic Instability in Space.

110 86. 87. 88. 89.

Phillip C. Saunders Gaddis, “The Evolution of a Reconnaissance Satellite Regime.” See Gompert and Saunders, The Paradox of Power. See Saunders, “The Military Factor in U.S.-China Strategic Competition.” See NDU Korea Futures 2025 Symposium.

PART 3 Arms Control Domains

7 Nuclear Weapons David A. Cooper

THE NEED FOR NEW ARMS CONTROL TO MITIGATE THE GROWING dangers of great-power nuclear rivalry is becoming all too apparent. It has been decades since the world worried seriously about nuclear arms racing, the stability of nuclear deterrence, or whether a conventional military conflict between major nuclear powers could escalate into a cataclysmic nuclear war. Unfortunately, the world is standing at the dawn of a new age of uncontrolled nuclear competition. Navigating this newly envenomed nuclear landscape may depend on whether the chief nuclear rivals—Russia, China, and the United States—can work together to control their adversarial nuclear relations. The danger of great-power nuclear competition has been brought into sharp focus since the February 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, with Moscow repeatedly pointing to the risk of nuclear escalation to convince the United States and its North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) allies not to go too far to help Ukraine. Together with recent revelations of Chinese nuclear expansion plans and worries that Beijing may apply Moscow’s Ukraine playbook to forcibly reunify Taiwan, it is increasingly apparent that nuclear weapons will play a key role in this new era of great-power competition. Unfortunately, the brief span of nuclear history provides few guideposts for the way ahead. The lessons of the bipolar Cold War are at best an imperfect map for a multipolar nuclear future. Washington and its allies are now widely seen to be in a new cold war with Russia and China.1 This may prove true, but nuclear superpower competition in any Cold War 2.0 is likely to be very different than the original, and there is no guarantee that this sequel will have a happy ending. Whereas the Cold War featured a relatively stable bipolar standoff between two superpowers and their allies, the emerging 113

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nuclear order is shaping up as a far more fluid tripolar competition among the United States, China, and Russia. Warming Sino-Russian political relations notwithstanding, the three primary nuclear powers are, for now at least, modernizing and targeting their nuclear forces with each of the other two in mind. Secondary nuclear powers are also in the mix, with Britain and France in nuclear competition with Russia (and perhaps China) and India with China. The key question is whether the core tripolar strategic nuclear rivalry that lies at the heart of this new nuclear order will lead to an uncontrolled arms race that erodes deterrence and complicates crisis stability, or if it may be possible to erect guardrails in the form of negotiated arrangements to mitigate these risks. Can arms control be revived to reduce this danger like it did in Cold War 1.0? Is such a cooperative approach possible in the face of today’s deteriorating relationships among the United States and its strategic and nuclear rivals? Even if so, can the Cold War model of nuclear arms control be adapted for today’s very different international security challenges, or will an entirely different approach be necessary?

Coming to Terms: What Is Nuclear Arms Control? The idea of military rivals negotiating formal or informal military arrangements is as old as military competition itself. Many such arrangements were the result of wars, often dictating the terms of peace. However, the concept of nuclear arms control is a very specific paradigm that emerged in the early 1960s in response to the numerical and technological race between the United States and the Soviet Union for strategic nuclear superiority and the resulting hair-trigger standoff that threatened to unleash nuclear devastation (whether by accident, miscalculation, or misadventure by either side). Nuclear arms control was conceived as a tool that could be used by the rival nuclear superpowers to reduce the shared risks of such a mutual catastrophe. Goals and Methods

The specific focus of nuclear arms control—measures negotiated competitively between rival nuclear superpowers for the purpose of managing the risks of their strategic rivalry—features goals and methods that distinguish it from closely related concepts such as disarmament and nonproliferation. Nuclear arms control is unique as a contractual political undertaking by, for, and between rival nuclear powers. That is, nuclear arms control arrangements are negotiated, verified, and enforced between nuclear competitors without the direct involvement of other parties such as allies or international organizations. It is rooted in the superpower nuclear rivalry of the

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Cold War and, to date, has only been undertaken bilaterally between Washington and Moscow.2 The goals and methods of nuclear arms control were conceived initially not within the corridors of power in Washington or Moscow, but instead by a small cadre of academic theorists such as Hedley Bull, Henry Kissinger, and Thomas Schelling.3 These scholarly strategists perceived that the awful destructiveness of nuclear war had fundamentally changed the nature of military competition. Recognizing that a general nuclear war could be won only at unthinkable costs, if at all, the paramount military goal (as the theorists saw it) was not to prevail in a nuclear war, but rather to prevent such a war from ever occurring. This built on a critical insight at the dawn of the atomic age by pioneering deterrence theorist Bernard Brodie, who in 1946 opined, “Thus far the chief purpose of our military establishment has been to win wars. From now on its chief purpose must be to avert them.”4 The new arms control thinking suggested that achieving this paramount goal likely would require negotiating deliberate arrangements to promote and preserve a situation of stable mutual deterrence. Such measures would be needed to offset the natural inclination of all militaries to seek superiority, and the corresponding determination of each side to prevent the other from attaining it. If left uncontrolled, such action-reaction dynamics could propel an endless cycle of nuclear arms racing. The danger of such arms racing would be that if one side temporarily achieved a strategic advantage it might have an incentive to launch a first strike from a position of strength and before the other side could catch up (or alternatively, the temporarily weaker side might be tempted to strike first preemptively to prevent this). This is where it was surmised that negotiated arms control could help by breaking the arms racing cycle, allowing the two sides to settle into a predictable and verifiable stalemate, otherwise known as a strategic balance or strategic stability. Arms control was thus conceived not as an alternative to military security, but rather as complementary tool to assist the military in providing effective nuclear deterrence. Although deterrence stability is the top priority for nuclear arms control, it is not the only objective. In a classic hierarchy of goals, Schelling and Morton Halperin suggest that arms control is for “reducing the likelihood of war, its scope and violence if it occurs, and the political and economic costs of being prepared for it.”5 Bull further explains that arms control should seek to achieve these goals by means such as “reduction of offensive forces, promotion of defensive forces, and promotion of strategies of limited war.”6 This hierarchy of goals—with promoting stable mutual deterrence preeminent—would guide US negotiating objectives throughout the Cold War. If arms control theory has a core insight, it is that the goal of stable mutual deterrence is one that should be shared even by the staunchest of

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nuclear adversaries. Neither side should want a ruinous nuclear war or, at the very least, they should share an interest to avoid such a war starting by miscalculation. As Kissinger puts it, “They should strive to make certain that war, if it does start, is the result of a deliberate decision and is not produced because the opponents, in taking measures which they deem to be defensive, push each other into an attack in self-defense.”7 Put simply, nobody wants to face a nuclear rival with a nervous trigger finger. At the same time, each side wants to preserve or create military advantages for itself, and presumably will not agree to any measures that put it at a disadvantage. Thus, although each side may have an interest in arms control in theory, the process requires tough compromises. This is precisely why arms control negotiations are lengthy, difficult, and often prone to failure.8 The methods for negotiating and implementing arms control measures reflect an explicitly competitive and implicitly distrustful brand of cooperation between military rivals. These are private contractual arrangements. For example, if an arms control agreement features inspections or other verification measures, these are conducted between the parties themselves without the involvement of outsiders. If compliance disputes arise, these are likewise discussed between the parties without any outside adjudication. Indeed, signing a treaty is typically not the end of negotiations, but instead the beginning of a protracted consultative process as implementation moves forward. Distinguishing Nuclear Arms Control from Nuclear Disarmament

The concepts of arms control and disarmament are often lumped together. However, while sharing many features, they are pursuing very different goals by somewhat similar means. These different goals are not necessarily incompatible, and arms control arrangements frequently involve nuclear reductions. However, arms control’s primary focus on stabilizing mutual deterrence does not always align with disarmament’s overriding credo that less is always better. When arms control does seek reductions, it is typically to prevent or redress a destabilizing imbalance (its primary objective), or else to achieve stable balances at lower numbers (to reduce costs and destructiveness, which are its secondary objectives). In other words, for arms control, it is not about reductions for the sake of reductions. Although parsing differences between arms control and disarmament may seem like splitting hairs, it is a crucial distinction that is borne out by their distinct, parallel historical trajectories. Disarmament efforts to eliminate nuclear weapons have had different methods and outcomes than arms control efforts to stabilize and manage hostile deterrence relationships. In contrast to arms control, which has been pursued through direct negotia-

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tions between the two nuclear superpowers, efforts to eliminate or drastically reduce nuclear armaments have mostly been pursued through broad multilateral negotiations under the auspices of the United Nations. Again, in contrast to some notable arms control successes, most of these disarmament efforts have yielded disappointing results. The United States first proposed total nuclear abolition in 1946 when it still had an atomic monopoly. In what became known as the Baruch Plan, the Harry S. Truman administration offered to give up atomic bombs in exchange for other countries forswearing them, agreeing to verification measures, and putting all civilian nuclear energy under international oversight. However, Moscow rejected this proposal out of hand, in part because it would give the Americans a knowledge monopoly that could allow Washington quickly to reconstitute an atomic arsenal. This failure at the outset of the atomic age set a pattern for later UN nuclear disarmament negotiations that had lofty goals but came up short on results.9 Stalling after the Baruch Plan failure, the focus of UN disarmament negotiations coalesced in 1954 around a proposal by India for a total ban on nuclear weapons testing. At this early juncture in nuclear history—before Moscow had even tested a thermonuclear fusion bomb and only two years after Washington had done so—the Indian proposal was only slightly less ambitious than outright nuclear abolition. A Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) would have stymied Washington and Moscow from developing more and more powerful fusion warheads, while also constraining new countries from going nuclear at all. However, these talks went nowhere over years of contentious negotiations. The main sticking point was Washington’s insistence on a robust monitoring and inspection scheme, which Moscow was equally adamant in rejecting as an excuse for spying. Rather than scaling back goals in the face of this stalemate, the rival superpowers instead upped the ante when, in 1961, the United States embraced a Soviet proposal to seek UN negotiations on the general and complete disarmament of all weapons by all countries, nuclear and otherwise. Unsurprisingly, these talks also went on for years without producing any results. Although Washington and Moscow had agreed in the 1968 Nuclear NonProliferation Treaty (NPT) to pursue universal and complete disarmament, no timeline was specified, and no progress was ever made.10 Instead, Washington and Moscow embraced the more pragmatic approach of bilateral strategic arms control to manage their nuclear rivalry. Deterrence and not disarmament would be the dominant nuclear paradigm throughout the Cold War. But the dream of a world without nuclear weapons never died, and it quickly resurfaced when the Cold War ended. For example, in 1995 Australia sponsored the Canberra Commission on the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons. Although this led to no concrete negotiations, calls for nuclear abolition would continue to grow even as Moscow and Washington continued to

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drastically reduce their legacy Cold War nuclear arsenals through bilateral arms control. To give a sense of the scale of these post–Cold War arms control reductions, from a combined high of nearly 70,000 nuclear warheads in 1986 (before the first arms control reductions began taking effect), the combined US and Russian arsenals today stand at just over 8,000 warheads.11 Despite these dramatic bilateral reductions, nuclear disarmament fervor continued to build and reached a crescendo in early 2009, when newly elected President Barack Obama formally endorsed the goal of nuclear abolition and called for nuclear talks to expand beyond the United States and Russia to include the other nuclear powers. However, these and subsequent US efforts failed to cajole any of the other nuclear powers to join Washington and Moscow at the nuclear negotiating table. Most recently, frustrated by the lack of progress toward nuclear abolition, eighty-six non-nuclear weapons countries have signed the 2017 UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (also known as the Nuclear Ban Treaty), which bans its parties, among other things, from possessing or indirectly controlling nuclear weapons. However, no nuclear weapons states, nor their allies, are among those parties. In fact, pointing to perceived flaws like the absence of verification provisions, the nuclear weapons states have all dismissed the Nuclear Ban Treaty as an unrealistic path toward nuclear disarmament. Therefore, while the Nuclear Ban Treaty stands as the rare case of the successful entry into force of a multilateral disarmament treaty, it has had no practical effect thus far. Nor will it until and unless nuclear weapons states or their allies join, which for now seems extremely unlikely. Achieving total nuclear disarmament has long been and remains the avowed goal of almost all countries. Yet there is little to show for many decades of nuclear disarmament negotiations within the multilateral UN framework. This disappointing disarmament legacy stands in contrast to the more successful results produced in the sphere of bilateral nuclear arms control. Distinguishing Nuclear Arms Control from Nonproliferation

Nuclear arms control has another cousin that is also closely related to disarmament. Nuclear nonproliferation does not focus on managing nuclear competition like arms control or abolishing existing nuclear arsenals like disarmament. Rather, it is all about preventing new countries from joining the nuclear club (a process that is sometimes referred to as horizontal proliferation). In effect, nonproliferation is seeking to achieve disarmament before the fact. Things do get a bit more complicated in that the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty recognizes only five nuclear powers. Thus, nonproliferation also seeks to thwart non-NPT countries that have successfully attained nuclear

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weapons (currently, India, Pakistan, North Korea, and presumptively Israel) from expanding or improving their nuclear wherewithal (which is sometimes referred to as vertical proliferation). It should be no surprise that NPT scofflaws like India and Pakistan object to this two-tier approach of nuclear haves and have-nots and decline to disarm to join the NPT as nonnuclear weapons states. This is where nonproliferation can blur into the realms of disarmament and arms control. For example, when the United States and other nuclear powers demand that North Korea give up its nuclear weapons, they are preaching a brand of total disarmament that they are themselves unwilling to practice. But they do so in the name of nonproliferation, even while modernizing and expanding their own nuclear arsenals. Likewise, if India and Pakistan were to negotiate measures to stabilize their hostile deterrence relationship, that would clearly be arms control, and presumably very useful. Yet this would do nothing to satisfy the nonproliferation imperative for them to disarm completely to get right with nonproliferation. As shown below, this odd situation has led to post–Cold War efforts to supplement the NPT with hybrid nonproliferation-cum-arms control-cum-disarmament multilateral arrangements that would apply to nuclear powers within and outside of the NPT. If complications involving the few nuclear states outside of the NPT seem messy and confusing, they are. But setting aside this vexing complexity, the basic distinction between nuclear arms control and nonproliferation remains straightforward. Arms control involves measures that are negotiated and implemented directly by and between nuclear rivals (to date, mostly bilaterally between Washington and Moscow) to self-regulate their own adversarial deterrence relationships, whereas nonproliferation involves global measures (mostly within the UN system and open to all countries) to encourage and regulate preemptive disarmament by everyone else.

A Brief History of Nuclear Arms Control The quest to negotiate bilateral arms control measures to manage the intensifying Cold War superpower nuclear rivalry gained traction following the shock of the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962, when for nearly two tense weeks the United States and Soviet Union found themselves standing at the precipice of nuclear war. Starting out slowly and progressing in fits and starts, bilateral arms control would nonetheless take center stage in Cold War superpower diplomacy. Adhering to the primary goal of enhancing deterrence stability, a bipartisan succession of US presidents and their Soviet counterparts led the negotiation of increasingly ambitious treaties and agreements. This steady progress continued into the post–Cold War period albeit with considerably less urgency and attention. However,

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nuclear arms control today is in trouble, hanging by the thread of a single treaty that is expiring soon. The rest of this chapter provides a summary account of the rise, decline, and prospective future of nuclear arms control. Early Cold War Preliminaries: The John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson Administrations

The first piece of low-hanging fruit for the new concept of bilateral nuclear arms control was the 1963 Hot Line Agreement allowing the US and Soviet leaders to communicate directly during a future nuclear crisis.12 Although this did not actually control any arms, it nonetheless demonstrated that the superpower rivals could agree to take pragmatic, cooperative steps to mitigate nuclear risks. But before taking any serious steps to negotiate controls on their own nuclear arsenals, they would first work together to establish a global nonproliferation system to constrain almost everyone else via the 1963 Limited Test Ban Treaty (LTBT) (banning all nuclear testing in the atmosphere, space, and under water) and the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (banning all but the then five existing nuclear powers from developing or possessing nuclear weapons). Both treaties were negotiated by Washington and Moscow and only then opened for signature as global multilateral nonproliferation instruments.13 Having thus taken steps to ensure that the nuclear arms race would remain mostly bipolar between themselves, the path was cleared to pursue bilateral arms control. In parallel to the bilateral NPT negotiations to freeze the nuclear status quo for everyone else, the Lyndon B. Johnson administration began pressing the Soviets for bilateral strategic arms control talks. What would become the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) initially proceeded in fits and starts. However, preliminary talks eventually succeeded in establishing a mutual understanding in principle that stabilizing mutual deterrence should be the paramount goal for bilateral arms control and that this would require addressing the offensive and defensive sides of the strategic balance. This set the stage for a bipartisan handoff to the new Richard M. Nixon administration and the formal launch of the SALT process. Détente and Progress: The Richard M. Nixon, Gerald R. Ford, and Jimmy Carter Administrations

President Nixon and his national security advisor Henry Kissinger viewed arms control as part and parcel of a broader effort to ease Cold War tensions that became known as the era of détente. SALT represented a critical early manifestation and enabler of détente. The negotiations produced two

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complementary agreements that were signed by President Nixon and General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev in May 1972. The Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM Treaty) limited each side’s missile defense far below levels that could offset the other’s second-strike capability. The Interim Agreement on the Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms (commonly known as the SALT I Interim Agreement) was a less formal temporary arrangement that set caps on the growth of strategic forces for five years to allow breathing space for a more far-reaching treaty (SALT II) to be negotiated. This détente period also saw the signing of a bilateral Threshold Test Ban Treaty (TTBT) in 1974 to limit the size of underground nuclear tests to 150 kilotons, but this was not ratified by the United States until 1990 due to concerns by the US Senate about its verifiability. A key factor shaping SALT outcomes was the Soviet refusal to consider any intrusive verification measures and the corresponding US refusal to consider any limitations that could not be verified without them. This severely limited the scope to things that could be verified through national technical means (NTM)—for example, spy satellites. This did not provide a major obstacle for limiting the number of antiballistic missile systems featuring hard-to-hide networks of radars and missile launchers. However, it would be impossible to know how many missiles the other side had, never mind how many warheads they could carry. Hence, SALT I limits focused on freezing new construction of strategic launchers—silos for intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and the number of launch tubes on ballistic missile nuclear submarines (SSBNs) for submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs). Because it did not prohibit the production of new missiles for these launchers, nor limit the number of multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles (MIRVs) each of these missiles could carry, nor set limits on strategic bombers or the number of air-launched cruise missiles (ALCMs) they could carry, both superpowers could increase total deployments of strategic weapons within SALT I limits. Despite some perceived shortcomings, SALT I did set limits on the hitherto uncontrolled nuclear arms race, thereby achieving a small measure of predictability in the strategic balance for the first time. This undeniably was a step toward the primary arms control goal to stabilize mutual deterrence. At the same time, the United States was determined to use the follow-on SALT II negotiations to achieve stricter and verifiable reciprocal limits, and to redress the aggregate so-called throw weight advantage that the Soviets had gained from their heavier MIRVed ICBMs (because each could carry more MIRVs per missile). The SALT II talks began under President Nixon in November 1972 and continued through the Gerald R. Ford and Jimmy Carter administrations. SALT II faced the same verification constraints as its less formal progenitor and also had to deal with a thorny set of negotiating complexities.

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However, by the time a final treaty was signed by President Carter and General Secretary Brezhnev in June 1979, Washington arguably had achieved its main objectives. SALT II imposed a relatively low limit on launchers for each side that included various subceilings to account for asymmetries between their force structures. It also extended limits for the first time to strategic bombers, banned mobile ICBM launchers entirely, froze the maximum number of MIRVs for existing missile systems, and limited further flight testing and deployment to only one new type of ICBM that could carry no more than ten MIRVs (although these MIRV provisions would raise verification concerns in the US Senate). All in all, SALT II promised to seriously curtail the arms race for the first time while improving strategic stability by limiting the most effective first-strike systems, heavily MIRVed ICBMs. For all these strengths, however, SALT II faced a bumpy prospective road to Senate approval over verification concerns. However, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979 led President Carter to withdraw SALT II from Senate consideration as part of a broader package of diplomatic sanctions. This marked the final collapse of détente and the renewal of intensely adversarial superpower relations. Disillusion, Collapse, and Revival: The Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush Administrations

The election of President Ronald Reagan the following year heralded a hardnosed turn in the US approach to nuclear arms control. The new administration was determined to pursue a two-track approach of closing what it perceived as a strategic gap by modernizing US strategic deterrent forces across the board, while at the same time seeking to negotiate an arms control alternative. However, President Reagan insisted from the onset that any new arms control arrangements would need to correct existing strategic imbalances and include effective verification measures. President Reagan took office opposing SALT II ratification. However, he offered a significant concession by agreeing to abide by its terms unilaterally during a new round of arms control negotiations if the Soviets reciprocated. Reagan’s signature proposal was to replace SALT II with a far more ambitious Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START). This envisioned halving strategic forces through verifiable reductions, including ICBMs, SLBMs, and strategic bombers. He also proposed in parallel carrying forward a Carter administration initiative to negotiate an Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF Treaty) to restrict the deployment of substrategic land-based missiles in Europe. The genesis for US calls for INF Treaty talks was the deep concern harbored by NATO countries about the 1977 deployment of intermediate-range

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SS-20 nuclear missiles to the European parts of the Soviet Union. Because these missiles could strike targets in Western Europe but not the United States, NATO members such as Germany worried that they would “decouple” NATO from US nuclear deterrence. If Moscow threatened limited nuclear strikes only against European targets using substrategic systems, then would US threats of strategic retaliation be credible given that this would surely provoke a strategic counterstrike against the US homeland? NATO leaders worried this situation might afford the Soviets what is known as escalation dominance. To prevent this, NATO believed that either the Soviets must be convinced to withdraw or eliminate their intermediate-range nuclear forces, or else the same type of US forces must be deployed to Europe to counter the threat. These allied concerns led the Carter administration to support NATO’s 1979 dual-track decision, which announced that US intermediate-range nuclear forces would begin deploying to Europe by 1983 unless Washington and Moscow could negotiate an arms control alternative before then. In a preliminary round of INF Treaty talks, the Carter administration had proposed reciprocal ceilings on deployments of land-based intermediaterange nuclear forces in Europe. However, the new Reagan administration took this a step further by seeking a mutual ban on all deployments of landbased intermediate-range nuclear forces in Europe. It then raised the stakes again with what became known as the “double zero” proposal for both sides to eliminate all land-based intermediate-range nuclear forces completely. In response the Soviets rejected double zero, the United States rejected various Kremlin counterproposals, and the INF Treaty talks in Geneva made no significant progress. Despite intense public opposition in Europe, NATO held firm on its “dual-track” decision and, in November 1983, the United States began deploying nuclear-armed ground-launched cruise missiles (GLCMs) and Pershing II ballistic missiles to five NATO countries. In response, the Soviets walked out of the INF Treaty and START talks. Arms control seemed to have collapsed. However, everything changed once NATO completed its deployments two years later. The year 1985 proved to be a decisive turning point for nuclear arms control. It also marked the beginning of an unusual period when the process became remarkably personal between the leaders of the rival superpowers. New Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev had just come to power with reformist ambitions and President Reagan had political momentum coming out of a landslide reelection. Together, Gorbachev and Reagan (and later President George H. W. Bush) propelled the revived Geneva negotiations forward at a speed and intensity that was previously unimaginable. In a concession to Soviet concerns about his 1983 Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), Reagan agreed to expand the Geneva talks to encompass “nuclear and space” (the latter covering missile defense). At their first meeting at a summit in Geneva in November 1985, the two leaders publicly embraced

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the goal of mutual deterrence by declaring that a nuclear war could never be won. At their second meeting in October 1986 in the Icelandic capital of Reykjavik, they famously discussed the possibility of total nuclear disarmament. Although this flirtation with nuclear abolition faltered over differences on missile defense, Gorbachev shocked the US side by offering radical concessions that dramatically narrowed their negotiating differences on the INF Treaty and START. In particular, he agreed in principle to making deep cuts in the number of ICBMs as part of an overall 50 percent reduction in strategic forces. Perhaps most importantly, Gorbachev not only agreed that the INF Treaty talks should move quickly to get done before START, he also conceded that any reductions in intermediate-range nuclear forces would necessitate intrusive mutual verification measures. The INF Treaty talks moved astonishingly quickly after Reykjavik, with the Soviets making a breathtaking series of major concessions. These included agreeing to total elimination rather than cuts, excluding French and British intermediate-range nuclear forces (which Moscow had wanted counted against NATO totals), and including shorter-range missiles (down to a range of 500 kilometers) where Moscow had a lopsided advantage. Most importantly, the two sides hammered out the details for a complex verification system that would feature almost 900 on-site inspections over more than a decade and the continuous US monitoring of the Votkinsk machine building plant where SS-20 missiles had been produced. Reagan and Gorbachev signed the INF Treaty on December 8, 1987, verifiably eliminating all land-based systems with ranges between 500 and 5,500 kilometers. It was quickly ratified by both sides and entered into force on June 1, 1988. The focus of momentum could now turn to the far more complex and higher-stakes START negotiations. Even with Reykjavik’s agreement in principle on halving strategic forces, including sublimits on MIRVs, the START talks stretched into the new administration of President George H. W. Bush. The primary US goal was to enhance strategic stability by using cuts to reduce both sides’ most destabilizing first-strike systems—MIRVed ICBMs, and especially the heavy Soviet SS-18 force—while favoring bombers and SLBMs that were seen as more stabilizing second-strike systems. However, this was a tough negotiating sell because Moscow held the advantage in ICBMs and Washington had the advantage in bombers and SLBMs. Verification would also need to be vastly more complex and intrusive than in the INF Treaty. However, over several years of tough negotiations, the two sides hammered out a treaty that achieved rough strategic parity at significantly lower force levels. Bush and Gorbachev signed START on July 31, 1991. The signing of START effectively marked the end of the nuclear arms race. However, by the time it entered into force in 1994, the Soviet Union had collapsed, and the Cold War was over. President Bush and the president of

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the new Russian Federation, Boris Yeltsin, would quickly negotiate a followon START II that would have banned MIRVs entirely. However, signed just days before President Bush left office in January 1993, it would never be ratified by the Russian Duma. President Bush also initiated two informal reciprocal arrangements to cut numbers and deployments of short-range nuclear forces—known as the Presidential Nuclear Initiatives of 1991 and 1992—which the Russian leaders agreed to match, although it is suspected that Moscow never fully implemented them. Perhaps understandably enough, the end of the Cold War quickly led to the de-emphasis of nuclear deterrence and bilateral nuclear arms control. A Post–Cold War Lull in Urgency: The William J. Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama Administrations

The post–Cold War decades saw a sharp shift in the focus of US nuclear policy away from stabilizing mutual deterrence with Russia and toward preventing nuclear proliferation by hostile regional actors like Iran, Iraq, and North Korea.14 Arms control did not go away after the Cold War, but it was pursued with less urgency and with less focus on promoting strategic stability. With START II entry into force languishing, Washington and Moscow tried to negotiate a new START III to further reduce their legacy strategic arsenals below START levels. However, this relatively low-key effort failed to produce a final agreement. The William J. Clinton administration did support a pair of hybrid multilateral initiatives with preventative nonproliferation and constraining arms control features. The Fissile Material Cut-Off Treaty (FMCT) talks sought to negotiate a universal ban on the production of the fissile material used to build nuclear weapons, while CTBT sought to codify a universal ban on all nuclear testing. FMCT talks remain under way to this day with little progress, but the United States played an instrumental role in shepherding CTBT negotiations to a successful conclusion. President Clinton signed CTBT on September 24, 1996, the day that it opened for signature. However, the US Senate subsequently refused to give its consent to ratification due to concerns about its verifiability. By its own terms, the CTBT cannot enter into force until eight specified remaining countries have ratified it: China, Egypt, India, Iran, Israel, North Korea, Pakistan, and the United States. In October 2023, Russia also withdrew its previous ratification of the CTBT.15 The George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations presided over a mixed bag for nuclear arms control. In 2002 President Bush dismantled a key piece of legacy Cold War arms control architecture by withdrawing from the ABM Treaty, over Russian objections, due to growing concerns that the United States needed the ability to defend itself against a limited

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missile attack by hostile nuclear proliferators like North Korea. On the other hand, that same year Presidents Bush and Vladimir Putin (Boris Yeltsin’s successor) signed and ratified the Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty, also known as the Moscow Treaty. This was a modest pact to further reduce each side’s operationally deployed strategic warheads within the existing START framework. The incoming Barack Obama administration sought to shift the trajectory from Cold War–style bilateral arms control to a broader nuclear disarmament paradigm. However, momentum on nuclear abolition quickly fizzled in the face of disinterest by the other nuclear powers. The only progress was another iteration of traditional bilateral arms control, the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START), which was signed by Presidents Obama and Dmitry Medvedev in Prague on April 8, 2010. Although it provided for nominal reductions beyond the Moscow Treaty, the primary purpose of New START was to replace the expiring START treaty to preserve the status quo. It largely succeeded in this modest goal, although it permitted Russian deployment increases due to changes in so-called counting rules, and some verification provisions were loosened. However, Russia rebuffed the Obama administration’s overtures for a more ambitious followon negotiation. Things went precipitously downhill from there after Russia’s 2014 annexation of parts of Ukraine and allegations by the Obama administration that Russia was grossly violating the INF Treaty by producing and then deploying banned missiles. By the end of the Obama administration, hopes to move beyond arms control toward nuclear disarmament had been set aside. Arms control itself was at a standstill and the United States began to face the prospect that the post–Cold War period of US global dominance was morphing into a new era of great-power competition that would feature the renewal of strategic nuclear competition.16 The rise and fall of the nuclear stockpiles of the United States and Russia are shown in Figure 7.1, along with key arms control agreements that were effective in preventing the numbers from growing even larger. The Return of Great-Power Strategic Nuclear Competition: The Donald Trump and Joe Biden Administrations

Nuclear arms control has struggled in recent years as renewed great-power nuclear competition has gathered steam. The Donald Trump administration restored deterrence as the centerpiece of US nuclear policy and identified Russia and China as the United States’ primary nuclear rivals, in effect reversing the post–Cold War reprioritization that had emphasized nonproliferation over strategic deterrence.17 This shift in strategic focus included prioritizing existing plans for the wholesale modernization of the United States’ aging strategic arsenal and seeking to close the gap in substrategic systems.

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How US and Russian Nuclear Arsenals Evolved (estimated stockpiled nuclear warhead count by year)

Source: Data from Federation of American Scientists, published by Statista at https://www.statista.com/chart/16305/stockpiled-nuclear-warhead-count/. Note: Excluding retired but still intact warheads in the queue for dismantlement.

In many ways Washington found itself playing catch-up, with the modernization of its nuclear arsenal still many years and many billions of dollars in the future. Meanwhile, Russia, China, and the United States were now openly racing to develop new technologies such as maneuverable hypersonic missiles up to intercontinental ranges. It is unclear whether many of these newfangled missiles will be limited by any arms control agreement. Russia has announced that it will use them as strategic nuclear delivery systems. 18 Russia is developing a number of these cutting-edge strategic systems—including an intercontinental-range nuclearpowered cruise missile and a nuclear-powered autonomous torpedo designed to inundate the coastal United States with radioactive tsunamis. Russia is also going back to MIRVs with the deployment of its new RS28 Sarmat/Satan-II heavy ICBM. Meanwhile, the rapid expansion of the hitherto modest Chinese strategic triad remains completely uncontrolled, with senior US military leaders assessing that China is now sprinting toward parity with the United States. In short, a new nuclear arms race is heating up after decades of lulling nuclear calm, and the firebreaks of legacy arms control seem to be failing. In 2019 President Trump withdrew the United States from the INF Treaty, citing blatant and continuing Russian violations and pointing to China not being covered. This leaves substrategic nuclear forces uncontrolled across

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the board. However, the Trump administration did not completely walk away from arms control. Trump named a special presidential envoy for nuclear arms control to pursue a new trilateral arms control initiative with Russia and China to negotiate an agreement covering nuclear weapons of all sizes and ranges. However, Russia showed no interest in discussing substrategic systems, and China flatly rejected participating in arms control of any kind. Bilateral negotiations to extend New START past its scheduled expiration in February 2021 also broke down in November 2020 just before the US presidential election that ushered in the new Joe Biden administration. President Biden, within days of taking office, struck a deal with Moscow to extend New START for five years through February 2026. There was even some optimistic talk about using this temporary reprieve to negotiate a new replacement agreement before then. However, such optimism was shortlived. Any hopes for a new round of strategic arms control were derailed by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and the openly adversarial relations that ensued. On February 21, 2023, President Putin seemed to put the nail in the coffin by announcing that Russia was suspending its participation in New START. The arms control forecast therefore looks bleak for the foreseeable future. It is entirely possible, perhaps even likely, that New START will not be revived before it expires in 2026, never mind trying to negotiate a new treaty to extend controls beyond that. This would usher in a world of uncontrolled strategic nuclear competition for the first time since 1972. The Biden administration’s National Security Strategy, National Defense Strategy, and Nuclear Posture Review, all released in October 2022, recognized the likelihood of an extended period of great-power competition as the pacing threat for US security. Yet the documents also reversed some of the new systems called for in the 2018 Trump NPR and continued to hold out hope for an eventual renewal of strategic arms control.19

Conclusion: The Future of Nuclear Arms Control Does nuclear arms control have a future? The most that the traditional bilateral approach is likely to offer in the foreseeable future is another extension of New START. Even that seems wildly improbable given that Russia has suspended its participation in New START. Even if New START could be revived, it would put few brakes on the trilateral nuclear modernization race. Future arms control will almost certainly need to be trilateral, if only because Beijing is now Washington’s chief geostrategic rival and seems on a trajectory to become a peer nuclear competitor. Yet trilateral arms control has never been done and Russia does not seem interested in negotiating away its current position of strength, just as China

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does not seem interested in negotiating from its current position of weakness. Like the Cold War experience, then, the road to future arms control is likely to be long, bumpy, and uncertain. The key may be to take a page from the Cold War playbook by starting small and building incrementally, perhaps by using mechanisms of cooperative security. For example, a trilateral nuclear crisis communication system would be an obvious place to start. Discussions on nuclear force structure and doctrine would likewise be useful absent the near-term prospect for new controls. Even most optimistically, any prospective new arms control agreement would probably look more like SALT than START, with ceilings rather than cuts and little to no intrusive verification. Overall ceilings might need to be set high— perhaps high enough to allow China to become a peer nuclear superpower. But within these high ceilings, there could be useful subceilings to balance asymmetries and limit the most destabilizing systems such as limits on heavily MIRVed ICBMs or intercontinental-range maneuverable hypersonic nuclear delivery vehicles. None of this would be easy. China may need to learn to live with greater transparency and, over time, some level of intrusive verification. The United States would need to consider how to address Russian and Chinese interest in putting new limits on strategic missile defenses. China and Russia might further complicate matters by seeking to include the secondary nuclear powers that also target them (Britain, France, and India). Great-power nuclear competition is back and intensifying. The dream of nuclear abolition today seems as distant as it has ever been. Arms control may not be easy, but it is the only realistic path to erecting guardrails against the ultimate threat to human survival.

Notes 1. See, for example, Hirsh, “We Are Now in a Global Cold War”; Shoemaker, “Cold War 2.0 and the New American Century”; Abrams, “The New Cold War”; Fosco, “China and Russia Declare Cold War II Against the West.” 2. Technically, certain Cold War treaties also applied to other Soviet successor states after the breakup of the Soviet Union. 3. See, for example, Bull, The Control of the Arms Race; Kissinger, The Necessity for Choice; Schelling and Halperin, Strategy and Arms Control. 4. Brodie et al., The Absolute Weapon, 76. 5. Schelling and Halperin, Strategy and Arms Control, 2. 6. Bull, “The Scope for Super Power Agreements,” 86. 7. Kissinger, The Necessity for Choice, 211. 8. For example, the failure to bring the signed SALT II and START II treaties into force, the failure of the START III talks, or thus far fruitless US efforts to negotiate a follow-on to New START with Russia or to convince China to join a trilateral nuclear arms control process.

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9. It should be noted that disarmament has fared better for other weapons of mass destruction, with the Biological Weapons Convention and Chemical Weapons Convention providing for total bans for most countries. 10. This was done by means of Article 6 of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty that applied to Britain and, eventually, also to China and France when they joined the NPT in the early 1990s as recognized nuclear weapons states. 11. According to the National Resources Defense Council, “Global Nuclear Stockpiles, 1945–2006”; and Federation of American Scientists, “Status of World Nuclear Forces 2023,” the exact numbers were 69,401 in 1986 and 8,197 in 2023. 12. Formally known as the Memorandum of Understanding Between the United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics Regarding the Establishment of a Direct Communications Link. 13. Technically, the LTBT was negotiated trilaterally between Washington, London, and Moscow. However, the Americans and British closely coordinated their negotiating stances. British inclusion was necessitated because the United States was testing nuclear weapons at Britain’s Pacific test site. 14. For example, the Clinton administration successfully pursued the indefinite extension of the NPT and the adoption of an Additional Protocol to strengthen its verification safeguards. It also negotiated an Agreed Framework to address North Korean proliferation concerns, although this ultimately proved unsuccessful. 15. Lebedev and Trevelyan, “Russia Passes Law.” 16. Fisher, “The New Era of Great Power Competition.” 17. Nuclear Posture Review, 2018. 18. Of course, no strategic systems of any type will be controlled unless New START is extended or replaced before it expires on February 4, 2026. However, the current status of new hypersonic systems within New START is unclear. Russia has acknowledged that hypersonic boost-glide systems specifically that are launched on traditional ballistic missiles are covered by New START, but otherwise it is unlikely that this type of system is covered. For an excellent discussion of this issue see Evans, Strategic Arms Control Beyond New START, 7–13. 19. See 2022 National Security Strategy, National Defense Strategy, and Nuclear Posture Review.

8 Proliferation, Nonproliferation, and Disarmament Rebecca Davis Gibbons

DEVELOPMENTS IN THE LIFE SCIENCES, CHEMISTRY, AND PHYSICS at the end of the nineteenth century allowed militaries to unleash new and terrifying weapons in the twentieth century. Since the advent of modern biological weapons, chemical weapons, and nuclear weapons (weapons of mass destruction, WMD), members of the international community have worked to prevent their spread. In the early nuclear age, scholars and government analysts predicted that if states had the resources and infrastructure, they would build the world’s newest and most destructive weapon. In 1963, President John F. Kennedy famously predicted “a world in which fifteen or twenty or twentyfive nations may have these weapons” by 1970.1 But these fears did not come to pass. Even though over thirty states meaningfully explored an indigenous nuclear bomb option,2 there are only nine nuclear-armed states in 2023, the same number that existed thirty years prior.3 Proliferation refers to the spread of weapons to additional states.4 Nonproliferation describes the vast array of efforts aimed at preventing the spread of weapons to additional states to include reducing stockpiles of weapons, technologies, and materials. Disarmament refers to reducing or eliminating military forces.5 The relatively small number of WMD-armed states today is in large part due to the success of global nonproliferation and disarmament efforts since the 1960s. In the nuclear realm, nonproliferation efforts center around the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). In 2023, India, Pakistan, Israel, North Korea, and South Sudan were the only states outside of the treaty. Biological weapons are prohibited by the 1973 Biological Weapons Convention (BWC), which boasts 184 members. Chemical weapons are prohibited via the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), a nearly universal treaty with 194 members. 131

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This chapter briefly chronicles the history of proliferation and nonproliferation efforts and the major theories explaining why states seek WMD. It then explains the development of the NPT and nuclear safeguards. Next, the chapter explores nonproliferation efforts centered on limiting supply and the dual-use challenge inherent to WMD materials and technology. It describes additional nonproliferation and disarmament treaties and agreements before concluding with several of the challenges facing these efforts today.

Historical Cases of Nuclear Proliferation Developments in science in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries led physicists to contemplate the possibility of splitting heavy atoms to generate massive amounts of energy. Several of these early breakthroughs occurred in Germany. During World War II, prominent physicists, including Albert Einstein, warned the US government that Adolf Hitler’s physicists could be building these new weapons. With this potential threat on the horizon, the United States secretly undertook a massive effort to develop enough plutonium and enriched uranium to build these hypothetical weapons. By the summer of 1945, on the early morning of July 16, the first atomic weapon exploded in the New Mexican desert. Three weeks later, US bombers dropped one atomic weapon each on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Soviet Union tested its first atomic weapon in August 1949, becoming the second nuclear-armed state. The United Kingdom would follow with its first test in Australia in 1952, France tested in present-day Algeria in 1960, and China tested a nuclear device in its western desert in 1964. During the 1960s, the Israeli government developed a secret nuclear weapons program. It did not openly test a weapon, but scholars now conclude Israel had nuclear devices by the late 1960s.6 South Africa also built a small, secret nuclear weapons program under its apartheid regime in the 1970s and 1980s; it would give up these weapons before its transition to democracy in the early 1990s. In the 1960s Indian scientists were exploring nuclear physics, and in 1974 conducted a test of an atomic device that New Delhi claimed was for “peaceful” purposes. Pakistan followed suit, building a program in the 1970s and 1980s. After India tested again in the spring of 1998, Pakistan did the same. The most recent state to develop nuclear weapons is North Korea. Pyongyang first tested a nuclear device in 2006 and, as of this writing, continues to test explosive devices and missile delivery systems. Together, the Soviet Union and the United States have maintained the largest nuclear arsenals on the planet with a combined total of approximately 70,000 weapons in the mid-1980s.7 By the early 2020s that number

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had dropped significantly, yet the nine nuclear armed states still possessed approximately 13,000 weapons, with the US and Russian arsenals accounting for over 90 percent of that number.8

Historical Cases of Chemical and Biological Weapons Proliferation The use of biological agents and harmful chemicals in combat has a long history. Industrial production of chemicals and scientific developments in the understanding of the causes of disease in the late nineteenth century made it possible for more widespread use of these weapons in warfare. Following World War I and the public outrage over the use of such weapons, nations signed the 1925 Geneva Protocol, which prohibits the use of chemical and biological weapons in warfare.9 Chemical and biological weapons were used by Japan in World War II, but none of the countries fighting in Europe chose to employ them. In the late 1960s, members of the international community began negotiating the BWC, which the United States and Soviet Union signed in 1971. During this period, the United States gave up its offensive biological weapons program and destroyed these weapons in the 1970s.10 The Soviet Union continued to develop offensive biological weapons despite joining the BWC, with Russian president Boris Yeltsin admitting to the long-standing Soviet program in the early 1990s. Though Russia has declared its compliance with its treaty commitments, it inherited a massive biological weapons program from the Soviet Union and US officials believe the program did not end. In 2022, the US State Department wrote in its annual arms control compliance report that it “assesses that the Russian Federation (Russia) maintains an offensive BW program and is in violation of its obligations under Articles I and II of the BWC.”11 The dual-use nature of biological weapons programs makes it difficult to know which countries beyond the United States and the Soviet Union have maintained these programs over time, but scholars have identified at least twenty other likely state-sponsored biological weapons programs over the past century.12 The United States began destroying its large chemical weapons arsenal in 1985. Several states possessing chemical weapons revealed their chemical weapons program as part of their responsibilities in adhering to the CWC, a disarmament treaty, which entered into force in 1997. Despite the codification of the norm against chemical weapons use in 1925, there have been several notable examples of use by states, including Italy against present-day Ethiopia in the 1930s, Iraq during the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s, and the Syrian government during its civil war beginning in 2011. In addition, North Korea and Russia have used chemical weapons during

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assassination attempts.13 As of this writing, the US State Department considers Syria to be in noncompliance with the CWC, along with Myanmar, Russia, and Iran.14

Theories of WMD Proliferation Why have some states developed nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons, while others have not? Scholars divide the causes of proliferation into the supply side and the demand side. The demand side refers to reasons why states seek or demand these weapons. The dominant demand-side theory is that states pursue WMD to bolster their national security.15 By this logic, states seek these weapons to deter attacks from or defeat other WMD-armed states or adversaries, especially those with superior conventional weapons capabilities. While the security rationale for proliferation is considered conventional wisdom, many states in the international system have experienced external security threats and not pursued WMD even as the option was available to them. Other demand-side theories are required to explain this variation in outcomes. One such theory argues that states seek or reject proliferation based on the weapon’s symbolic value, either pursuing them as emblems of prestige and modernity or rejecting them as illegitimate and inhumane weapons.16 Another theory suggests that certain factions within governments pursue WMD programs for their own narrow personal or bureaucratic benefits.17 Some demand-side theories of nuclear proliferation focus on leaders, suggesting that certain types of leaders, for example, personalist dictators18 or “oppositional nationalists,”19 are more likely to seek the bomb. Alternatively, states that are seeking to liberalize their economies and engage in global trade are less likely to build nuclear weapons.20 Some scholars consider chemical and biological weapons “the poor man’s nuclear weapon,” theorizing that states seek biological and chemical weapons as an alternative to nuclear weapons when they do not have the resources for the bomb or are otherwise thwarted in seeking nuclear technology. Indeed, existing scholarship indicates that some states that are capable of acquiring nuclear weapons may abandon their chemical weapons and biological weapons programs.21 More recently, scholars have noted regime security and domestic repression as additional motivating factors for states to acquire chemical and biological weapons, as illustrated in Syria’s use of chemical weapons on its own people.22 In contrast, supply-side theories emphasize the ability of states to develop or acquire the materials and plans needed to build WMD. Some states may seek or demand nuclear weapons, for instance, but are unable to secure the needed technology to enrich uranium or reprocess plutonium.

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Early scholars of proliferation assumed a sort of technological determinism was at play, hypothesizing that all states capable of doing so would build nuclear weapons. Policymakers also worried about supply and, thus, created constraints on WMD-related technology and material; as such, it has become much more difficult for aspiring proliferators to acquire sensitive nuclear technology.23 The Development of the NPT

The first US and Soviet plans to control nuclear weapons failed. In 1946, the United States presented the Baruch Plan at the United Nations. This step-by-step plan would involve all other nations rejecting the bomb and agreeing to international inspections and monitoring under a UN body. The United States would give up its weapons once this plan was put into place. The Soviet Union offered a counterproposal that the United States should give up its arsenal as a first step. While these proposals failed, many of the ideas would influence later actions such as the development of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in 1957. Over a decade after the failed Baruch Plan, in October 1958 Irish minister of external affairs, Frank Aiken, came to the UN General Assembly (UNGA) with a resolution calling for the world to address the problem of nuclear proliferation. In 1961, Aiken introduced UNGA Resolution 1665, appealing for an international agreement banning nuclear-armed states from giving their weapons to other states and non-nuclear-armed states from building the bomb. Initially, the two superpowers rejected this resolution, but eventually they came around to see the wisdom in Ireland’s nonproliferation proposals.24 Though formally negotiated within the UN’s Eighteen Nation Disarmament Committee in the 1960s, US and Soviet negotiators primarily drafted the NPT’s text. Articles 1 and 2 included the superpowers’ priorities. Article 1 prohibits nuclear weapons states (NWS) from transferring control of nuclear weapons to non-nuclear weapons states (NNWS). Article 2 prohibits NNWS from receiving the transfer of or manufacturing such weapons. The text established five official NWS: the United States, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, France, and China. These five states had tested a nuclear weapon by January 1, 1967. All other states that joined the treaty would have to join as non-nuclear weapons states.25 US and Soviet negotiators had left a placeholder for Article 3, on the topic of nuclear safeguards, believing that other states would help develop inspection measures to ensure treaty compliance. In consultations, several NNWS insisted on the addition of several other provisions. For example, Article 4 of the treaty makes clear that all treaty members have the right to peaceful uses of nuclear technology. Article 8

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indicates that the continuing relevance of the treaty would be assessed every five years in review conferences. Article 10 permits states to withdraw from the treaty if “extraordinary events” have “jeopardized the supreme interests of its country.” Article 10 also required the treaty parties to come together twenty-five years after entry into force to determine the future of the treaty. In the spring of 1995, the NPT’s members agreed to extend the treaty in perpetuity. The NNWS also wanted to include a commitment to nuclear disarmament in the treaty. The NPT’s Article 6 calls on each member “to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament, and on a treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control.”26 The United States and the Soviet Union were amenable to this addition, in part, because it lacked specific timelines or benchmarks for disarmament. Once the final draft was finalized, the UNGA voted on Resolution 2372 to adopt the NPT. On July 1, 1968, the NPT opened for signature and the United States, the Soviet Union, and United Kingdom signed; the treaty entered into force in March 1970. The NPT text does not include an explicit enforcement mechanism for states that fail to comply with the treaty. However, the treaty requires NNWS to conclude a safeguards agreement with the IAEA and, under the IAEA’s statute, its board of governors can refer NPT members to the UN Security Council for noncompliance. The Council can then sanction the state and call for it to resume compliance with their safeguards and the NPT. Iraq, Iran, and North Korea have all been subjected to sanctions by the Council. Nuclear Safeguards

By 1971, states and the IAEA had finalized the safeguards agreement that would be mandatory under the NPT’s Article 3 for all NNWS to verify compliance with the treaty. The agreement, known as the Comprehensive Safeguards Agreement, requires the NNWS in the treaty to declare their fissile materials stocks and allows the IAEA to inspect their nuclear facilities and account for this material to ensure that it has not been diverted for nonpeaceful purposes. These agreements are important because they allow the international community to detect activities contrary to the NPT and then address noncompliance. In other words, they allow states to have confidence that others are not cheating. In 1991, following the Gulf War in which Saddam Hussein’s Iraq invaded neighboring Kuwait, international inspectors discovered that Baghdad—a member of the NPT with safeguards in place—was building a secret nuclear weapons program that had gone undetected by IAEA inspectors.

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This revelation prompted the international community and the IAEA to devise a stronger safeguards mechanism to make it more likely that inspectors would discover a clandestine nuclear weapons program. The new agreement, known as the model Additional Protocol (AP), was finalized in 1997. It allows IAEA inspectors to access more information and additional sites—including undeclared sites—within a state. The AP is not mandatory for NPT members; most states have concluded this agreement with the IAEA, but several holdouts with nuclear infrastructure remain.27

Multilateral Nonproliferation and Disarmament Efforts As described above, scholars divide theories of proliferation into the demand side and the supply side. A significant challenge for nonproliferation efforts for all types of weapons—WMD and conventional—stems from the fact that technology employed for peaceful purposes can also be used to develop the material for weapons. For example, the spent fuel from a nuclear reactor for energy generation can be chemically separated with reprocessing technologies to extract the plutonium for usage in a nuclear bomb. Similarly, biological samples that have medical applications may be used to develop biological weapons. Thus, many WMD-related technologies and materials are known as dual-use. The global community has designed several organizations to control the supply-side elements of this dual-use challenge. The Zangger Committee

In 1971, several members of the NPT established a group to set standards for nuclear supply to fulfill the NPT’s Article 3.2, which states that treaty parties may not provide other states with material or technology used to create fissile material unless these exports are safeguarded. The members established a “trigger list” of items that require IAEA safeguards. Named for its first chairman, the committee now includes thirty-nine member states and continues to meet regularly and update the trigger list as needed. The Nuclear Suppliers Group

In May 1974, the Indian government tested a nuclear device developed using technology and material exported from the United States and Canada. As a result, the United States coordinated suppliers in the mid-1970s to create the multilateral Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG). Under NSG guidelines, states must have implemented the IAEA’s Comprehensive Safeguards Agreement to receive sensitive nuclear technology and materials such as

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enrichment and reprocessing technology, nuclear reactors, and fissile material. Just as the discovery of Iraq’s clandestine nuclear program in 1991 led to the development of a stronger IAEA safeguards agreement, this event also precipitated a revision of the NSG’s rules to try to prevent such secret nuclear programs. In 1992, the NSG created a new list of dual-use items that require the receiving state to have nuclear safeguards. In 2011, the NSG made a rule change aimed at further addressing the challenge of dual-use technologies by establishing that states seeking the supply of enrichment and reprocessing technology must have an Additional Protocol safeguards agreement in place with the IAEA or a regional equivalent.28 Today, the NSG boasts forty-eight members. Any state that exports nuclear-related material and technology may apply to join the group. New members are approved by consensus. NSG membership has several benefits, including making the rules regarding global nuclear trade, increasing nuclear-related exports, accessing nuclear technology, and increasing a state’s status within the international community.29 Limits on nuclear supply are not without controversy among the membership of the NPT. NPT Article 4 states that countries have an “inalienable right” to nuclear energy for peaceful purposes. As such, when nuclear suppliers developed the NSG or when the United States and its allies have attempted to stop states from purchasing or using sensitive technology, many NNWS have protested that they have a right to this technology. Iran and North Korea have made this case several times in the past two decades.30 The Australia Group

The international community has also come together to address supply concerns for other types of weapons. After the Iraqi government used chemical weapons in the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s, the international community founded an informal, voluntary group to identify exports that may contribute to the development of chemical weapons, known as the Australia Group. This group eventually extended its mandate to include biological weapons. First meeting in 1985, the group now includes forty-three members. Members are expected to deny the export of materials if the importing country might potentially use them for weapons. Members are also states parties of the BWC and the CWC. The Missile Technology Control Regime

In the 1980s, the Group of 7 (G7) industrialized states came together to address the global spread of missile technology as nuclear-armed missiles were considered destabilizing. They developed the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR), an informal political agreement in which mem-

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bers will abide by certain guidelines related to the export of missiles or missile technology. In particular, the agreement aims to limit the development of delivery vehicles for chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons. Controlled items under the agreement include ballistic missiles, space launch vehicles, sounding rockets, cruise missiles, and unmanned vehicles that can deliver a payload of at least 500 kilograms to a distance of 300 kilometers. Today, the regime has thirty-five members.31 The Wassenaar Arrangement

The Wassenaar Arrangement is another export control regime created to set guidelines for the export of dual-use items as well as conventional weapons. Under this arrangement, established in 1996, members are expected to provide information and motivations on their exports of specific items. In addition, the members seek to avoid the destabilizing accumulation of weapons in regions around the world. Members are supposed to give special scrutiny to requests to export sensitive technologies and they are not supposed to export items that another member has recently determined not to sell. The group operates by consensus, with each member having veto power over new guidelines. The forty-two participating states include the United States and its transatlantic and Pacific allies as well as Russia, Mexico, South Africa, Argentina, Ukraine, and India.32

Other Nuclear Nonproliferation and Disarmament Treaties In addition to the NPT and its associated agreements, there are several other treaties, in various stages of development that attempt to address nuclear proliferation and nuclear disarmament. Nuclear-Weapons-Free Zones

In the aftermath of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, several states within the Caribbean, Central America, and South America joined together to negotiate a nuclear-weapons-free zone (NWFZ) in their region. After several years of negotiations, the Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons in Latin America and the Caribbean, also known as the Treaty of Tlatelolco, opened for signature in February 1967. Under this agreement, none of the members may build, maintain, or test nuclear weapons, nor may they store the nuclear weapons of other states on their territories. Though many states joined the treaty early on, the treaty did not come into force until 2002 with Cuba’s ratification; thirty-three states are now part of this NWFZ.

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With the development of this first NWFZ in the 1960s, the NPT treaty negotiations, which were occurring at the same time, included in Article 7 the right of states to conclude regional treaties banning nuclear weapons. Since the development of the Treaty of Tlatelolco, several additional regions have established NWFZs. Today, these zones include the South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone Treaty (Treaty of Rarotonga), which entered into force in 1986; the Treaty on the Southeast Asia Nuclear Weapon-Free Zone (Treaty of Bangkok), which entered into force in 1997; the African Nuclear-Weapon-Free Zone Treaty (Treaty of Pelindaba), and the Treaty on a Nuclear-Weapon-Free Zone in Central Asia, both of which entered into force in 2009. Each of the existing NWFZs include protocols for the five NPT nuclear-armed states to sign and ratify, calling for these states to abide by the rules of these zones. In addition, Mongolia declared itself a singlestate nuclear-weapon-free zone in 1992. Each of these agreements promote nuclear nonproliferation norms and contribute to nuclear disarmament. Other areas in which nuclear weapons are prohibited by treaty include Antarctica, outer space, the moon, and the seabed. The Antarctica Treaty, which entered into force in 1961, provided an important precedent in the early nuclear age as it prohibited military activities, including the stationing of weapons, on the entire territory of Antarctica. The text explicitly bans nuclear testing or the disposal of radioactive waste. Similarly, the 1967 Outer Space Treaty prohibits the stationing of WMD, installing military bases, and testing weapons in space.33 It also establishes that “outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty.”34 Following from the ideas that space should be free from weapons and open to peaceful uses by all states, the Moon Agreement entered into force in 1984. This agreement supplements the Outer Space Treaty by applying its tenets to the moon and other celestial bodies. It declares that these bodies should be used for peaceful purposes only and thus prohibits WMD, military installations, weapons testing, or other military activity on the moon or in its orbit. The Moon Agreement has only eighteen members as of 2023 and, unlike the Outer Space Treaty, does not include the United States, China, or Russia. All three states have plans for moon bases and mining, which could lead to competition and conflict over moon resources.35 The Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty

Following growing global concerns about the negative health effects of atmospheric nuclear testing in the early 1960s, the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union negotiated the Limited Test Ban Treaty (LTBT), which prohibits nuclear testing under water or in the atmosphere— anywhere but underground. In 1974, the two superpowers agreed to an additional limit on their underground nuclear tests; the Threshold Test Ban

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Treaty required that any test could not exceed a yield of 150 kilotons. Though the LTBT did not enter into force until 1990, all three parties followed the prescriptions of the treaty after its adoption in the 1970s. This ambition to develop a treaty to fully eliminate nuclear testing was not fulfilled until the 1990s, when international parties began negotiating the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). The CTBT, which opened for signature in 1996, prohibits all nuclear explosions in all environments and created the International Monitoring System to detect nuclear explosions through radionuclide, seismic, hydroacoustic, and infrasound-detecting stations spread throughout the world. The International Data Centre in Vienna collects information from the monitoring stations and shares it with states that have signed or ratified the treaty. After its entry into force, the treaty will allow verification of potential violations through challenge inspections. The CTBT has existed for a quarter-century and yet it has not entered into force. Per the treaty’s Annex II, forty-four specific states must ratify the treaty before it reaches this milestone.36 These states were those with nuclear reactors or nuclear research reactors in 1996 when the treaty was finalized. The holdouts from this group include China, India, Iran, Israel, North Korea, Pakistan, the United Kingdom, and the United States. President Bill Clinton signed the treaty on behalf of the United States as the first signatory in September 1996. The treaty went before the US Senate in the fall of 1999 and was defeated 51–48 in a partisan vote. As with all treaties considered by the Senate, the CTBT required two-thirds of the Senate’s votes to pass. Since 1999, the Senate has not voted on the treaty again even though the United States remains a signatory, voluntarily abides by the treaty’s prohibition on nuclear testing, and contributes financially to the treaty’s International Monitoring System.37 In October 2023, Russia further complicated the process by withdrawing from its previous ratification of CTBT.38 The Fissile Material Cut-Off Treaty

The Fissile Material Cut-Off Treaty (FMCT) does not yet exist, though members of the international community have discussed this notional treaty for years. The goal of the treaty would be to prohibit additional development of the key materials for making nuclear explosions, plutonium, and enriched uranium.39 A 1993 UN resolution called for beginning negotiations of this treaty, and in 1995 the treaty was put on the agenda of the sixty-five-member Conference on Disarmament. The treaty has stagnated in this consensus-based body ever since. Existing stocks of fissile material also present an obstacle for nonproliferation and disarmament. In 2021, there were approximately 1,110 metric tons of highly enriched uranium and 545 tons of separated plutonium in the world.40 Eliminating current stocks is difficult. Enriched uranium can be “down blended,” which means it is combined with natural uranium, but

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plutonium is a greater challenge. The United States has plans to deposit diluted plutonium in underground waste sites. Other states, including Japan, have developed nuclear power reactors that can use plutonium as their fuel source, but these pose considerable proliferation risks. The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons

As described above, Article 6 of the NPT called for all member states to pursue effective measures toward nuclear disarmament. The end of the Cold War raised expectations for greater progress on nuclear disarmament. Though the United States and Russia have significantly reduced their arsenals, the continued reliance on nuclear weapons combined with nuclear modernization plans among the NWS led a group of NNWS and antinuclear activists to pursue disarmament outside of the NPT context. These diplomats and antinuclear activists were inspired by the humanitarian disarmament movement. Focusing on the concept of human security (vice national security), three different treaties beginning in the 1990s argued for the abolition of certain weapons based on their potential effects on individuals and the environment. The first of these treaties, known as the 1997 Mine Ban Treaty or the Ottawa Convention, prohibits states from possessing antipersonnel landmines. In many instances, these mines have been left behind after warfare, which can harm civilians when they inadvertently trigger them. The next treaty was the Convention on Cluster Munitions, which bans cluster munitions. It entered into force in 2010 and currently includes 111 states parties. This humanitarian rhetoric then came into the nuclear context with the final 2010 NPT Review Conference consensus document noting the “catastrophic humanitarian consequences that would result from the use of nuclear weapons.”41 A new antinuclear movement began. In three humanitarian conferences in 2013 and 2014, diplomats and activists learned about the effects of nuclear weapons and built momentum toward negotiating and then adopting the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) in 2017.42 This treaty bans nuclear weapons and activities associated with their creation, possession, and threatened or actual use. The treaty’s backers aim to stigmatize nuclear weapons and create a global norm against their possession. No NWS or state protected by extended nuclear deterrence has joined the treaty, which entered into force in 2021.

Challenges Facing Nonproliferation and Disarmament Today Many of the nonproliferation efforts described in this chapter have required great-power cooperation and leadership. In a period of rising tensions,

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made worse by Russia’s war in Ukraine, it will be increasingly difficult for the United States, Russia, and China to address difficulties facing the nonproliferation regime and to make progress on nuclear disarmament. The various challenges, if left unaddressed, may serve to weaken future efforts to adapt and enforce nonproliferation rules, causing states to lose confidence in the regime’s ability to stave off proliferation. Without a strong nuclear nonproliferation regime, achieving significant nuclear reductions will also be difficult. Several of these challenges are described below. Nonproliferation and Disarmament Failures

In 2003, North Korea withdrew from the NPT, as permitted under Article 10, and then developed and tested nuclear weapons. The NPT allows states to acquire safeguarded dual-use nuclear technology and material for peaceful purposes. Once North Korea withdrew from the treaty, however, it transferred its “peaceful” technology to its weapons program. As of this writing, it has conducted six nuclear tests since 2006. Iran also continues to pose a challenge for the nuclear nonproliferation regime. Diplomacy succeeded in halting Iran’s nuclear program for several years through the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). But since the US withdrawal in 2018, the deal appears dead. What can these nonproliferation failures teach us? Each case highlights the challenges facing the NPT when the great powers are not cooperating. For example, attempts at negotiation have done little to affect the overall trajectory of North Korea’s program, and the US government has accused Russia and China of “enabling” Pyongyang by not supporting stronger sanctions.43 US-led efforts to strengthen the NPT’s withdrawal clause to make it more difficult for states to exit with all their nuclear technology has been met with little interest by China.44 US president Donald Trump’s JCPOA withdrawal is another example. If renewed negotiations fail and Iran were to seek nuclear weapons, its Middle East rival Saudi Arabia has vowed it will also seek nuclear weapons.45 Two new nuclear weapons states would severely undermine the legitimacy of the NPT and global nonproliferation efforts. The Disarmament Divide

Rising tensions among the great powers render nuclear disarmament progress unlikely any time soon. All the NWS are improving their nuclear arsenals, whether quantitatively or qualitatively, sending a message that they plan to maintain these weapons well into the future. At the same time, many states are deeply committed to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. This deep divide triggers frustration on both sides and will make it more difficult to secure global cooperation to make adaptations to the regime when necessary. Even worse for the regime, some states may eventually decide that

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the NPT is not a worthwhile endeavor. A few disarmament advocates have called for NNWS to withdraw from the NPT to protest insufficient disarmament progress.46 Thus far, this idea does not appear to be widespread among NPT members, but it was telling that at the 2022 NPT Review Conference one diplomat from a Pacific nation said he would recommend his country pull out of the treaty because the meeting was a waste of his time.47 Emerging Multipolarity and the War in Ukraine

As described above, the NPT and the broader nonproliferation architecture has largely succeeded (with some exceptions) during periods of bipolarity and unipolarity. Today’s emerging multipolarity, however, may undermine this regime. Increasing animosity among the United States, Russia, and China makes it less likely that the great powers will promote universal participation in agreements such as the Additional Protocol or work together to adapt the treaty regime when weaknesses become apparent. At the very least, great-power tensions will make it less likely that the NWS will work toward fulfilling Article 6 of the treaty as they come to rely more on nuclear deterrence with an eye toward one another.48 Russia’s war in Ukraine brought great-power tension to new extremes. Not only will the resulting poor relations make future regime cooperation difficult, but the war has also increased the global salience of nuclear weapons, which may lead to unfortunate developments for nuclear nonproliferation. There are several ways in which the war in Ukraine has brought nuclear weapons back into public consciousness. Russian president Vladimir Putin has issued several nuclear threats to deter outside involvement in the war. Early in the war, Belarus, an ally of Russia, voted to permit the stationing of Russian nuclear weapons and troops on its soil. In addition, the fact that Ukraine hosted Soviet weapons during the Cold War has led some around the world to conclude that Ukraine would have been safer if it had kept those nuclear weapons. Indeed, the war spurred Sweden and Finland to seek North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) membership with the protection of a nuclear alliance, and in the early days of the war former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe floated the idea that Japan should consider a possible nuclear-sharing arrangement with the United States.49

Conclusion Historically, when a new weapon or military capability was invented, most states would seek out the new technology and incorporate it into their arsenals. This has not been the case with WMD. Owing in part to the world’s many nonproliferation efforts over decades, only a small minority of states

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possess WMD today. Past achievements do not necessarily indicate future success, however. While the nonproliferation regime has shown great resiliency, current global tensions indicate that we may be entering a new period in which WMD, especially nuclear weapons, find more relevance around the world and the most powerful states lack the will to cooperate to address the many challenges within the regime.

Notes 1. “The President’s News Conference of March 21, 1963 (107).” 2. Bleek, “When Did (and Didn’t) States Proliferate?” 3. The number remains the same because South Africa gave up its program in the early 1990s and North Korea has become a nuclear weapons state since then. 4. To be more precise, horizontal proliferation refers to additional states developing nuclear weapons, while vertical proliferation occurs when nuclear-armed states increase their arsenals. 5. Disarmament is distinct from arms control; the latter may or may not include reducing military forces as a goal. 6. Bleek, “When Did (and Didn’t) States Proliferate?” 7. Kristensen, Korda, and Norris, “Estimated Global Nuclear Warhead Inventories 1945–2022.” 8. Ibid. 9. “Geneva Protocol.” 10. Cirincione, Wolfsthal, and Rajkumar, Deadly Arsenals, 60. 11. Adherence to and Compliance with Arms Control, Nonproliferation and Disarmament Agreements and Commitments, 2022, 38. 12. Carus, “A Century of Biological-Weapons Programs (1915–2015).” 13. Kelle, “The CWC at 25.” 14. Compliance with the Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production, Stockpiling and Use of Chemical Weapons and on Their Destruction, 4. 15. Sagan, “Why Do States Build Nuclear Weapons?” Debs and Monteiro, Nuclear Politics. 16. Sagan, “Why Do States Build Nuclear Weapons?” Holum makes this argument about prestige in reference to all WMD in “The Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction,” 1–4. 17. Ibid. 18. Way and Weeks, “Making It Personal.” 19. Hymans, The Psychology of Nuclear Proliferation. 20. Solingen, Nuclear Logics. 21. Horowitz and Narang, “Poor Man’s Atomic Bomb?” 22. Koblentz, “Regime Security.” 23. Kaplow, “The Changing Face of Nuclear Proliferation.” 24. Gibbons, The Hegemon’s Tool Kit, 5. 25. China and France did not join the NPT until 1992. 26. “Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT).” 27. Gibbons and Robinson, “Twenty-Five Years Safer?” 28. The regional equivalent was an exception made for Brazil and Argentina, members of the NSG without an Additional Protocol, that maintain a regional

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nuclear inspection agency with one another known as the Brazilian-Argentine Agency for Accounting and Control of Nuclear Materials. 29. Hibbs discusses each of these benefits in the context of India’s desire to join the NSG. Hibbs, “Eyes on the Prize.” 30. For example, see Dahl, “Q&A: Is There a ‘Right’ to Enrich Uranium?” 31. “The Missile Technology Control Regime at a Glance.” 32. ”The Wassenaar Arrangement on Export Controls for Conventional Arms and Dual-Use Goods and Technologies,” n.d., https://www.wassenaar.org/about-us/. 33. “The Outer Space Treaty at a Glance.” 34. “Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, Including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies,” https:// www.unoosa.org/pdf/gares/ARES_21_2222E.pdf. 35. Ibid. In addition, according to a recent Lawfare post, ASAT tests are not considered illegal under the treaty: “The Outer Space Treaty does not define ‘peaceful purposes’; thus, the international community has interpreted it to mean ‘nonaggressive’ or ‘nonhostile’ rather than ‘nonmilitary.’” “ASAT Tests Are Not Considered Illegal Under the Treaty,” https://www.lawfareblog.com/placement-weapons-outer -space-dichotomy-between-word-and-deed. 36. Giovaninni, “The CTBT at 25 and Beyond.” 37. Herzog and Baron, “Public Support, Political Polarization, and the NuclearTest Ban.” 38. Lebedev and Trevelyan, “Russia Passes Law.” 39. For more detail, see Feiveson et al., Unmaking the Bomb. 40. “Fissile Material Stocks.” 41. “2010 Review Conference of the Parties to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons Final Document.” 42. For more on the TPNW, see Gibbons, “The Humanitarian Turn in Nuclear Disarmament and the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.” 43. Nichols, “U.S. Accuses China, Russia of Enabling North Korea’s Kim Jong Un.” 44. See, for example, Bunn and Rhinelander, “NPT Withdrawal.” 45. “Saudi Crown Prince Says Will Develop Nuclear Bomb if Iran Does.” 46. See, for example, Pretorius and Sauer, “When Is It Legitimate to Abandon the NPT?” 47. “Tenth Review Conference of the Parties to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, Plenary Meeting August 22, 2022.” 48. Gibbons and Herzog, “Durable Institution Under Fire?” 49. Johnson, “Japan Should Consider Hosting U.S. Nuclear Weapons, Abe Says.”

9 Arms Control Monitoring Regimes Justin Anderson

MANY ARMS CONTROL AGREEMENTS ARE NEGOTIATED AND IMPLEmented between states that are competitors or adversaries; some represent compacts completely prohibiting weapons considered so dangerous, destabilizing, or inhumane that any violation of the agreement would be a serious threat to international security. Given the stakes, trust between states parties that all participants in an arms control agreement will fully carry out their obligations cannot be assumed. Successful arms control agreements require each participant’s implementation of, and compliance with, the terms of the agreement. Various types of monitoring are often directly codified within the agreement; for example, in the form of carefully regulated on-site inspections of military bases hosting capabilities regulated by the accord. Treaties often also include language permitting or condoning the use of other technical means to gather information germane to assessments whether states parties are abiding by the limits, prohibitions, or other key tenets of the agreement. Monitoring is central to the implementation of arms control agreements but is often overlooked in scholarly literature. This chapter introduces the mechanics of arms control monitoring while also contextualizing their importance to state party determinations regarding whether other participants are complying with the key provisions of an accord.

Key Definitions The terms below have specific definitions within the context of the development and implementation of arms control agreements, to include monitoring regimes. 147

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Monitoring

Monitoring includes activities and processes whereby a state party to an arms control agreement observes, records, and collects information regarding another party’s implementation of, and compliance with, the terms of the agreement. Monitoring can be conducted via various means and practices both direct and remote. Direct means can include on-site inspections conducted by trained inspectors or the placement of recording devices, such as sensors or cameras, at locations covered by the agreement; for example, International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) cameras installed to monitor spent fuel ponds at civilian nuclear power plants. The terms of direct forms of monitoring are typically negotiated with care by all parties involved in an arms control agreement. An interest in pursuing a significant degree of transparency in the armaments and military operations of another state party must be balanced against the operational and national security interests of one’s own armed forces. For agreements that include some form of monitoring of civilian sites, such as nuclear power plants by the IAEA for the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) or industrial chemical production facilities by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) for the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), states parties seek to balance a level of transparency with private industry concerns about protecting proprietary information. Indirect or remote means can include national technical means (NTM), which refers to satellites, sensors, or other technological means that are not co-located or emplaced on the national territory of a state party, but can gather information relevant to an agreement. Information collected via direct and remote means, the prescription of the ways and means by which it is collected, as well as any prohibitions against preventing the gathering of certain data, are often collectively referred to as an arms control agreement’s “verification regime.” A verification regime represents an agreement-specific approach to providing the necessary, but not necessarily sufficient, data for a state party to assess whether other parties to the agreement are fulfilling their obligations. Monitoring and verification are processes central to the practice of arms control, and the two are sometimes referred to in a seamless manner. As discussed below, however, they are related but separate processes. This chapter uses the term monitoring regime instead of verification regime. Implementation

Implementation includes actions undertaken by a state party to fulfill its interpretation and understanding of its obligations under an arms control

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agreement, to include its obligations to allow monitoring of the armaments, facilities, and activities covered by the accord. Compliance

Compliance is the degree to which a state party fulfills its obligations per the terms of an arms control agreement. Interpretations may differ between states parties, to include regarding obligations to allow or support monitoring activities—thus, mechanisms to discuss and resolve potential differing interpretations of obligations are also an important part of the terms of an arms control agreement. Verification

Verification is an assessment by one party of another party’s compliance with the spirit and the letter of the law in meeting the obligations of an arms control agreement. This is inherently an internal political and policy process by a participating state party. In the contemporary era, major powers have considerable means for monitoring other states. But a complete picture of another state’s arsenal and a full understanding of its strategic intent is not possible. As a result, the data provided by an arms control agreement’s monitoring regime provides necessary, but not sufficient, information for a determination of whether another state party is in full compliance with the terms of an agreement. This determination will be made by the decisionmakers of participating states based on a range of evidence and other factors, to include broader strategic assessments and/or political imperatives.

Monitoring Regimes A range of armaments, facilities, and activities are currently subject to monitoring by major arms control regimes. There are currently two major arms control treaties, the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) and the Conventional Armed Forces in Europe Treaty (CFE Treaty), that limit numbers of designated armaments, require participants to report these armaments in terms of overall numbers and numbers per specified locations, and have monitoring regimes focused on counting these armaments. Participants provide an initial “baseline” report and subsequently provide treaty-mandated notifications that update these numbers. For example, a redeployment of a wing of bombers from one air base to another would be subject to notification, as would dismantling

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tanks assigned to a unit at a combined arms base. In both cases, armaments limited by the treaty and located at bases subject to reporting and monitoring changed in terms of numbers at one or more of these sites. New START 1 is a bilateral nuclear arms control treaty between the United States and Russian Federation.2 It limits the two parties to 700 deployed and 800 deployed and nondeployed nuclear-capable strategic offensive armaments: intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), deployed submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs), and deployed heavy bombers equipped for nuclear armaments),3 and 1,550 nuclear warheads on these platforms.4 These armaments are subject to monitoring by NTM and on-site inspections, with each state permitted eighteen inspections a year: ten Type 1 inspections of deployed or nondeployed systems and eight Type 2 inspections of nondeployed systems. CFE Treaty

The CFE Treaty has thirty members, although the Russian Federation “suspended” its participation in 2007. The treaty limits conventional armaments, referred to as treaty-limited equipment (TLE), located within the treaty’s specified area of application (AoA) in Europe.5 TLE is limited across five categories: tanks, armored combat vehicles (ACVs), artillery, aircraft, and helicopters. Each category includes various types (including fifty types of ACVs). In addition to national limits within the AoA, the treaty also includes regional limits reflecting its original Cold War intent to reduce the concentration of conventional armaments in Central Europe. TLE located at so-called treatyspecific objects of verification (OOV) are subject to on-site inspection. OOV refers to units possessing TLE and “storage sites, maintenance units, military training establishments, and airfields” with TLE, as well as sites where TLE is dismantled.6 OOVs are located at declared sites. Given the treaty’s scope, some declared sites are large military bases hosting various categories of TLE and including multiple OOVs. TLE are subject to monitoring by NTM and on-site inspections. The treaty includes four types of on-site inspections to count a state party’s TLE reported at specific locations: declared site, challenge, reduction, and certification inspections, with the first type representing the most common type of inspection.7 For those declared sites with multiple OOVs, a “carefully negotiated compromise” late in the treaty’s negotiations granted inspection teams the right of access to both.8 The treaty is currently within its “residual” period following initial “baseline” and “reduction” periods.9 Within this phase, each state is potentially subject to a number of declared site inspections; states with more TLE are subject to more inspections.10 In addition, there are currently two major multilateral arms control treaties (CWC and NPT) with monitoring regimes that prohibit an entire

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category of armaments; one prohibits chemical weapons and applies to all members, the other prohibits nuclear weapons for all members except five states.11 Their monitoring regimes are primarily focused on the potential development and production of these prohibited weapons. Chemical Weapons Convention

The CWC prohibits developing, storing, transferring, or employing chemical weapons. The OPCW is the international body responsible for monitoring state party compliance. All states parties must provide information on their stockpiles of “scheduled” chemicals (“certain toxic chemicals and their precursors . . . [to] ensure that such chemicals are only used for purposes not prohibited”) and the civilian chemical industry facilities that produce and store these substances.12 These sites are subject to OPCW inspections, with site selection determined by an algorithm. While specific site selection is random, the algorithm factors in national numbers of declared sites such that countries with more sites are more likely to host more inspections within a given year.13 States parties that formerly possessed military chemical weapon programs must also provide additional information on associated development, production, and storage facilities, as well as facilities devoted to disposing of these now-prohibited weapons. These facilities are also subject to OPCW inspection.14 The treaty provides for three types of inspections: routine, challenge, and investigation of alleged use.15 While the timelines and procedures for these inspections vary, during each type OPCW inspectors gather samples that are subject to laboratory analysis, with the most common approach involving gas chromatography–mass spectrometry to determine the collected substance’s properties.16 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty

The NPT allows only five states—the United States, the Russian Federation, the United Kingdom, France, and China—to possess nuclear weapons. These state’s nuclear arsenals and associated bases are not subject to monitoring under the provisions of the NPT.17 All other member states are prohibited from possessing nuclear weapons and are subject to direct and remote monitoring established through bilateral agreements concluded with the IAEA, the international body tasked with monitoring the NPT. The purpose of IAEA monitoring is to ensure that state parties’ civilian nuclear facilities and materials are solely devoted to “peaceful nuclear activities” and the latter are safely stored and subject to accurate accounting protocols.18 This ensures that no aspect of a state party’s civilian nuclear program is being used for the development of a military nuclear weapons program and no nuclear materials are

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being diverted, either within this state or to some other actor, to build nuclear weapons. Each NPT member outside of the five states permitted to possess nuclear weapons is required to have a comprehensive safeguards agreement with the IAEA. Per the terms of that agreement, the state declares the facilities and nuclear materials associated with its civilian nuclear program, to include nuclear power plants and research reactors, which are then subject to IAEA monitoring by on-site inspection and direct monitoring devices. IAEA inspectors can take measurements and samples, and destructive and nondestructive assay analyses are used to determine the accuracy of the state’s declarations.19 Discovery of Iraq’s illicit nuclear weapons program in 1991, which included multiple facilities outside of those the Iraqi government declared to the IAEA, revealed the importance of providing the agency with the ability to conduct monitoring activities, such as collecting air and soil samples, beyond a state’s declared sites. This led to the development and negotiation of Additional Protocol (AP) agreements (additional to the earlier comprehensive safeguards agreements, which proved not quite comprehensive enough) granting the IAEA the right to conduct more investigative types of activities; to date, the international agency has concluded these agreements with 139 NPT member states.20 AP agreements grant the IAEA the right to conduct inspections at “all parts of a State’s nuclear fuel cycle, from uranium mines to nuclear waste and other locations where nuclear material intended for non-nuclear uses is present,” to include “short-notice access” to buildings at nuclear sites.21 The additional authorities granted by an AP agreement allows the IAEA to better serve its role as the NPT’s “nuclear watchdog,” and has significantly strengthened the ability of the agency to identify nuclear proliferation activities and illicit nuclear weapon programs. Notable by its absence in this list of monitoring regimes is the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC). The treaty, which bans all biological weapons, has no monitoring regime. Both during negotiation and after entry into force key states parties failed to reach agreement on how to design and implement an approach to monitoring compliance.22

Approaches to Monitoring and Verification From the Cold War to the present day, most arms control monitoring regimes have included both remote and direct forms of monitoring. Remote Monitoring Satellites. The modern era of arms control dates to the advent of satellites

capable of conducting overhead reconnaissance by taking photographs of

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the territory of other states. This provided governments with the ability to identify a foreign state’s key military facilities such as ICBM silos and missile test ranges, and important pieces of above ground military hardware such as mobile ballistic missiles capable of launching nuclear weapons. This era opened with the United States’ successful placement of the Discoverer XIV/CORONA satellite in orbit in August 1960. Operating well beyond the sovereign limits of other states, CORONA’s onboard camera could take photographs of approximately 8 meters resolution and then jettison film in canisters for retrieval by specialized US Air Force aircraft following reentry into the earth’s atmosphere.23 The CORONA satellites represented a groundbreaking technological and engineering achievement that revolutionized the processes and capabilities of intelligence collection.24 It also proved critical to advancing the prospects for arms control agreements. Prior to the advent of satellite reconnaissance, states were limited in their ability to monitor the compliance of others. States that resisted providing transparency could stonewall diplomatic proposals that included monitoring provisions. When President Dwight D. Eisenhower suggested in 1955 the United States and Soviet Union negotiate a confidence-building agreement allowing aerial reconnaissance flights over their territories, for example, Moscow summarily rejected the proposed Open Skies Treaty as an “espionage plot.”25 CORONA and its successors, however, broke a state monopoly on this type of information. While satellites had limitations—they could not observe activities within buildings or underground, for example—Soviet leaders were forced to conclude they could not keep their military forces (especially, large objects such as long-range nuclear delivery vehicles) entirely under wraps. This reality changed the cost-benefit calculus for the Soviet Union and other states of engaging in arms control negotiations that included reciprocal monitoring arrangements. In addition to opening the aperture for including monitoring provisions within arms control agreements, satellites also immediately became key to the implementation and compliance processes for these accords. Overhead imagery provided the ability to observe military equipment such as bombers parked on runways and submarines moored at port facilities. With each pass of a satellite over a foreign state’s land, air, and naval bases providing additional snapshots of this equipment, analysts were able to build a picture of the overall number, deployment patterns, posture, and (to a degree) operations of these forces. This information became central to monitoring arms control agreements limiting numbers of “strategic” (i.e., long-range) deployed nuclearcapable delivery vehicles. By the early 1970s, the United States and Soviet Union were confident in their respective ability to record photographic evidence of armaments considered central to any future strategic nuclear arms

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control treaty.26 The acceptance of this new information environment and the prospect that satellites and other remote monitoring tools could undergird a relationship of strategic stability informed the inclusion of national technical means in US-Soviet arms control agreements. When the superpowers’ Strategic Arms Limitation Talks yielded the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and Interim Agreement limiting strategic offensive arms in 1972, both accords stated: “For the purpose of providing assurance of compliance with the provisions of this [agreement], each Party shall use national technical means of verification at its disposal in a manner consistent with generally recognized principles of international law.”27 Both parties also pledged “not to interfere” or “use deliberate concealment measures which impede verification” with the other’s NTM.28 This principle of noninterference with NTM has remained critically important to arms control agreements and monitoring regimes over time; it was included, for example, within New START.29 From the Cold War to the present day, satellites have remained a critically important remote means of monitoring state party compliance with arms control treaties. Additional forms of remote monitoring. While satellites are often the first platforms associated with national technical means, there are numerous other ways for states to conduct remote monitoring of arms control agreements. Aircraft operating in international airspace, for example, have long played a role in collecting data relevant to agreements such as the Limited Test Ban Treaty (LTBT). The United States first equipped RB-29 aircraft with specialized filters for collecting particulates providing evidence of nuclear testing in 1948, a mission later transferred to the WC-135 Constant Phoenix airframe.30 Following the 1963 signature of the LTBT, which banned nuclear weapon tests in “the atmosphere; beyond its limits, including outer space; or under water, including territorial waters or high seas,” the ability of US aircraft to collect air samples providing evidence of above-ground nuclear testing gave Washington a critically important tool for monitoring Soviet compliance with the agreement.31 Today, the United States and countries such as Japan continue to fly aircraft that can collect evidence of suspected nuclear weapons tests.32 Fixed sensors located outside of the territory of states under observation can also play an important arms control monitoring role. Sensors located on the ground and under water, for example, are an important part of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Organization’s (CTBTO) International Monitoring System (IMS), which is tasked with global monitoring of nuclear weapon tests banned by the accord. IMS sensors can detect seismic waves and subtle changes in water pressure caused by sound waves that represent tell-tale signs of nuclear weapons tests.33 The CTBTO also operates eighty radionuclide monitoring stations collecting air samples.

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Filters are checked daily for gamma ray spectrum data, with suspected positive results sent to the organization’s International Data Centre in Vienna for additional analysis.34 The fidelity of these various sensor arrays, their ability to collect various forms of data and samples, and the global nature of the CTBTO’s monitoring network allow the organization to detect nuclear weapon tests and determine their origin; for example, the network has successfully detected and characterized every North Korean underground nuclear test.35 Direct Monitoring

Remote monitoring provides important data for determining compliance with arms control agreements, but for those accords that seek to limit specific weapons or their means of delivery some form of direct monitoring is necessary to provide states parties with evidence of others’ compliance. The direct monitoring of armaments and military activities on the national territory of a state party by another party (or parties) to the accord can be undertaken by human inspectors or by monitoring devices, with many post–Cold War arms control treaties utilizing both. On-site inspections of military hardware covered by an arms control treaty were pioneered by the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF Treaty) between the United States and Soviet Union (later Russian Federation). This former accord provided a general template for these inspections utilized subsequently by a number of other agreements, to include the CFE Treaty and the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaties. As this template, with some refinements, represents a tried-and-true approach after thirty-plus years of US, Soviet, and Russian teams inspecting each other’s military equipment and bases (and with CFE involving many more European states), the case study below describes an on-site inspection from a notional accord that draws on processes utilized by these nuclear and conventional arms control treaties.36 It specifically highlights several key aspects of on-site inspections for treaties with monitoring regimes focused on counting specific armaments: Timeline. An inspecting party must be allowed to conduct an inspection in

a timely fashion to get an accurate snapshot of the number of treaty-limited armaments at a specific location subject to monitoring and dispel any concern the inspected party might move or hide items that can be counted against its central limits. The inspected party, however, must also be permitted a window of time to prepare the site for inspection. The inspection of the base, to include specific facilities or pieces of equipment, should also be time limited to protect the right of the inspected state to reveal only what is necessary to confirm information directly relevant to the treaty.

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Access. An inspecting party must be permitted access to a base hosting equipment covered by an accord to determine that treaty limited armaments are present and their numbers align with treaty reporting. The inspected state, however, has the right to restrict inspector access so they can observe and tally these armaments but not further inspect them nor otherwise roam over a base, possibly collecting data on facilities, forces, or personnel outside the scope of the treaty. A treaty may place limits, for example, on which buildings inspectors can enter, allowing the inspected state to deny access to buildings that cannot house items limited by the accord. Procedures. An effective monitoring regime provides orderly, logical, and

practical on-site inspection standards and procedures, to include recording any disputes, for the inspectors and the inspected base’s host team. This highlights the seriousness of the task at hand and encourages professionalism between the two teams. Additional forms of direct monitoring. In addition to on-site inspections,

monitoring can also be conducted on the territory of a participating state party by fixed sensors, cameras, and other data-gathering devices whose specifications, operating status, and locations are mutually agreed on in advance of their placement. These devices can provide monitoring of sites such as manufacturing facilities to ensure they are not producing weapons banned by an arms control treaty or can otherwise assist efforts to monitor the overall numbers of armaments limited by an accord. The INF Treaty and START, for example, included provisions for “portal monitoring” at specific US and Soviet/Russian missile production facilities. Newly produced missiles at these facilities were subject to monitoring prior to leaving the “portal” (i.e., gate or exit) for delivery to the military. For the INF Treaty, this monitoring was to ensure that missiles produced by these manufacturing plants were not intermediate-range ballistic or cruise missiles prohibited by the treaty. For the United States, INF Treaty portal monitoring was primarily accomplished by a radiographic imaging scanning device that could scan railcars leaving the Soviet missile production facility at Votkinsk.37 Fixed devices can also play an important role in monitoring other locations or items that are directly associated with the potential development or manufacture of weapons limited or banned by a treaty. As noted above, the IAEA uses fixed cameras to monitor key areas of civilian nuclear sites, to include placement at “[nuclear material] storage areas, in and near spent fuel ponds, and at all transit points through which nuclear material can pass.”38 The cameras are an important part of the IAEA’s efforts to work with NPT member states to safeguard their nuclear materials and ensure they are used for only legitimate civilian purposes.

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Attempting to Resolve Potential Monitoring Issues

Monitoring is inherently intrusive. States parties allow, within limits, foreign nationals to conduct inspections on their territory or install monitoring devices on or near military bases and other important facilities. They are understandably determined to limit the information gathered to data relevant to only the arms control agreement in question. At the same time, monitoring countries will often press for as much access as the host nation will allow. There is a built-in tension between demonstrating compliance through transparency and protecting sensitive information not related to the agreement. This can lead to differences of opinion over a range of issues involving monitoring such as which facilities are open to inspectors or when, where, and how monitoring devices are used. Treaty language is sometimes vague and open to different understandings. An additional complication is that many treaties have more than one “official” language and meanings of certain words can vary between translations. The express purpose of monitoring is to provide data directly relevant to determining the compliance of states parties with specific limitations on armaments or activities agreed to within the treaty. Effective monitoring therefore can identify discrepancies or deviations such as what can appear to be an excess in permitted numbers of military equipment. Discrepancies can result from an internal failure to report information in an accurate and timely fashion to a treaty partner; an inspector being unsure of the exact classification of certain hardware; or may indeed represent an attempt to directly circumvent the limits of an agreement. Judgments about compliance or noncompliance, however, are not made by inspectors on the ground. They are responsible for gathering or validating specific data points that are then passed up in inspection reports and other documents for consideration by specific treaty implementation bodies. It is important for questions of compliance related to monitoring activities or the data they yield to have a formal mechanism specified within the agreement to raise, discuss, and ideally resolve differences of interpretation, questions of compliance, and other issues that may arise. The United States and Soviet Union (and later, the Russian Federation), for example, agreed to establish specific consultative mechanisms for the INF Treaty (Special Verification Commission), START (Joint Compliance and Inspection Commission), New START (Bilateral Consultative Commission, BCC), and CFE (Joint Consultative Group, JCG). For NPT monitoring, the IAEA or member states can bring forward compliance questions to the organization’s Board of Governors. The IAEA does not have an enforcement role, but the board can vote on official resolutions citing violations of the monitoring provisions of NPT or address other issues identified by IAEA monitoring activities. If passed, the board can then

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request the IAEA secretary general to forward a report to the UN Security Council for the latter to debate potential enforcement actions.39 While the overall record of these bilateral and multilateral mechanisms’ ability to resolve monitoring issues is mixed, they have proved important in providing dedicated forums for discussion of implementation questions both technical and political. Early within CFE Treaty implementation, for example, inspectors from the United States and other North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) states conducting inspections at Russian declared sites had their access restricted.40 The Russian Federation also attempted to put forward revised site diagrams. Numerous declared sites that earlier contained multiple OOVs disappeared; these locations were now depicted as multiple declared sites, each with a single OOV. This was a significant change from an agreement reached during the endgame of the CFE Treaty negotiations that allowed inspection teams access to a declared site and its OOVs. The Russian Federation’s attempted re-interpretation of the treaty’s inspection protocol had an immediate impact on on-site inspections, significantly reducing US and other NATO state inspector access to numerous Russian sites. A flurry of diplomatic activity, including several Joint Consultative Group meetings, ultimately led Moscow to agree to abide by the earlier agreement, incorporated into the treaty’s final text, allowing inspectors access to a declared site and its associated OOVs (the Russian Federation also returned to its initial site diagrams).41 This sequence of events demonstrated the importance of consultative mechanisms like the JCG, particularly in a treaty’s initial implementation phase. In the first months after a treaty enters into force, efforts to turn monitoring provisions negotiated by diplomats into on-the-ground procedures and practices by inspectors and base host teams will inevitably encounter differing understandings of treaty texts and situations unanticipated during treaty talks. Consultation bodies like the JCG provide a vital mechanism for the diplomatic resolution of disagreements between states parties, preventing the breakdown of a treaty’s monitoring regime or the poisoning of relations between inspection teams and other personnel responsible for implementing the accord.

Case Study of an On-Site Inspection The sample inspection described here is based on the monitoring regime of a hypothetical “Nuclear-Capable Delivery System Limitation Treaty” between two states, “Blue” and “Red.” It assumes that the treaty places limits on each side’s deployed long-range nuclear-capable delivery systems and deployed nuclear weapons associated with these systems.

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Upon entry into force, each side exchanged baseline declarations reporting their respective military bases hosting delivery systems covered by the treaty. Each side is allowed up to ten on-site inspections a year of declared sites, but individual bases are required to host only one visit per annum. The inspection process begins with a decision by Blue to inspect a Red air base that hosts nuclear-capable bombers. The base and its wing of sixteen bombers were included within Red’s baseline declaration of forces; Blue decides to use one of its annual quotas of ten inspections of Red’s deployed forces to confirm this wing is located at this base and that this number is accurate. The on-site inspection process begins with a notification transmitted by Blue to Red of its intent to conduct an inspection of deployed nuclear forces; the notification also informs Red that the Blue inspection team will arrive at Red’s treaty-designated point of entry (POE) in thirty-six hours. An accompanying notification provides the names of ten inspectors, the maximum number permitted by the treaty. The Blue team includes a team chief who is responsible for the overall mission, two interpreters specially trained in the specific terminology of the treaty, and seven subject matter experts (in areas such as Red military aircraft, etc.). Per the terms of the treaty, the inspection team is permitted to designate the base it wishes to inspect after its arrival at the POE.42 Red responds twelve hours later with a notification accepting the arrival of the inspectors. At +36 hours, the Blue inspection team arrives at the POE. Red checks their inspection tools (which includes radiation detectors, measuring tape, calculators, compasses, flashlights, and dosimeters) to ensure they are permitted by the treaty; in addition, for any tools taking measurements, both sides must agree they are properly calibrated.43 The time is now 0845 Greenwich Mean Time (GMT). The Blue and Red team chiefs confer and agree the clock for the in-country on-site inspection process will be marked as starting at 0900 GMT. This mutual agreement is crucial because the treaty mandates a specific timeline of forty-eight hours for inspections. The host state has twelve hours to transport the inspection team to the declared site; twentyfour hours are assigned to the inspection, joint signing of an inspection report, and “social and cultural” time; and twelve hours for returning the inspection team to the POE. The Blue team chief then requests an inspection of Red’s “Northern Airbase #1.” After a brief internal conference, Red agrees. The Red team chief arranges for a military transport aircraft to fly the Blue team to the location. Blue arrives at 1800 GMT. The arrival is well within the treaty’s mandated twelve-hour window for travel to the designated base; however, given the lateness of the day, the team chiefs agree the inspection will commence at 0700 the next morning.

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At 0700 the next day, the two teams meet in a Northern Airbase #1 briefing room. The Red team chief provides his Blue counterpart with a site diagram of the base (as the base also hosts aircraft not limited by the treaty, only part is subject to inspection) and a listing of equipment subject to inspection currently located on base. He states that all sixteen of the base’s long-range nuclear-capable bombers reported in Red’s baseline declaration are on site; eight are on the flight line while the rest are parked within hangars. Of these latter aircraft, two are undergoing maintenance. Per the terms of the treaty, once the inspection team arrives no bombers can depart the base, prohibiting last-minute removal to prevent their inspection. This also underlines another important point, applicable to both Red and Blue when their bases undergo inspection: once a site is selected for inspection, the base’s commanding officer suspends all nonessential operations to preserve operational security (to ensure that inspectors will not see any equipment or operations not directly related to the treaty) while also providing a safe operating environment for both teams. After traveling to the flight line, the Blue team inspects the eight bombers parked there. Basic measurements, the tail numbers, and each aircraft’s treaty-specific “unique identifier” number allow the inspectors to confirm that each represents an aircraft included within Red’s initial baseline declaration. The inspection team is also able to observe a specific aircraft’s bomb bay, with the specific aircraft receiving this additional scrutiny designated during the earlier team chief meeting. The treaty’s inspection protocol is similar to New START’s, which for bomber aircraft states: “Each inspector shall have the right to view a designated deployed heavy bomber for no more than 15 minutes. Inspectors shall have the right to view the weapons bay from a location or locations designated by the in-country escort in order to confirm the number of nuclear armaments declared to be located on such a heavy bomber.”44 Red has opened the bomb bay doors of the designated aircraft; Blue inspectors are able to look inside and confirm it is empty. If there were objects inside that could be nuclear weapons, Blue could request closer access and, if the objects were shrouded (a practice permitted by the accord), use a treaty-approved radiation detection device to determine if the covered item has a radioactive signature. If so, it is counted as a nuclear weapon against the treaty’s central limits. The time limit on inspecting each bomber and other limitations (e.g., Blue inspectors may observe the bay, but from a location specified by Red) are important. In New START, for example, inspectors are not allowed to access or inspect the full interior of an aircraft. Inspectors are allowed only the level of access necessary to determine the following: Does the observed piece of equipment fit within a category of delivery systems covered by the accord? Is it equipped with nuclear weapons, and, if so, how many? Does the delivery system’s pres-

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ence on this base align with the inspected state’s treaty declarations (and any relevant notifications)? Inspectors are not granted access that would allow them to gather information on the aircraft’s capabilities beyond what is directly relevant to the treaty. The same restriction applies to every treaty-limited delivery system on base. The agreement focuses on delivery systems while providing an important, but limited, ability to also check for nuclear signatures associated with nuclear weapons on selected systems. The inspection team then continues to several large hangars near the flight line. The Blue team inspects the six active deployed bombers parked in open hangars. The Blue team then points to a closed hangar located next to a second runway running parallel to the main flight line and requests access. The Red team chief refuses, stating the structure is too small to contain any treaty-limited equipment, but invites the Blue team to measure the dimensions of the building’s entrances. The Blue team’s measurements confirm that aircraft covered by the treaty are too large to fit through any of this structure’s entrances; the building may contain an aircraft, but not one counted by the treaty. The inspection team then observes two open hangers with aircraft inside covered by large tarps; the Red team chief states these are the two bombers undergoing maintenance. The Blue team chief requests the coverings be removed to allow inspection to confirm they are the treaty-limited aircraft assigned to this location. After a prolonged debate, the Red team chief reluctantly concurs. Base personnel remove the tarps and Blue inspects the aircraft without further incident. Once the inspection is complete, the two teams return to the briefing room. The team chiefs complete and sign a joint inspection report, confirming that the sixteen bombers reported by Red in its initial baseline declaration as assigned to this base were observed by Blue. While debates occurred during the inspection, there were no fundamental disagreements for the team chiefs to note for others to resolve. The time is now 1500 GMT on the second day of the Blue inspection team’s time in-country. The teams adjourn and reconvene two hours later for an official dinner. Hosted by Red, the dinner includes a formal toast by each team chief, congratulating both sides for the conclusion of a successful inspection and noting the importance of the treaty in establishing a stable strategic relationship between their countries. Small gifts are also exchanged. While the toasts and gifts are formal, the atmosphere, particularly as the inspection proceeded without serious disagreement, is cordial. These dinners and any other social and cultural time built into an inspection team’s visit—for example, a facilitated visit to a major historical site or local shopping—represent a critically important, but little-known, aspect of past US-Russian arms control inspections that, over time, significantly strengthened professional working relationships between inspection teams.

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Following the meal, the Blue team is escorted to an awaiting Red transport aircraft and flown back to the POE. The exhausted team arrives at 0500 GMT on the third day. After a brief processing through customs, they board their flight home at 0700 GMT, two hours within the overall fortyeight-hour window provided by the treaty. The above describes a notional, straightforward on-site inspection of a Red air base. Over time, most inspections required by the INF Treaty, the CFE Treaty, START, and New START were conducted in a similarly businesslike and professional manner. Disagreements and differing treaty interpretations certainly occurred, but disputes were noted, recorded, and forwarded for bilateral discussion by officials within treaty-specified forums. Nevertheless, their eventually routine nature should not overshadow the remarkable fact that rival states worked closely with each other to execute detailed on-site inspections, often against tight timelines, providing access to highly secure military bases and observation of high-end military equipment.

Present Challenges and Future Opportunities Arms control monitoring regimes are currently under strain. States such as the Russian Federation, Iran, and North Korea have suspended or blocked on-site inspections, disabled or demanded the removal of monitoring equipment, and sought to sabotage processes by which monitoring data is gathered, assessed, and reported.45 While states that suspend or terminate their involvement with a monitoring regime may face later sanctions or other costs, in the short term it is often relatively easy to halt inspections or dismantle monitoring equipment.46 In addition, while past and present arms control monitoring regimes have covered a significant range of conventional and nuclear armaments, there are numerous weapons systems, arsenals, and entire strategic domains that remain outside of any significant form of monitoring or inspection. No treaty regime has ever covered stored nuclear weapons, for example. In addition, outer space and cyberspace are recognized as arenas of increasingly tense competition between major powers. Proposals for measures to reduce the risk of arms competition in these key strategic domains, however, often note the difficulty of attempting to develop and implement an associated monitoring regime.47 Whether in space, cyberspace, or elsewhere, the present geopolitical era appears increasingly defined by tension and competition between major powers. President Ronald Reagan frequently used the Russian proverb doveryai, no proveryai (trust, but verify) during the US-Soviet arms control negotiations of the 1980s, emphasizing the interrelationship between accepting a degree of transparency and building the trust essential to implementing

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treaties between competing superpowers.48 Future arms control treaties and their monitoring regimes will need to address the present lack of trust within the international system. For the United States and its allies, the bar will likely be high. There are, however, some reasons for cautious optimism. First, past and present arms control monitoring regimes have built a solid foundation for future agreements. Via direct and indirect means, regimes for conventional and unconventional armaments have provided for the accurate accounting of critically important deployed military hardware, the direct observation of the dismantlement of military equipment, and the effective monitoring of other important sites, items, and activities. These regimes were vital to implementing agreements that directly reduced the risks and costs of arms races between superpower adversaries. There is a considerable body of knowledge and experience regarding on-site inspections, the use of in-country monitoring equipment, and how best to leverage various forms of national technical means that can inform future efforts to negotiate new arms control treaties and their monitoring regimes. Second, there is increased interest within the international community in directly engaging with the development of arms control monitoring practices and tools. This brings additional actors and new ideas into discussions addressing complicated questions of how to design monitoring regimes that can address sites, weapons, or activities that were included in past arms control agreements. Efforts such as the International Partnership for Nuclear Disarmament Verification (IPNDV), for example, bring states with extensive nuclear arms control experience together with states that have not participated in these types of agreements, but are deeply interested in cooperatively tackling challenges associated with potential future nuclear agreements. Over twenty-five states have participated in the IPNDV.49 Third, new technologies can provide new tools to monitoring regimes expanding their scope and reach while also improving their ability to collect and process information. The ability to carry out standoff detection of hidden or otherwise concealed nuclear weapons and nuclear materials, for example, may be an important feature of future monitoring regimes. Joint US-Soviet experiments carried out in 1989 proved this is possible, with radiation detection equipment aboard a helicopter successfully detecting a single nuclear warhead concealed aboard a Soviet cruiser. Researchers conducting experiments in 2017 and 2021 with unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) equipped with radiation detectors lauded their ability to identify and map radiation signatures, which suggests these platforms may have a range of future monitoring applications. In addition, technological developments in fields such as quantum sensing and machine learning can bolster the ability to closely monitor a foreign state’s military facilities and correctly identify specific objects (e.g., treaty-accountable military equipment), making it difficult for states to hide

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the development or deployment of weapons and delivery systems.50 When coupled with the increasing availability of commercial satellite imagery, the scope and fidelity of direct and remote forms of monitoring available to future treaty negotiators and implementers continue to significantly improve. Moreover, as with the advent of satellite photography in the late 1950s, technological innovation is increasing various forms of transparency (whether governments like it or not) and may again alter the cost-benefit calculus of major powers considering future arms control monitoring regimes.

Conclusion Monitoring regimes are an essential component of arms control treaties, and the information they provide is vital to states parties’ determinations of others’ compliance. The modern era of arms control has provided an impressive range of human and technological achievements in directly and remotely monitoring conventional and nuclear arms control agreements. This work continues today. But monitoring regimes ultimately rely on cooperation between states, to include between rivals. When this cooperation is lacking or suspicions are otherwise high, it can affect national leadership decisions on verification. Monitoring and verification are therefore intertwined, but not identical. Future monitoring regimes can build on past successes, but will also need to address this tension, particularly given high-profile examples of suspended compliance, noncompliance, and outright treaty violations.

Notes The views expressed in this chapter are those of the author and are not an official policy or position of the National Defense University, the Department of Defense, or the US government. 1. The treaty’s official title is the Treaty Between the United States of America and the Russian Federation on Measures for the Further Reduction and Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms. 2. At the time of this writing, the Russian Federation has “suspended” its participation within New START. It has not officially withdrawn from the treaty, leaving its future status unclear. Russian officials have stated the country will no longer host on-site inspections or exchange information required by the treaty, but will continue to abide by the treaty’s central force limits. The treaty is due to expire in 2026. 3. US Department of State, “New START Treaty.” 4. The limit of 1,550 reflects “treaty math,” as each nuclear capable bomber is counted as carrying one nuclear warhead regardless of its load-out. 5. Per the treaty’s Article 2 (B) text, the “area of application” is “the entire land territory of the States Parties in Europe from the Atlantic Ocean to the Ural Mountains.” 6. Harahan and Kuhn, On-Site Inspections Under the CFE Treaty, 29.

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7. Koulik and Kokoski, Verification of the CFE Treaty, 54–56. 8. Ibid., 30. 9. For specific descriptions of each type, see Section VII through X of the CFE Treaty Protocol on Inspection at US Department of State, “Conventional Armed Forces in Europe Treaty.” 10. Harahan and Kuhn, On-Site Inspections Under the CFE Treaty, 31. 11. CWC members are permitted to retain chemical riot control agents (RCA), but pledge not to “use [RCA] as a method of warfare.” CWC Treaty, Article I (5). 12. Organisation for the Prevention of Chemical Weapons, “Chemical Weapons Convention.” 13. Organisation for the Prevention of Chemical Weapons, “How Does the OPCW Monitor Compliance with the [CWC]?” 14. Boehme, “The Verification Regime of the Chemical Weapons Convention.” 15. de Whitlaan, “Three Types of Inspections.” 16. Flood, “Sampling and Analysis Relevant to the Implementation of the [CWC].” 17. While not expressly required by the treaty, the five nuclear weapons states can choose to pursue nuclear safeguards agreements with the IAEA applicable to their civilian nuclear power programs. The United States concluded an agreement in 1977 with the international organization “to apply safeguards . . . on all source or special fissionable material in all facilities within the United States, excluding only those facilities associated with activities with direct national security significance to the United States.” US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, “U.S.-IAEA Safeguards Agreement.” 18. NPT Preamble. The treaty is also referred to by its official IAEA document title INFCIRC/140. 19. IAEA, “Verification and Other Safeguard Activities. 20. IAEA, “Additional Protocol.” 21. “IAEA Safeguards Overview.” 22. Cropper, Rath, and Teo, Creating a Verification Protocol for the [BWC], 1. 23. Mulcahy, CORONA Star Catchers, 5–10; National Reconnaissance Office, “CORONA Fact Sheet.” 24. “The first successful recovery documented 1,650,000 square miles of the Soviet Union, more than 24 U-2 had missions provided.” Nye, “This Air Force Unit Caught Spy Satellite Photos as They Fell from Space.” 25. Glass, “Ike Offers ‘Open Skies’ Plan at Geneva Summit.” 26. The Soviet Union’s first reconnaissance satellite, Zenit-1, was launched in 1962. “Sputnik Declassified.” 27. Identical language is found in Article XII of the ABM Treaty and Article V of the Interim Agreement. 28. Gleason and Riesbeck, Non-interference with National Technical Means, 3–4. 29. Language regarding noninterference is included in the treaty’s Article X. 30. Schultz, “How Airborne Detectives Collect Evidence from a Cloud of Atomic Debris.” 31. US Department of State, “Treaty Banning Nuclear Weapon Tests in the Atmosphere, in Outer Space, and Under Water,” Article I(a), n.d. 32. Dorr, “Constant Phoenix”; Cenciotti, “The Oldest F-4EJ Phantom in Japan is now Flying with a Dust Collection Pod to Detect Radioactive Particles.” 33. Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Organization, “Seismic Monitoring”; Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Organization, “Hydroacoustic Monitoring.” 34. Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Organization, “Radionuclide Monitoring,” 35. Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Organization, “DPRK Sept 27 Unusual Seismic Event.”

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36. Harahan, On-Site Inspections Under the INF Treaty, 47–60; Harahan and Kuhn, On-Site Inspections Under the CFE Treaty, 157–170; US State Department, “New START Treaty Inspection Activities.” 37. Harahan, On-Site Inspections Under the INF Treaty, 68–69, 74–75. 38. Fournier, “Surveying Safeguarded Material 24/7.” In 2016, the IAEA reported operating 1,416 of these cameras. IAEA, IAEA Safeguards, 4. 39. See, for example, IAEA Board of Governors, “Implementation of the NPT Safeguards Agreement and Relevant Provisions of Security Council Resolutions.” 40. Harahan and Kuhn, On-Site Inspections Under the CFE Treaty, 235. 41. Ibid., 235–236. 42. Due to the size of the United States and Russia, and the number of bases included in agreements such as the INF Treaty, START, and New START, these agreements each had a “Western” and “Eastern” POE. The list of bases subject to inspection by a team arriving at a designated POE represented a sublist of the overall number of declared sites. This reflected the reality that it was not practical nor feasible, for example, for a US inspection team arriving in Western Russia to declare an inspection of a site located on Siberia’s Kamchatka Peninsula. 43. All these tools were included on a list of equipment permitted for use by New START on-site inspectors, as listed in the treaty’s Annex on Inspection Activities. See “Protocol to the Treaty between the United States of America and the Russian Federation on Measures for the further Reduction and Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms.” 44. New START, Protocol: Annex on Inspection Activities, Section VI (4). 45. “How the Dutch Foiled Russian ‘Cyber-Attack on OPCW’”; Murphy, “IAEA Warns of ‘Fatal Blow’ to Nuclear Deal as Iran Removes Cameras.” 46. IAEA, “IAEA North Korea Inspector Recalls the Day When . . .” 47. Futter, “What Does Cyber Arms Control Look Like?” 4; Scharre and Lambeth, Artificial Intelligence and Arms Control, 2, 11; Lauder, Klotz, and Courtney, “How to Avoid a Space Arms Race.” 48. Shevchenko, “Did Reagan Really Coin the Term ‘Trust but Verify,’ a Proverb revived by HBO’s Chernobyl?” 49. IPNDV, “Deliverable 8.” 50. Gamberini, Jacobs, and Rubin, “Quantum Sensing’s Potential Impacts on Strategic Deterrence and Modern Warfare,” 354–357; Lempinen, “A Machine Learning Breakthrough Uses Satellite Images to Improve Lives.”

10 Chemical and Biological Weapons Amanda Moodie and Michael Moodie

FOR MOST OF THE SEVENTY-EIGHT YEARS FOLLOWING WORLD War II, arms control has been dominated by nuclear weapons issues. Consequently, arms control’s concepts, practices, procedures, and policies were shaped by approaches designed primarily to regulate nuclear capabilities. It was as if other weapons of mass destruction (WMD)—chemical and biological weapons (CBW)—were deemed “lesser included cases.” This has not been the most useful way to think about these capabilities or to deal with the challenges they present. Neither chemical weapons (CW) nor biological weapons (BW) are at all like nuclear weapons. CW and BW are not the same as one another either, although traditionally they have been lumped together. Reflecting the prevalent thinking of the time, for example, the 1925 Geneva Protocol addressed both “poisonous gases” and “bacteriological methods of warfare.” This joint consideration of CW and BW created some problems that hampered initial arms control approaches. The science underlying CW and BW diverged significantly in the early twentieth century, but it was not until the late 1960s that the international community began to treat them as discrete threats. The result was a set of arms control agreements using quite different approaches to dealing with military capabilities based on quite different sciences. Even then, many people concerned about CW and BW conflated them too often, producing homogenized results that made achieving successful arms control more difficult. The negotiations for a verification protocol for the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC), for example, failed in part because negotiators tried to adopt wholesale the verification approach of the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), entailing primarily a quantitative focus on materials, with accompanying emphases on facilities, declarations, on-site visits, and other measures. The CWC verification 167

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provisions had been designed for a set of research, development, production, industrial, and deployment factors related to CW, but not necessarily relevant to unique challenges posed by BW. While it is true that CW and BW nonproliferation policies reflect several similar concerns, this can also be said of arms control writ large. That fact, however, should not mask the significant differences that characterize their stories and the problems that lie in store for both.

Chemical and Biological Weapons: A Brief History While many assume that BW and CW were frequent hallmarks of conflict prior to the modern era, chemical and biological warfare as we understand them today did not exist until the middle of the nineteenth century. Anthropologists have found that many ancient hunter-gatherer societies relied on poisoned arrows in warfare as well as hunting and fishing, which may be one reason for the commonly held belief that such weapons were widespread. The use of such poisons largely disappeared when these groups transitioned to larger settled societies.1 More generally, it is difficult to verify accounts of deliberate attempts to spread disease or poison water or food supplies prior to the twentieth century, and historians have called into question some of the best-known accounts. Even where historical evidence suggests that warriors or armies spread disease among their enemies, it is usually unclear whether they did so deliberately, or whether their actions were actually responsible for subsequent outbreaks. A few exceptions exist, most of which are well known and well documented. In 1763, as a confederation of American Indian tribes carried out a series of attacks on Fort Pitt, the fort’s British leaders gave the chiefs who came to parley blankets and handkerchiefs from the local smallpox hospital, in hopes of triggering a smallpox epidemic.2 During the American Civil War, a Confederate physician sought to spread yellow fever in Northern cities by distributing clothing and bedding belonging to yellow fever patients.3 In most cases, however, source material or data is insufficient to determine whether pathogens were deliberately employed. Moreover, given the rudimentary understanding of disease etiology until the dramatic advances in microbiology of the nineteenth century, it is often impossible to tell whether aggressors knew what the results of their actions would be. What does seem clear, however, is that fears of intentional disease recurred through time and across cultures, even though such actions were relatively rare and often unsuccessful until the advent of modern microbiology. The use of CW also appears to have been infrequent prior to the development of modern chemistry. Thucydides writes of Sparta’s use of sulfur in its siege of Plataea, rendering a portion of the town inaccessible. But

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Thucydides’ account makes it sound as if Sparta was more interested in using the sulfur to produce a bigger fire than in the irritating effects of the resultant gas.4 During the American Civil War several individuals proposed filling artillery shells with cyanide or liquid chlorine. In response, President Abraham Lincoln signed a War Department General Order stating that the use of poison should be “wholly excluded from modern warfare.”5 The stalemates of World War I put an end to any qualms about using poisons or chemicals as weapons. In October 1914, Germany began developing irritating chemical agents such as those that would generate smoke or fire or have other nonlethal effects. By 1915, a shortage in high explosives had led the Germans to develop lethal agents, a process facilitated by its large and sophisticated domestic chemical industry. The first large-scale attack took place at Ypres, Belgium, on April 22, 1915, marking a turning point in military history. By the end of the war, all seven major combatants had CW programs, and the CW research effort in the United States was at the time the largest government research program in the country’s history.6 More than 90,000 soldiers from combatant countries suffered painful deaths due to exposure, and close to a million more were wounded—a number that is even higher if civilians are taken into account.7 Following World War I, the public began to express concerns about chemical weapons. They were seen as weapons that particularly targeted civilians and that could have a major psychological effect on soldiers. Nevertheless, many states maintained their chemical weapons programs into the 1960s and beyond; the United States did not eliminate its offensive CW program until 1990. The large-scale battlefield uses of CW such as those of World War I, however, have rarely been seen again, except on occasion—as during the 1980s Iran-Iraq War and, more recently, Syria. Most CW use throughout the rest of the twentieth century, however, occurred within the context of intrastate or civil conflict, to suppress internal violence, or as a counterinsurgency tool.8 The first half of the twentieth century also saw the organization of state BW programs. In addition to its CW efforts, Germany produced several animal pathogens, particularly B. anthracis and P. mallei, and sought to carry out biological sabotage operations during World War I, demonstrating its exploitation of scientific research and recent advances in germ theory.9 Between the two world wars, Canada, France, Hungary, Italy, Japan, Poland, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States also initiated offensive BW programs. Of these, by the time World War II began, Japan’s program was the largest, focusing primarily on dissemination of agents through fleas and other vectors, as well as through bombs, contamination of food and water supplies, and the use of aircraft sprayers. Japan employed its weapons against China during several operations; while the impact is difficult to estimate, it seems clear that these attacks resulted in several significant outbreaks, nearly all of them among Chinese civilians.10

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After World War II, several countries terminated their offensive programs. Nuclear weapons were seen as more strategically important, particularly for France and the United Kingdom, and resources were transferred from BW development to nuclear weapons programs. Although the United States continued to conduct research in such areas as agent aerosolization and anticrop munitions, it had little capability to actually use biological weapons in any strategic way by the 1960s. In 1969, President Richard Nixon announced the elimination of the offensive US BW program, the result of a perception that BW were of limited tactical or strategic utility, that they were hampering nuclear arms control negotiations with the Soviets, and that the American public viewed them as morally repugnant.11 The US renunciation of BW opened the door for the negotiation of an international convention prohibiting the development, production, stockpiling, acquisition, and transfer of BW. The Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention opened for signature in 1972 and entered into force in March 1975. Nevertheless, President Nixon’s public insistence that such weapons were of limited deterrence value and the subsequent elimination of the US program reduced the incentive for US negotiators to push for effective verification and compliance measures. The BWC, therefore, contains no provisions to ascertain that members are abiding by their obligations.12 Consequently, after the BWC entered into force, the Soviet Union undertook a massive reorganization and revitalization of its BW program, resulting in the largest and most sophisticated program ever organized. The Soviets mistakenly believed that the United States had no intention of abiding by the BWC, and that President Nixon’s elimination of its offensive program was a sham, so they invested heavily in BW research, development, and production. The Soviet Union was particularly interested in creating novel biological agents and modifying newly emerging infectious diseases such as viral hemorrhagic fevers; it also sought to capitalize on new scientific techniques such as genetic editing, which was in its infancy in the 1970s. The program was highly secretive, and the Soviets made every effort to conceal its existence in light of the BWC’s prohibitions. In 1992, Russian president Boris Yeltsin admitted that the Soviet Union had maintained a program in violation of its BWC obligations and pledged to terminate it.13 Nevertheless, the United States has remained concerned about whether Russia dismantled all the components of its former program and whether it is sufficiently transparent about its activities today.14

CBW Arms Control Efforts The Biological Weapons Convention

As the first multilateral treaty to outlaw an entire category of weapons, the Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production and Stock-

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piling of Bacteriological (Biological) and Toxin Weapons and on Their Destruction, better known as the Biological Weapons Convention, initially inspired tremendous hope. Unlike the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) or the Chemical Weapons Convention, the BWC contains no loopholes allowing nonlethal use of biological weapons or categories of protected states permitted to maintain their arsenals, even temporarily. Yet problems have plagued the BWC since its inception: the number of biological weapons in the world actually increased after its entry into force (thanks largely to the Soviet program discussed above15); the treaty suffers from a lack of universality, having fewer states parties than either the NPT or CWC (although the number of parties has continued to steadily increase as more states with limited capacity complete their ratification processes); there is no institutionalization, only an understaffed implementation office that also serves as the secretariat; and the treaty contains no guidance on how to assess compliance with its provisions or punish violators. Nevertheless, the convention’s history reflects a willingness among states parties to search for innovative solutions to its shortcomings. Interest in a treaty banning biological weapons dates to the 1960s, when the United States’ use of riot control agents and herbicides in Vietnam led to an effort by the newly created Eighteen Nation Disarmament Committee (ENDC) to negotiate an agreement on the cessation of the development and production of chemical and biological weapons.16 After NPT negotiations concluded in 1968, on realizing that prospects for a treaty prohibiting both CW and BW were poor, the United Kingdom tabled a working paper proposing that the two issues be separated and that states concentrate on the latter, reasoning that BW had not been used in the recent past, were not considered useful for deterrence, and had not spread beyond the great powers. Despite some countries’ fears that this might permanently dampen any hope for agreement on CW, the ENDC countries accepted this approach. Negotiations were facilitated by the 1969 unilateral US decision to renounce BW and destroy its stockpiles regardless of whether an international agreement could be reached.17 The treaty opened for signature on April 10, 1972, and entered into force on March 26, 1975. The convention contains a scant fifteen articles and can be printed on a single page of paper. Article I, its central provision, bans the development, production, stockpiling, acquisition, or retention of biological agents “whatever their origin or method of production, of types and in quantities that have no justification for peaceful purposes.” Known as the General Purpose Criterion, this clause is particularly important for two reasons. First, it acknowledges that materials used in biological weapons are dual-use and can also be employed for peaceful purposes, and it clarifies that BW are defined not by the type of agent or the activity being conducted, but by the intention behind the activity and whether or not it is peaceful. Second, it serves to “future-proof” the treaty, ensuring that future developments in

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biology and possible new methods of producing agents would not create loopholes that a state party could exploit. In addition to refraining from development and production of BW, states parties are also obligated to: • destroy existing stockpiles of BW agents; • refrain from transferring BW to other entities; • prohibit and prevent acquisition on their territory (which has been interpreted as a requirement for states parties to enact domestic legislation criminalizing BW possession or use); • consult and cooperate in the event of compliance concerns; • provide assistance in the event of an attack; and • promote the exchange of biological knowledge and materials for peaceful purposes. Notably, the convention contains no verification provisions. During the ratification process in the United States, the director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency informed the Senate in his testimony that the treaty was inherently unverifiable, but that it was nevertheless his view that the convention would benefit the United States for three reasons: first, the military utility of biological weapons was dubious due to their unpredictable effects; second, because they were morally repugnant; and, third, because adherence to the convention would discourage a biological arms race.18 Throughout its history, the convention’s members have tried various approaches to improve transparency and provide confidence that states parties are in compliance with their obligations. Since 1986, states parties have been obligated to submit annual confidence-building measures (CBMs) providing information on certain activities they are conducting as well as facilities in their territory. Unfortunately, adherence to this politically binding obligation to submit reports is limited, and the information states parties do provide is often inconsistent. In 1994, an Ad Hoc Group was created to negotiate a legally binding protocol (essentially, a supplement) to the convention that would include measures to enhance confidence in compliance (some participants deemed it a verification protocol); it would also include lists of materials and equipment to be prohibited and new obligations for international assistance and cooperation. The contemporaneous ratification of the CWC, which contained verification provisions such as routine and random visits as well as inspections of facilities, influenced many delegates to believe that a similar regime could be applied to the BWC. The dual-use problem (i.e., materials, processes, or facilities with both permissible and prohibited potential uses) and the much-larger universe of relevant biological facilities, however, made inspection and verification protocols a far more daunting prospect for

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the BWC. Moreover, the US pharmaceutical industry objected strongly to the negotiations, arguing that inspections would compromise proprietary information. Negotiations on the protocol text continued from 1995 until 2001, when the United States withdrew its support. In doing so, it stated that the proposed protocol would provide only a false sense of security and would unduly compromise private industry while not providing sufficient confidence that states parties were in compliance with their obligations. Several states objected strongly to the US position and have continued to advocate for a return to protocol negotiations.19 Despite the stalemate over verification, states parties to the BWC have continued to find ways to address its shortcomings. Since 2003, they have held annual meetings to look at other issues, including national legislation, disease surveillance, and pathogen security. These meetings have engaged a range of stakeholders from diplomacy, public health, law enforcement, and civil society—new representatives who had never been involved or had a voice in the BWC before—which has in turn led to productive activities and relationships as well as more exchanges of experiences and best practices across multiple communities. Nevertheless, the abrupt end to the protocol negotiations in 2001 created a political stalemate among a subset of active players that have opposed any meaningful action in the convention short of an immediate return to verification negotiations. As a result, the BWC has been unable to generate the necessary consensus to make important or substantive decisions, which has led many countries to disengage from the BWC altogether and to view it as a polarized and politicized forum whose discussions are a futile exercise. In 2022, the United States indicated that, for the first time in two decades, it would be willing to discuss possible verification measures in the more general context of strengthening implementation of the BWC in an attempt to break the deadlock. In response, states parties created a new working group that will replace the annual meetings and explore possible next steps. It remains to be seen whether the group will be able to overcome the extant political divisions and, if it does, whether it will recommend returning to negotiations of a legally binding instrument as the most productive next step.20 The Chemical Weapons Convention

The history of efforts to regulate toxic chemicals as weapons of war is not as extensive as the history of their use, as their origins go back 350 years.21 Not much was done, however, until the late nineteenth century, as concerns increased over the potential battlefield impact of toxic chemicals produced by an industrializing world. The result was the 1899 Hague Declaration in which contracting parties agreed to “abstain from the use of projectiles, the

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sole object of which is the diffusion of asphyxiating or deleterious gases.” The extensive and horrific CW use in World War I, however, shattered any illusions about such promises, although it did provide the impetus for the 1925 Geneva Protocol. The protocol banned the use of chemical weapons, but did nothing regarding their development, production, or possession. Several key signatories also attached reservations noting that, if attacked with chemical weapons, they would respond in kind, making the protocol essentially a nofirst use agreement. As a result, most of the key participants in World War II had well-developed CW arsenals, although they did not resort to them. Despite a small number of limited CW cases after World War II, almost no attention was given to chemical weapons while the world attempted to address the challenges posed by newly emergent nuclear capabilities. A blip on the screen occurred in 1968 when, as mentioned earlier, chemical and biological weapons were split apart from their traditional joint consideration and added separately to the agenda of the Conference of the Committee on Disarmament (CCD). The CCD, however, did not create an ad hoc group to consider CW until 1980. The pace picked up four years later when Vice President George H. W. Bush tabled a draft treaty calling for a worldwide ban on development, production, stockpiling, and transfer of chemical weapons. Given participants’ keen awareness of Iraq’s use of chemicals in its war with Iran as well as against its own people, the US draft became the basis for a negotiation “rolling text.” The talks were not easy. Some countries wanted chemical disarmament to be linked to progress on eliminating nuclear weapons. Others, including many members of the Non-Aligned Movement, sought to ensure that the treaty offered no grounds for limiting trade in chemicals and established a treaty requirement to provide assistance related to chemical goods and technologies for peaceful purposes. Many countries worried about the intrusiveness of the inspection regime and the extent to which it would endanger vital national security secrets and valuable confidential business and industry information. The talks finally culminated in an agreed text approved in August 1992. The Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production, Stockpiling and Use of Chemical Weapons and on Their Destruction, or Chemical Weapons Convention, opened for signature on January 12,1993, and entered into force on April 29,1997. The CWC is both an arms control and a nonproliferation agreement. It requires its parties to destroy all their chemical weapons as well as the facilities that produced them,22 and to desist from engaging in any activities (e.g., research, development, testing) related to offensive CW capabilities. Parties must also open their defense facilities and civilian chemical industries to international inspections, and the treaty prohibits parties from transferring CW or certain chemical precursors to others. Relevant chemicals are divided into three schedules depending on their utility for use in chemical weapons,

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each with unique reporting and inspection obligations. Schedule 1 comprises chemicals that are regarded exclusively or almost exclusively as chemical warfare agents or precursors. Schedules 2 and 3 comprise dual-use chemicals that also have legitimate, nonmilitary commercial applications, on a smaller scale for Schedule 2, and on a larger scale for Schedule 3. Use in warfare of certain chemical agents used as riot control agents is banned, but their use is allowed for domestic purposes, including law enforcement. Given most countries’ experience with the BWC’s lack of a verification regime, many insisted that such a regime be included in the CWC; the details of that regime, particularly those related to inspections, became one of the most controversial issues in the negotiations. This was especially the case for challenge inspections. The United States called for conducting inspections “anywhere, anytime with no right of refusal.” The Soviet Union ultimately accepted the concept after initially refusing, and a major battle then ensued on the specifics of such inspections, not only in the forum in Geneva, but in national capitals, including Washington. It was only after the innovative concept of “managed access” was developed that the challenge inspection issue was resolved. After so much sturm und drang during the negotiations, it is ironic that in the first twenty-five years of the treaty’s operation the challenge inspection provision has never been invoked. Another lesson CWC negotiators learned from the BWC experience was the difficulty created by the absence of an institutional framework to facilitate the treaty’s implementation.23 In contrast, the CWC established the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) in The Hague, which is comprised of three main bodies: the Conference of States Parties, composed of representatives from all member countries; the Executive Council, a smaller group of member representatives that oversee the OPCW; and the Technical Secretariat, responsible for the CWC’s day-today implementation, including the conduct of inspections. The first fifteen years of the CWC’s operation were straightforward, with some successes. Today, the treaty has 193 adherents,24 and states parties have destroyed 98 percent of all declared stocks and facilities.25 During the past decade, however, a trio of events occurred that generated divisive strains among CWC states parties and within the OPCW, some of which continue. For example, in February 2017, North Korean agents used the nerve gas VX to assassinate Kim Jong Nam, the half-brother of North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un, in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. In March 2018 Russian agents tried to assassinate former spy Sergei Skripal in Salisbury, England, using the novel agent Novichok. Russia is also accused of poisoning Russian dissident Alexi Navalny in August 2020. Most egregiously, beginning with a nerve gas attack in 2013, OPCW analysts have identified more than fifty occasions in Syria’s ongoing civil war in which Syrian government forces used nerve gas and chlorine bombs.

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While each of these cases is extremely serious, perhaps the most challenging is in Syria where the OPCW’s dilemma is ongoing and barriers to bringing CW use to an end are readily apparent. On the positive side, the OPCW has been innovative in addressing the overall Syrian situation through creation of the Joint Investigative Mechanism (with the United Nations) and the Declaration Assessment Team. The OPCW also demonstrated a considerable ability to innovate by agreeing to the use of a novel technology developed in the United States as the basis for destruction of Syria’s CW stockpile at sea, a prospect never considered by the treaty negotiators.26 It has also sought frequently in OPCW councils and at the UN Security Council to hold Syria accountable for its CW use. One of the major challenges in doing so, however, has been Russia’s complete rejection of such efforts and its strong support for Syria in both venues. One assessment contends, for example, that regarding OPCW voting on Syriarelated measures, two groups have emerged that do not seem to consider it important to hold Syria accountable for its CW use nor respond effectively to Damascus’s noncompliance: “first, U.S. adversaries and the lesser powers in their orbit, which actively side with Russia in OPCW voting, and second, member states that frequently abstain, thereby making it harder to reach the two-thirds threshold needed to pass decisions . . . stifling decisive action.”27 Following one Russian rejection, however, members took the unusual step of setting aside OPCW’s normal practice of making decisions by consensus and, in a majority vote, passed a decision holding the Syrian regime responsible for three CW attacks in northern Syria in March 2017.28 The OPCW Conference of States Parties then agreed to suspend certain of Syria’s rights and privileges as a CWC state party, including the right to vote in the conference and the council; to stand for election to the council; and to hold any office of the conference, the council, or any subsidiary organs.29 In addition to more mundane but still important demands, such as reorienting the OPCW’s routine operations away from inspecting CW destruction to monitoring a changing chemical industry, achieving further success against chemical weapons will require the CWC to find a way to address these kinds of formidable barriers.

New Issues and Challenges Chemical and biological arms control efforts clearly must overcome a range of severe challenges if they are to remain successful tools of security policy. Like other issues addressed in this book, many of those challenges have their origins in the significant changes that have occurred in the global security environment across a broad swath of factors that include politics, science, technology, information, governance, and society. Many of these changes are complex and multidimensional. Each dimension of arms con-

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trol, including CBW, must address them from its unique perspective, while remaining aware that they interact with one another, making the implications of each more difficult to address successfully. Convergence or Collaboration?

Although the science underlying CW and BW diverged in the twentieth century, the political thinking about them did not. Traditionally, the arms control enterprise has lumped them together as “non-nuclear weapons” and has thought of them as a unified problem set, despite the fact they are quite different. Nonetheless, due in part to complex geopolitical relations during the mid–twentieth century and the resulting impact on treaty negotiations, two distinct regimes evolved, each with its own culture, approach to managing the risks of science and technology, tools to monitor compliance, and institutional framework. The CWC and BWC, headquartered as they are in The Hague and Geneva respectively, each has its own distinct expert community. Historically, the substantive overlap between them has been limited to bioregulators and toxins – the so-called mid-spectrum agents. The separation of the scientific disciplines of biology and chemistry, however, has never been as pronounced as that between the weapon types and the proliferation challenges they present. Today, technological advances have blurred the boundary between biology and chemistry even further. Chemicals can be produced through metabolic processes or with biological catalysts; bioscavengers can be used as treatments for nerve agent exposure; toxins can be synthesized chemically or produced using synthetic biology approaches.30 Given that the record shows that arms control progress is achieved much more slowly than that in the life sciences, these advances may well outpace efforts in the diplomatic sphere to adapt the treaties, and could render the regimes irrelevant. Historically, few opportunities have arisen for the two treaty regimes to collaborate. While there are informal contacts between the BWC Implementation Support Unit and the OPCW, no formal relationship exists. Presently, the very different structures of the two regimes make it challenging to envision what closer collaboration might look like, despite limited efforts at information sharing and attempts to bring the two expert communities together. Without such collaboration, however, it is possible that the treaties will become divorced from the world of the life sciences and create a divide that becomes increasingly artificial and irrelevant as scientific and technological advances progress. Underlying Technologies

For more than two decades, changes in the life sciences have joined advances in computing, automation, and artificial intelligence to contribute

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to rapid technological innovation, leading to transformation and disruption of the scientific landscape. The new technologies that underpin this revolution share qualities that, according to former White House Office of Science and Technology Policy assistant director Gerald Epstein, can be summarized as “the 5 D’s”:31 • Dual use. The same science and technology underlies legitimate and illegitimate applications. The use of these technologies does not necessarily indicate malevolent intent, which makes it difficult to distinguish, for example, a terrorist conducting experiments for nefarious purposes from a scientist doing similar experiments to develop better pharmaceuticals. Since such technologies have legitimate purposes, they can also be purchased from the open market by illegitimate users. • Digital. These technologies often rely on developments in automation, processing, or intelligence, and promote sharing and transfer. Such technologies often have a smaller footprint and fewer signatures than those seen in the past and can increase the speed of research. • Deskilled. These technologies require less tacit knowledge or specialized expertise for their use. In part, this is due to increased automation; many technologies require less hands-on work as laboratories increasingly rely on computer-controlled robotic systems and automated instruments to simplify and speed up repetitive workflows. • Decentralized and diffused. The development and application of many of these technologies are no longer limited to advanced industrial countries. While the United States remains the world leader in biotechnology innovation, successful research and development is occurring in developing countries, many of which have emphasized the development of their pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and chemical sectors in national strategies. • Do-it-yourself. Development and utilization of emerging technologies are increasingly occurring outside of traditional institutions. While many of these technologies will still require expertise and tacit knowledge to use them effectively, access to the technologies is nevertheless expanding to a wider range of stakeholders than ever before, which complicates their governance. Noncompliance and Enforcement

In January 1961, Fred Ikle, one of the early intellectual architects of arms control, authored a Foreign Affairs article that many arms controllers still consider a seminal text. In “After Detection—What?” Ikle argued that technical questions related to verification and compliance tend to dominate “not only the domestic debates but also the international disarmament negotiations.”32 However, he went on, detecting violations is not enough. Sixty years

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later the arms control community continues to be plagued by Ikle’s question, and a view has emerged that in the past twenty years, the problem of responding effectively to proven treaty violations has become increasingly acute. Today, as debate rages over the effectiveness of current and potential verification systems, Ikle reminds us that even if an agreement makes it technically possible to detect a violation, “what counts are the political and military consequences of a violation once it has been detected.”33 One of the most popular explanations of this challenge is the emergence of great-power competition and the resulting absence of the unity necessary among great powers for effective compliance action. Reviewing the experience of addressing noncompliance situations in the nuclear arena in the past forty years, Carmen Wunderlich and her colleagues conclude the “lesson is that, without great power unity—or at least, a useful measure of common resolve—the compliance and enforcement system in the nuclear [nonproliferation] regime does not work.”34 A similar assessment of the chemical and biological realms is likely to lead to the same conclusion. The absence of unity among the great powers derives in large measure from the respective priority that these countries—especially the United States, China, and Russia, but also Iran, India, and others—give to arms control. The UN Security Council is the locale where this competition and its negative impact has been most manifest in recent years. Russian vetoes of attempts to address the Syrian government’s use of chemical weapons in its civil war is one example. Other states parties to arms control agreements also bear some responsibility for the lack of effective responses to noncompliance. In the Syrian case, for example, British analyst Paul Schulte describes their behavior as “second order complicity” including, “widespread toleration of suspected countries, acceptance of Russian blocking tactics, and de facto downgrading of the entire non-compliance problem compared to other values, aspirations, shared religious identities, and national interests.”35 While this assessment may be too harsh regarding some CWC states parties, it can be argued that arms control is at best a secondary priority for a significant number of states. Another challenge for arms control fostered by noncompliance and the weakness of enforcement is its damage to the current arms control infrastructure, particularly its use as a rationale to withdraw from a treaty. The most recent and serious example was the Donald Trump administration’s decision to withdraw from the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF Treaty) in the face of its inability to get Moscow to acknowledge persistent US allegations of noncompliance. This has not yet happened in the CBW realm, but the INF Treaty and similar developments, such as those related to the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe, set uncomfortable precedents. Arms control contributes to a stable global security arena through a cooperative approach based on mutually shared norms of

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behavior, transparency about the pursuit of those norms, commitment to the fulfillment of freely accepted obligations, and, above all, trust. Serious noncompliance and violations of arms control treaty commitments erode all those pillars, as does the inability to respond to such violations. Conceptual Issues

In the nearly fifty years since the BWC’s entry into force, and especially in the quarter-century since that of the CWC, the world has witnessed enormous changes across virtually all the elements shaping the international system, including: • evolving features of global conflict; • the reemergence of great-power conflict; • a barely recognizable technological landscape marked by the breathtaking speed and enormous reach of technological change; • a fundamentally novel information environment; • growing competition between democratic and authoritarian models of government; • diminishing confidence in governing institutions, whether global or domestic; and • growing domestic political polarization. The question now confronting CBW arms control is whether in this environment it can continue to be a useful tool for advancing security. At first glance, the answer may be a self-evident yes. But on closer examination it is not so clear-cut. As the dean of nuclear strategy and arms control Thomas Schelling once warned: “The tendency in our planning is to confuse the unfamiliar with the improbable. The contingency we have not considered seriously looks strange; what looks strange is thought improbable; what is improbable need not be considered seriously.”36 Over the past fifty years, has the approach to and practice of arms control become too familiar? Is the arms control community too comfortable with what it has been doing for decades? One underexamined dimension of the changing landscape is the emergence of “unfamiliar” conflict situations. These are not the kinds of conflicts envisioned when much of the thinking about arms control was done— the familiar force-on-force conflicts between the militaries of nation states. Today’s conflicts are characterized not just by their intrastate focus, but also by unconventional dynamics, emerging and advanced technology, diverse participants, and stunning brutality that opens the door for CBW use. It is also increasingly difficult to separate these conflicts from other discomfiting, unfamiliar security issues such as illicit trafficking, failing states or undergoverned spaces, or intrastate community conflicts. Much of this convergence occurs in spaces—physical or virtual—where state-centric

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assumptions that remain at the heart of arms control models no longer hold sway; that is, spaces where state authority either does not prevail or confronts major challenges. The reemergence of great-power competition also has repercussions beyond those related to compliance and verification. In March 2021, the US National Intelligence Council published Global Trends 2040, the central theme of which was “a more contested world.” The report describes an international environment that is more competitive and at greater risk of conflict as states and nonstate actors “exploit new sources of power and erode longstanding norms and institutions that have provided some stability in past decades.”37 The three key players at the core of this competition, of course, are the United States, China, and Russia. The current state of play among them suggests that, as much as it might desire to do so, Washington could find it difficult to make meaningful arms control progress with either or both of its main competitors.38 Together, these and other factors have created a new context for arms control that has yet to be seriously explored. The challenges are unconventional, including “hybrid warfare” in which ambiguity and the inability to attribute responsibility for heinous actions are central tenets for success. They are conflicts in which traditional norms do not matter. They are conflicts in which advanced and emerging technologies come together to increase the range of destructive options. Do the existing paradigms for CBW arms control take account of these possibilities? Are they capable of dealing with them? Will they inspire more of the same or something different? Will action be constrained by an insistence on universal multilateralism that is too often a recipe for arms control’s glacial progress? Or will it be more flexible and diverse, speeding up the process by creating coalitions of the willing interested, for example, in testing potential new transparency or information-sharing mechanisms and implementing them if found deserving? These and similar questions suggest an argument that for too long the arms control community has been working from outdated models and paradigms that have become too familiar and too comfortable in the face of major geopolitical changes. Given such changes, the need to reconceptualize arms control must be considered. UN Secretary-General António Guterres, for example, has offered one alternative, which in his report, Our Common Agenda, he calls “networked multilateralism.” As he explains, “Today, a broader range of State and non-State actors are participating in global affairs. . . . This is a form of multilateralism that is more networked, more inclusive, and more effective. . . . Networks can be more flexible, allowing for variable participation by a wide range of actors and the possibility of open coalitions or small ‘mini-lateral’ or even ‘micro-lateral’ groups.”39 In the early years of the twenty-first century a nascent simplified form of such a network of smaller coalitions of the willing appeared to be emerging

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with initiatives such as the Proliferation Security Initiative, the Group of 8 (G8) Global Partnership, and UN Security Council Resolution 1540. In the past fifteen years or so, however, such efforts appear to have been, if not abandoned, given relatively low priority. It appears the Secretary-General has something more robust in mind, arguing for an “inclusive multilateralism that draws on civil society, business, local and regional authorities, and others, and shares power more broadly and fairly.”40 Networked multilateralism, in theory, could represent a new paradigm for arms control that might ameliorate many of its challenges. Even so, securing support for such alternatives entails answering tough questions. Operating solely on the basis of consensus, for example, leaves necessary action subject to the possible tyranny of a single opponent. Does an insistence on the principle of consensus become a recipe for gridlock? Politics Above All?

Have states parties consistently demonstrated and promoted the responsible exercise of national sovereignty in meeting their treaty obligations? It can be argued, for example, that abstaining on key votes at the UN Security Council and OPCW, such as those related to Syria’s CW attacks, is an abrogation of that responsibility. Why do states do so? The analysis of OPCW voting patterns cited earlier suggests a one-word answer: politics. In some cases, maintaining good relations with a great power by aligning with it in important votes trumps arms control values; for others, as mentioned, solidarity is their key priority. For some, as Schulte observes, “Diplomatic engagement over WMD and war crimes is simply another field of increasing information warfare, potentially indispensable for wider national objectives.”41 Still others seem to be motivated by resentment and anxiety over global power disparities and preventing Western countries from using their capabilities to discipline regimes they dislike. Getting many members of the international community to reorder their political priorities appears to be another critical requirement for ensuring the future of arms control. Can it be done? If so, how?

Conclusion Since venues addressing CBW issues have been as active as arms control efforts in other realms, if not more so, they also have been especially visible stages on which these political dramas have played out and the challenges have been increasingly obvious. But they have also been places that have demonstrated progress can be made, albeit slowly and incrementally, in a variety of areas—in creating unanticipated flexibility to facilitate the work of those responsible for implementation; in expanding participation in

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the arms control process to include industry, academia, the scientific and technological communities, civil society and others; and in seeking innovative approaches toward reinforcing critical norms. Exploring untraditional and potentially uncomfortable alternatives to familiar arms control practice could generate surprising results. Networked multilateralism, for example, suggests an alternative coalitional approach in which those participating can take action without waiting for the comfortable approach to grind into action. The exploitation of new and emerging technologies might foster innovations that can support many aspects of arms control such as information management and verification. Changing mind-sets from a focus on material accounting to maintaining the priority of norms could open new pathways for action. So, what is to be the future of CW and BW arms control? Clearly, the jury is still out.

Notes 1. Carus, “A Short History of Biological Warfare,” 4–5. 2. Ranlet, “The British, the Indians, and Smallpox,” 427–441. 3. Singer, The Confederate Dirty War. 4. Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, 2.77.4. 5. “General Orders No. 100.” The ban on poison was related to and limited by the principle of “military necessity,” which confined military action to “measures which are indispensable for securing the ends of the war.” Accordingly, Article 16 states, “Military necessity does not admit of cruelty—that is, the infliction of suffering for the sake of suffering or for revenge, nor of maiming or wounding except in fight, nor of torture to extort confessions. It does not admit of the use of poison in any way, nor of the wanton devastation of a district.” 6. Slotten, “Humane Chemistry or Scientific Barbarism?” 485. 7. Precise estimates on the number of casualties from chemical weapons vary, but most analysts assume that approximately 1.3 million people were injured by chemical weapons during the war. See Gilchrist, A Comparative Study of World War Casualties from Gas and Other Weapons. 8. Allison and Herzog, “Gas, Norms, and Statistics,” 397–401. 9. Carus, “A Short History of Biological Warfare,” 12–13. 10. See, for example, P. Williams and Wallace, Unit 731; also Guillemin, “Crossing the Normative Barrier.” 11. Tucker and Mahan, “President Nixon’s Decision to Renounce the U.S. Offensive Biological Weapons Program,” 9–10. 12. Ibid., 17 13. Based on information from Soviet defectors, the United States and the United Kingdom at the Third BWC Review Conference in 1990 publicly alleged that Moscow was pursuing a significant illicit BW program, claims that triggered a process that ultimately led to President Yeltsin’s decision. See Moodie, “The Soviet Union, Russia, and the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention,” 59–69. 14. US Department of State, “2021 Adherence to and Compliance with Arms Control, Nonproliferation, and Disarmament Agreements.” 15. Carus, “A Short History of Biological Warfare,” 35–36.

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16. Spelling, McLeish, and Balmer, “Where Did the Biological Weapons Convention Come From?” 17. Goldblat, “The Biological Weapons Convention.” 18. Prohibition of Chemical and Biological Weapons, 15–16. 19. For more on the US rejection of the protocol and international reaction, see Pearson, Dando, and Sims, “The U.S. Rejection of the Composite Protocol”; Bolton, “The U.S. Position on the Biological Weapons Convention”; Kahn, “The Biological Weapons Convention.” 20. US Department of State, “U.S. National Statement at the Ninth BWC Review Conference.” 21. In 1675, France and Germany signed an agreement in Strasbourg prohibiting the use of poison bullets. OPCW, “Origins of the Chemical Weapons Convention and the OPCW.” 22. Albania, India, South Korea, and the United States declared possession of chemical weapons as the CWC began to operate. Woolf, Kerr, and Nikitin, Arms Control and Nonproliferation, 48. 23. The absence of any BWC-focused organization, however, is related in part to the lack of an articulated verification process. 24. Israel has signed, but not ratified the treaty. Egypt, South Sudan, and North Korea are the only other remaining holdouts. 25. Wunderlich, Mueller, and Jakob, “WMD Compliance and Enforcement in a Changing Global Context,” 28. 26. See Warrick, Red Line. 27. Apart from China and a few others, most countries that abstained or voted with Russia are members of the Non-Aligned Movement, which for much of arms control’s history has demonstrated their priority to be peer solidarity rather than positive arms control outcomes. Stricker, “OPCW Member States Must Counter Russian Obstruction.” 28. US Department of State, “OPCW Condemns Syria’s Repeated Use of Chemical Weapons.” In a related but non-OPCW measure, France initiated the creation of the International Partnership Against Impunity for the Use of Chemical Weapons. 29. “Conference of the States Parties Adopts Decision to Suspend Certain Rights and Privileges of the Syrian Arab Republic Under the CWC.” 30. Spiez Laboratory, Spiez CONVERGENCE: Report on the First Workshop. 31. Epstein, personal communication with the authors, August 2022. 32. Ikle, “After Detection—What?” 33. Ibid. 34. Wunderlich, Mueller, and Jakob, WMD Compliance and Enforcement in a Changing Global Context, 10. 35. Paul Schulte, “The Effectiveness of International Norms over CBW (and, prospectively, other WMD?) in early 2017.” Private Paper. 36. Schelling, “Foreword.” in Pearl Harbor, vii. 37. National Intelligence Council, Global Trends 2040, 1. 38. Ibid. 39. Guterres, Our Common Agenda, 66. 40. Secretary-General Guterres, as quoted in Espiinosa and Turk, “Building an Inclusive Networked UN.” 41. Schulte, “The Effectiveness of International Norms.”

11 The Impact of Emerging Technologies Marina Favaro

WHY ARE EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES RELEVANT TO ARMS CONtrol? First, emerging technologies are acutely relevant to arms control today because of the combination of rapid technological change and great-power competition. Second, conflating new military operating domains (e.g., space and cyberspace) with enabling technologies (e.g., artificial intelligence) or with specific military applications (e.g., weapons targeting) is not conducive to effective arms control measures. Third, these technologies are not developing in a linear manner and are interacting in complex ways. So, too, are the opportunities and challenges that they present to arms control. This chapter begins by defining emerging technologies and answers the question: Why are emerging technologies relevant to arms control? It then identifies some of the challenges of doing research in this space before characterizing the current state of thinking on related topics. Next, it explores the arms control implications of artificial intelligence, quantum, biotechnology and human enhancement, and novel projectiles, propulsions, and platforms. It concludes with guiding principles for the future of arms control.

Defining Emerging Technologies Although it has become ubiquitous in government, business, and academic circles, the “emerging technologies” moniker is conceptually woolly and imprecise. Technology is broadly defined as the application of scientific knowledge to the practical aims of human life.1 For example, the Greek myth of Pandora grew out of a parable about technology; Prometheus defied the gods by stealing fire from Mount Olympus and giving it to humankind. 185

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Humans learned to tame fire’s volatile nature and it became the basis for civilization.2 Although we do not normally think of it as such, writing is itself a technology. A literate person is someone whose thought and communication processes are technologically mediated.3 Neither fire nor writing meet the criteria of emerging technologies as we understand them in the context of challenges for arms control; however, they do fit the definition of technology as a transformative force that arranges and rearranges societies.4 The second constituent part of the term is emerging. A technology is emerging when it has not yet reached maturity in the technology life cycle.5 There is no objective measure or universally agreed definition of what is new or emerging. Instead, this is a subjective assessment based on the novelty, current performance, and use cases of the technology as well as expectations about the scope for its further development. This suggests that the definition of emerging is heavily context dependent. Future humans might argue that the internet is an emerging technology in 2022, given that it is primitive in comparison to future iterations, but today it seems a mature technology. There is a third element beyond defining what a technology is and under which conditions a technology is considered emerging. Emerging technologies are not the same from industry to industry. In other words, the technologies and technological applications that are relevant to arms control specifically—and security and defense more broadly—are not the same emerging technologies that are relevant to finance, law, telecommunications, or education sectors. Putting these three elements together, emerging technologies encompass novel applications of, or improvements to, existing technologies that have not yet been widely deployed or used.6 In the arms control context, emerging technologies refer to “those technologies, scientific discoveries and novel applications that have not yet reached maturity or are not widely in use, but are anticipated to have a major, perhaps disruptive, effect on international peace and security.”7 Although this definition encompasses all three aforementioned elements, it remains somewhat ambiguous. This ambiguity is interpreted variously within the research community; some criticize the collective understanding of emerging technologies as “absurdly flexible and variable in its application,”8 whereas others see flexibility as an inherent strength. Maaike Verbruggen suggests that the research community’s understanding of emerging technologies is “vague and amorphous, but so are the technologies that fall under it, and that vagueness is constitutive of the concept and part of [its] appeal.”9 Notwithstanding its shortcomings, this term has purchase among scholars and policymakers and is widely used in the absence of anything better. The significance of this debate is greater than semantics. The inherent flexibility or ambiguity (depending on where one sits) of the moniker influences which technologies qualify as emerging technologies. Some tech-

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nologies that fall into this bucket have been “emerging” for decades such as directed-energy weapons.10 Some have been theorized for decades, such as artificial intelligence (AI),11 but recent advancements in enabling technologies such as modern graphics processing units have sped up computational processes for deep learning.12 Others—like quantum technologies—have not yet emerged insofar as they are still largely in the research and development phase.13 Moreover, in the world of innovation, it often takes several decades to achieve what can look like overnight success.14 This highlights the necessity of acknowledging both continuity and change when discussing emerging technologies. Crucially, continuity does not mean that nothing changes; instead, it helps to sober overblown claims that a given emerging technology represents a revolution in military affairs.15 Finally, it is worth emphasizing that a new technology represents only one building block of military capability. A functioning weapon system that might be of concern to arms control is comprised of multiple technologies in combination. That technical system will, in turn, need to be combined with various nonmateriel elements—such as a concept of operations and changes to organization, training, and logistics—to become a functioning capability.16

Why Are Emerging Technologies Relevant to Arms Control? Not all new technologies are relevant to arms control, nor are they all relevant to arms control in equal measure. This is the inverse of a point made earlier: the technologies with most relevance to security and defense are not necessarily relevant in other sectors. Put differently, technological change does not, in and of itself, pose a challenge to arms control. Nor is the challenge of emerging technologies to arms control unprecedented; arms control has always contended with new capabilities and behaviors that fall outside of existing arms control regimes. Heather Williams makes this point through a historical analysis of once emerging technologies with relevance to arms control, such as balloon projectiles, expanding bullets, and blinding lasers, all of which were thought to pose unique challenges to arms control at one time.17 If emerging technologies are not a sufficient condition for arms racing, then why and in what ways are emerging technologies relevant to arms control today? Put differently, what is “new” here? This chapter argues that certain emerging technologies are acutely relevant to arms control today because of rapid technological change and great-power competition. Of particular concern are technologies that change the equilibrium between offense and defense; for example, artificial intelligence–augmented cyber operations that slightly increase the sophistication of attacks and considerably increase the scale of attacks such that they overwhelm existing defenses.

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Artificial intelligence, quantum, biotechnology, human enhancement, and novel projectiles, propulsions, and platforms have created new means and methods of warfare. These emerging capabilities are non-nuclear, nonkinetic, nontangible, dual-use, and dual-capable. Meanwhile, the broader sociotechnical context has changed and continues to change. Geopolitics shapes perceptions of technological vulnerabilities and threats, while framing the reach and bounds of regulatory efforts. Moreover, technology is changing at a rate faster than the reach and bounds of regulation, which is increasingly limited in the new era of great-power competition. These factors culminate in what Andrew Futter and Benjamin Zala term the Third Nuclear Age.18 Technology is neither good nor bad, nor is it neutral; instead, its value or harm for arms control ultimately depends on precisely how and when it is applied, and by whom.19 The development and weaponization of new and existing technologies are largely driven by the new geopolitical competition between the United States, Russia, and China.20 This competition has prompted the great powers to seek competitive advantages in their nuclear arsenals,21 including first-strike advantages and greater flexibility between tactical and strategic nuclear weapons.22 Furthermore, China and Russia have invested in significant advanced conventional weapons such as ballistic missiles in pursuit of so-called antiaccess/area denial (A2/AD) capabilities to offset the advantages that the United States and its North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) allies enjoy and undermine power projection.23 This illustrates the circular nature of vulnerability detection, response, and creation, wherein states might “innovate out” of perceived vulnerabilities only to “innovate into” new vulnerabilities.24

The Current State of Research on Emerging Technologies and Arms Control Emerging technologies are currently receiving a lot of attention in the arms control policy and scholarly communities. The impact of emerging technologies on arms control is on the political agenda of industrialized states; research projects that focus on deepening our collective understanding of this topic are receiving funding and being included for the first time in books such as this one. There has been a growing body of research commensurate with this growing interest. However, the technical intelligence quotient in the arms control community is low;25 much of the literature considers the impact of emerging technologies on arms control in a reductive or shallow manner. Correspondingly, emerging technologies are often treated as a broad risk category for international stability. Too often, scholarship in this area exhibits little regard for the heterogeneity among emerging technologies, does not distinguish between tactical and strategic effects,

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and fails to consider how emerging technologies could reinforce, bolster, or enhance stability and security. This results in a tendency for conflation and worst-case thinking. When nontechnical arms control experts discuss the impact of emerging technologies on the future strategic environment, they often conflate new military operating domains (e.g., space and cyberspace) with enabling technologies (e.g., artificial intelligence) or with specific military applications (e.g., weapons targeting). The issue with mixing “levels of analysis” (i.e., military operating domains, enabling technologies, and specific military application) is that it precludes comparison.26 Clarity around levels of analysis is a necessary condition for generating effective arms control measures in the future. While nontechnical arms control experts acknowledge that today’s arms control regimes are struggling to adapt to these emerging technologies, they often fail to specify the effects of emerging technologies on international stability, which hinders their ability to formulate guiding principles for the future of arms control. Equally, technical experts may understand how a given technology works, but lack the wider contextual understanding to appreciate how it could be integrated into military operations and what the effects might be on international stability. An excessively narrow scope of inquiry has hampered efforts to understand and respond to the impact of emerging technologies. Scholars frequently sidestep the categorization issue by examining the impact of individual emerging technologies in isolation. In doing so, they restrict their analysis to the technology to which their expertise pertains, sometimes failing to consider how multiple technologies might combine to create a new system or system of systems. While understandable, this siloing limits the ability of the arms control policy and scholarly communities to comprehend and navigate the broader technological landscape. These technologies are not emerging sequentially, nor is their development linear; instead, they are evolving and interacting in complex ways, as are the opportunities and challenges that they represent to arms control. The likelihood of intensified arms race instability in the coming years cannot be evaluated on the basis of a single innovation. This requires a sense of the impact potential of a range of technologies developing in unison—albeit at different paces—and in combination with other new technologies and existing legacy systems.27

How Might New Technologies Affect Traditional Arms Control Efforts? This section highlights some of the challenges and opportunities that emerging technologies might pose for arms control in the coming decades.

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It uses the outputs from a technology evaluation exercise conducted by the author on behalf of the Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy.28 Given that this study utilizes foresight methods to systematically collect expert opinion, it is speculative in nature. On a twenty-year time horizon, some notable technology categories of interest include: • Artificial intelligence (e.g., for command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (C4ISR); for weapons and effects; for cyber operations; for information operations); • Quantum (e.g., for C4ISR; for hardening and exploiting systems); • Biotechnology and human enhancement; and • Novel projectiles, propulsion mechanisms, and platforms. The following subsections explore these technology categories in turn. The bottom line is that these technologies will complicate arms control negotiation and verification. This is not to say that their impact on arms control will be wholly positive or negative, but rather that their impact will be multifaceted. The impact of emerging technologies on arms control will depend on the sociotechnical context that they inhabit and their technical characteristics. The Arms Control Implications of Artificial Intelligence

There are at least four AI applications with relevance to arms control in the next twenty years: C4ISR, cyber operations, information operations, and weapons and effects. AI for C4ISR. The application of AI for C4ISR could enhance clarity and flex-

ibility in battle in relation to intelligence gathering and analysis, early warning, and through just-in-time simulations that generate AI-recommended courses of action. These processes augment and, in some circumstances, replace human perception and judgment. This technology could also target an adversary’s systems to fake sensor data or communications.29 This application might provide a range of new offensive options, while also creating new ways to degrade adversary capabilities. These advantages are likely to dissipate as adversaries catch up and close the capability gap. This is likely to intensify competition in the years ahead. The acquisition of this technology by smaller states could enhance their deterrence options, situational awareness, and attribution capabilities to the benefit of regional security. Contrasting the effect on deterrence is the risk that regional powers will perceive the use of this technology in their region of interest as escalatory and threatening. There is also the possibility of accidents, data poisoning, and technical malfunction, which could worsen regional stability.

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It is unclear whether this technology would undermine or bolster existing arms control agreements. On the one hand, this technology could improve verification and monitoring. On the other hand, there are concerns over misinterpretation, deception, and perceived first-strike advantages. AI developments in C4ISR may diminish the perceived importance of arms control by giving states more knowledge of the adversary than can be obtained through formal cooperation. AI for cyber operations. AI can be used to detect, defend against, and

facilitate cyber attacks, either independently (i.e., bot vs. bot/bot vs. human) or collaboratively (i.e., in a human-machine team). Such capabilities can speed up discovery, evaluation, and response times within the cyber domain. Specific applications could include vulnerability scanning and exploitation, as well as the concealment and false-flagging of offensive actions. AI cyber operations could extend to the degradation or safeguarding of critical national infrastructure. Although this technology has the potential to enhance regional stability by strengthening deterrence, the inverse might be a more likely future prospect. The clandestine nature of this technology and general resistance by relevant parties to meaningful control measures—beyond nonbinding normative agreements and confidence-building measures—are important factors to consider in this context. AI for information operations. AI can be utilized to distort and weaponize

information in both peacetime and crisis. One example of this potential is the use of deep fakes which refers to synthetic media in which a person in an image or video is either replaced or manipulated. AI can also detect and counter these tactics. While media has always been an important dimension of armed conflict, AI can generate a level of contrived realism that is distinct from previous forms of propaganda. This technology can destabilize and subvert relationships built on trust, which is not conducive to negotiating or upholding arms control agreements. Indeed, in recent years distrust and contaminated information environments have eroded institutions and uprooted even deeply held societal norms. Mis- and disinformation could also complicate the verification and monitoring of existing treaties, which could lead to incorrect conclusions about intentions and capabilities. Not all states are equally impacted by disinformation; wealthier states have more robust national technical means to analyze text, images, video, and audio for signs of manipulation and some states have greater societal-level resistance to these kinds of threats through nontechnical means such as education and a robust, free media capable of fact-checking in a trusted manner. Even if verification and monitoring data is not manipulated, the perception that it could be manipulated may be sufficient to lower confidence levels.

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AI for weapons and effects. AI-incorporated weapons systems can surveil, capture, disable, or strike human and material targets. This technology would generate specific intelligence benefits, including pattern of life analysis and decision support for targeting. Depending on the level of technological sophistication, these systems could be employed narrowly (e.g., ship-to-ship naval warfare) or in more complex conditions (e.g., urban counterinsurgency). The distinctiveness of this innovation lies in its potential to significantly speed up or compress the target cycle (i.e., find, fix, track, target, engage, and assess) far beyond human capacity. States are expending significant financial and technical resources to develop military AI with a range of applications, including those that pertain to weapons systems. This spending is expected to continue—and even intensify—in the years ahead. Different states are operating under contrasting sets of restraints on the development and deployment of emerging technologies. For example, the values-based restraints on the development of AI for weapons and effects in Europe and the United States are not the same as those in China or Russia. This technology could have a deterrent effect by providing smaller states with a force multiplier that could discourage aggression from significantly larger conventional forces. This optimism ought to be caveated, however, with a warning of the likely destabilizing effect of rogue power acquisition.

The Arms Control Implications of Quantum

There are at least two quantum applications with relevance to arms control in the next twenty years: quantum for C4ISR and quantum for hardening and exploiting systems. Quantum for C4ISR. Quantum technologies have the potential to significantly improve C4ISR in multidomain battlefields. Quantum computing will optimize the performance of AI systems, which will become increasingly important to surveillance, reconnaissance, and target identification. Furthermore, quantum imaging offers various applications (e.g., radar, 3D cameras, and stealth rangefinders). Better C4ISR could make a state more confident in arms control reductions. For example, quantum sensing technology could enhance verification by detecting the presence or absence of nuclear material from a greater distance. While this would increase transparency, the arms control advantages associated with this technology would probably not transpire in any negotiation comprised of states that have access to quantum technology and those that do not. Mistrust could arise from the knowledge that possessors of this technology could use it to bypass traditional measures of control. Since the

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development of this technology is likely to be asymmetric, it could harden existing global hierarchies and exacerbate competition. Quantum computers could create proliferation risks, but this is unlikely to weaken international stability; proliferation is more likely to promote technical cooperation and technological stewardship. If states use quantum computing for nuclear design validation and nonexplosive testing, this could improve proliferators’ means to acquire nuclear weapons or improve their designs without risking detection by the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Organization. Quantum for hardening and exploiting. Quantum technology can pro-

vide new attack vectors and defenses in the cyber domain. On the offense, quantum technologies could decrypt data previously secured by public key encryption schemes. A quantum computer can rapidly “crack” existing cryptography, as compared to binary computers that could take years to do so. However, classical hacking methods could also exploit bugs and security breaches in nascent quantum system control software. On the defense, quantum-resilient algorithms offer a new approach to encryption that even quantum computers would find difficult to decrypt, whereas quantum key distribution allows safe encryption key exchange. The “hack now, crack later” strategy applied to weapons designs could aid proliferation. At the same time, if this technology brings to light nonnuclear weapons states’ records of nuclear hedging or noncompliance with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, it could create political challenges for the institution. Quantum computing could break existing encryption, which could improve verification and monitoring by adding a layer of information certainty, reliability, and security. Quantum hardening could allow some parties to make their activities highly inaccessible to verification and monitoring efforts. In this case, quantum-hardened national technical means—especially if asymmetric—could decrease reliance on, and trust in, measures of control. If US allies use quantum technologies to improve their cyber defenses, this could augment the stabilizing effects that those alliances bring to their respective regions. This technology also has the potential to incite competition among allies, who are simultaneously vying for the economic advantages associated with quantum leadership. Quantum proliferation could adversely impact regional security if it creates another avenue for arms racing. The Arms Control Implications of Biotechnology and Human Enhancement

There are at least three biotechnology applications with relevance to arms control in the next twenty years: cognitive human enhancement technologies

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(HETs), physical HET, and synthetic biology for the creation of novel biological and chemical agents. Cognitive human enhancement. Cognitive HET optimizes the cognitive performance of individuals and decisionmakers (e.g., enhancing mental abilities such as learning capacity, memory formation, attention, sleep efficiency, and concentration). Interventions could include human enhancement via genetic manipulation, neural interfaces, sociotechnical symbiosis with AI and autonomous systems, and pharmacological approaches to cognitive enhancement (e.g., to enhance memory-retention capabilities, improve situational awareness, and enhance tactical and operational decisionmaking). As military networks become increasingly intricate and automized, cognitive upgrades could offset the perception of humans as the weakest link in the action chain. This could potentially have a positive impact on regional security if such innovations allow for more accurate information communication and greater situation awareness insights. The drive to develop cognitive HET also has the potential to trigger an arms race, as well as a “race to the bottom,” with human experimentation intensifying in the absence of ethical and legal constraints. Physical human enhancement. Physical HET optimizes the physical per-

formance of individuals and decisionmakers (e.g., endurance, speed, fitness, muscle strength, infection prevention, wound control, pain reduction, and motor ability). Interventions include human enhancement via integrated robotics (e.g., exoskeletons or 3D-printed replacement parts); neural interfaces; pharmacological approaches to physical enhancement (e.g., reducing sensitivity to pain); ultralight body armor that is extremely flexible and robust; new biosensors and bioinformatics; nanotechnologies that monitor and dispense drugs; or genetic manipulation. Similar to cognitive HET, it will be difficult to verify and monitor physical human enhancement and genetic modification, a reality that could complicate future arms control agreements in this area. Synthetic biology for the creation of novel biological and chemical agents. Synthetic biology describes the deliberate design, engineering, and

creation of novel synthetic or modified biological components or systems. This could include new pathogens and novel biological or chemical agents, with explicitly engineered and targeted effects (e.g., increased virulence, physical, neurological, physiological impact, or genetic susceptibility). Synthetic biology builds on a human tradition of genetic manipulation, such as crop breeding and domestication, but has begun to evolve very rapidly due to advances in molecular biology, systems engineering, information science, and other emergent technical fields.

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Verification and monitoring of the development and deployment of bioweapons has always been challenging, and these challenges are likely to intensify as synthetic technologies advance. If relevant parties do not punish violations of existing treaties, including the Biological Weapons Convention, then regulatory measures may weaken. This could also have a spillover effect, undermining broader commitments to arms control. The Arms Control Implications of Projectiles, Propulsions, and Platforms

There are at least three novel projectiles, propulsion systems, and platforms with relevance to arms control in the next twenty years: antisatellite (ASAT) capabilities, directed-energy weapons, and hypersonic weapon systems. Antisatellite capabilities. ASAT capabilities fall into two categories:

ground-to-orbit and co-orbital. Ground-to-orbit ASAT capabilities deliver a kinetic or directed-energy effect from the earth to targets. Co-orbital ASAT capabilities deny or degrade space assets and enable covert/overt modifications of satellites on-orbit. In the case of both kinetic and co-orbital ASATs, the damage to the target satellite is often irreversible, as is the potential increase of space debris in orbit. While this is not a new capability, its use against other satellites is concerning for the growing number of state and nonstate actors who are reliant on a sustainable space environment. Development of these capabilities by nuclear possessors could weaken international trust and deepen the divide between nuclear weapons states and non-nuclear weapons states, with adverse impacts on multilateral agreements like the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. In addition, the political posturing associated with ASAT capabilities puts pressure on existing arms control agreements and contributes to a sense that nuclear risks are growing. However, mutual vulnerability could also create the conditions for arms control. To the extent that proliferation drives actors to recognize mutual vulnerability, this could incentivize the creation of new legal and normative mechanisms for preventing unintended escalation. Recognizing the impact that ASATs could have on national technical means of verification could also bring parties to the negotiating table. States will likely focus future military spending on enhancing the resiliency and redundancy of space assets and space-dependent systems and services to mitigate the impact of ASAT capabilities. Nonmateriel solutions such as training in reversionary modes could also be helpful to manage the disruption or denial of space-enabled data and services. Directed-energy weapons. Directed-energy weapons are ranged weapons that damage targets with highly focused energy (e.g., particle beam,

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high-energy laser, and microwave). These may be used offensively, against human or material targets, including hardware. Alternatively, they may be utilized as a countermeasure to intercept, disrupt, and destroy drone swarms, hypersonic missiles, and other emerging weapons technologies that challenge traditional defenses in innovative ways. This technology could increase the costs of an offensive Chinese or Russian campaign, thereby strengthening deterrence, encouraging restraint, and contributing to international stability. Alternatively, however, China and Russia could perceive the United States’ use of directed energy for ballistic missile defense as undermining mutual vulnerability. This could result in increased Chinese and Russian military spending on offensive capabilities to overwhelm US missile defenses. If China and Russia augment their missile defenses with directed-energy weapons, this might incentivize countries in their respective neighborhoods to offset this asymmetry. In this instance, the presence of these weapons would create regional instability, resulting in a zero-sum arms race. Hypersonic weapon systems. Hypersonic weapon systems are capable

of exceeding speeds of Mach 5. A combination of speed, maneuverability, stealth, warhead ambiguity, and ability to evade defensive systems set hypersonic weapon systems apart from that which came before them. Hypersonic flight vehicles can be used for reconnaissance or to deliver high-energy kinetic strikes against standard military and high-value timesensitive targets. The lack of a clearly defined military requirement for this capability in the United States raises questions around the strategic utility of hypersonic cruise missiles and hypersonic glide vehicles over existing ballistic and cruise missiles. Nevertheless, political support in the United States is substantial and growing, suggesting that hypersonics could represent a significant portion of future US military spending. The development of hypersonic systems by US adversaries may drive investment in counterhypersonic systems such as directed-energy weapons or use of other hypersonic missiles as interceptors. The resulting mutual vulnerability could create the conditions for arms control. In the best-case scenario, proliferation could force adversaries to acknowledge their mutual vulnerability, which might bring parties to the negotiating table. However, the ongoing hypersonic arms race is currently fueling distrust between states, reducing the willingness of states to participate in arms control, and complicating the negotiation of follow-on treaties. This technology could also act as a driver for the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. Since nuclear weapons states have developed this technology for nuclear deployment (e.g., Russia’s Avangard missile), this could lower the confidence of non-nuclear weapons states

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party to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. But non-nuclear weapons states could regard hypersonics with nuclear payloads as a qualitative improvement to existing arsenals, which would defy the spirit of the treaty’s Article VI obligations. Other Arms Control Implications of Emerging Technologies

This section has heretofore characterized the arms control implications for twelve emerging technologies with relevance to international stability broadly, and arms race stability in particular. Admittedly, it has done so in a somewhat uneven manner, which reflects the differing technological maturity timelines between these technologies and resulting uncertainties. Another limitation of this analysis is that there is no way of accounting for presentism, or so-called unknown unknowns. The emerging technologies surveyed seemed appropriate at the time of this writing, but there is no way to account for future capabilities or future counterforce capabilities, which will doubtless affect the impact of these technologies. Similarly, we cannot forecast the future geopolitical landscape from our present vantage point. The objective of foresight methods is not to predict the future, but to encourage experts and policymakers to critically examine their assumptions about the present and consider a wide range of future possibilities. No research can fully transform unknowables and uncertainties into calculable and manageable risks. Instead, the objective is to give scholars and policymakers a better understanding of expert opinion and broaden their perspectives on what the future might hold. The conversation on the impact of emerging technologies on arms control should also consider the implications of less flashy capabilities (e.g., edge computing) and the resources that underpin several of these technologies (i.e., rare earth elements) in addition to technologies that cannot be foreseen.

Approaches to Arms Control for Emerging Technologies Arms control has historically focused on regulating capabilities that can be seen and counted. In the past, this approach was fit for purpose. However, to accommodate the unique challenges and opportunities that emerging technologies present for arms control, a broader definition is required. This book proposes various ways for rethinking arms control; its authors broadly agree that arms control should be understood as the process of addressing an emerging capability, to constrain associated risks and maximize associated benefits.

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That said, emerging technologies complicate the traditional arms control process in at least five ways. First, there is the matter of the inherent complexity and uncertainty of emerging technologies and the corresponding low technical intelligence quota among policymakers. Second, there is the lack of political will among policymakers to engage in the topic of emerging technologies, given already-crowded agendas at every level—unilateral, bilateral, and multilateral. Third, there is limited desire among highly industrialized states to curtail any future economic or military advantages through arms control.30 Fourth, there is a mismatch between the slow pace of international negotiations and the rapid pace of technological development. Fifth, there is a lack of effective interdisciplinary analysis and data resources for assessing the impact on arms control of a given technology or system of technologies. Historically, hard law (legally binding) instruments have been the gold standard of arms control, but ambitions cannot be limited to treaties alone. This ideal is occasionally unattainable for practical or instrumental reasons. When the ideal is unachievable, efforts should be made to get as close to the ideal as possible. Soft law instruments (e.g., industry standards, UN resolutions, and confidence-building measures) could precede, bolster, or partially substitute for hard law. Furthermore, hard law cannot address every challenge; it needs to be augmented with robust expectations, norms, and best practices. Given the challenges associated with regulating emerging technologies, soft law offers a flexible governance alternative. Moreover, arms control for emerging technologies requires creative thinking. Given that these technologies are primarily developed in the private sector, the study of arms control should include mandatory courses in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics that explore the security implications of their work. This could have the added benefit of incentivizing more people with technical backgrounds to enter the arms control community. Although these may not resemble arms control measures from the outside, as mechanisms designed to build trust and enhance stability, they embody the spirit of arms control.

Guiding Principles for the Future of Arms Control From this analysis one can derive several guiding principles for the future of arms control. These are not intended to be comprehensive, but rather to offer an indication of some paths forward. 1. A continuous threat assessment process. It is essential to scan the horizon to identify emerging technologies and systematically consider the risks and opportunities that they may present. This is

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intended to overcome a presentist mind-set and avoid investing limited resources in arms control for emerging technologies that are rapidly outpacing existing governance structures. 2. Investigate both capabilities and behaviors. Scholars occasionally set up a false dichotomy between regulating capabilities and placing restrictions on certain types of behavior. The logic here is that one cannot quantify certain enabling technologies or ascertain the intention behind others. The challenges associated with regulating dual-use capabilities should be mitigated through a combination of hardware and behavioral obligations, including transparency and rules for peaceful use.31 3. Set a research agenda. Rather than unthinkingly reproducing tired statements that are not grounded in empirics, the emerging technologies and arms control scholarly community needs to be asking: What would it look like to make meaningful insights in this space? This will require the formulation of an overarching goal for the research community, which might pertain to avoiding arms race dynamics or conflict escalation to include the use of nuclear weapons. Associated research questions might include: What do decisionmakers need to know to derisk a conflict? And what tools does this scholarly community need to solve this problem?

Conclusion This chapter explored some of the challenges and opportunities associated with artificial intelligence, quantum, biotechnology, human enhancement, and novel projectiles, propulsion systems, and platforms. It highlighted the heterogeneity among emerging technologies and underscored the limitations of treating emerging technologies as a broad risk category for international stability. When it comes to regulating emerging technologies, what has worked in previous decades may or may not have purchase in the future. It could be helpful to compare where thinking is currently on emerging technologies issues with the emergence of arms control in the early years of the nuclear era. It is more important than ever to think about arms control as a series of mechanisms established to build trust and enhance stability. These mechanisms should be sufficiently flexible to accommodate a rapidly changing technology landscape. In this otherwise uncertain environment, a few things are clear: new technologies will continue to emerge, existing technologies will continue to be applied in novel ways, and new technologies will interact with each other and with legacy systems in complex ways. Anticipating the effects of

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innovation on international stability and arms control will always be a fraught and imperfect process, but the manner of forecasting the future will enable the generation of robust arms control measures today.

Notes 1. “Technology,” Encyclopedia Britannica. 2. Keefe, Empire of Pain. 3. Chiang, Exhalation. 4. Felt, The Handbook of Science and Technology Studies. 5. The technology life cycle comprises four stages: research and development, ascent, maturity, and descent. 6. H. Williams, “Arms Control and Emerging Technologies.” 7. Favaro, Renic, and Kühn, Emerging Technologies, International Stability, and Human Security. 8. Drew, Twitter post. 9. Verbruggen, Twitter post. 10. Paul Scharre writes, Few weapons have held as much promise—and have consistently failed to live up to that promise—as directed-energy weapons. Since the 1960s, [the US Department of Defense (DOD)] has sought directed-energy weapons such as high-energy lasers or high-power microwaves. . . . In the 1990s and early 2000s, DOD spent billions in aggregate on high-energy lasers such as the Airborne Laser and Space-Based Laser, both of which ultimately failed to reach maturity. At the turn of the millennium, defense commentators crowed that another “revolution in military affairs, empowered in part by directed energy weapons, was just around the corner.” DOD itself argued that directed-energy weapons were “ready for some of today’s most challenging weapons applications, both offensive and defensive.” After several decades of investment, billions of dollars and several canceled programs, DOD has yet to successfully field an operational directed-energy weapon system. Scharre, “Preface,” 3–5.

11. The term artificial intelligence was coined in 1956 by the computer scientist John McCarthy to describe the study of intelligence by implementing its essential features on a computer. Katz, “Noam Chomsky on Where Artificial Intelligence Went Wrong.” 12. Dubner, “In the 1890s, the Best-Selling Car Was . . . Electric.” 13. Favaro, Renic, and Kühn, Emerging Technologies, International Stability, and Human Security. 14. Dubner, “In the 1890s, the Best-Selling Car Was . . . Electric.” 15. Revolution in military affairs refers to a major change in the character of warfare precipitated by new technologies and their subsequent impact on military doctrine, as well as operational and organizational concepts. 16. This is reflected in doctrine, organization, training, materiel, leadership and education, personnel, and facilities (DOTMLPF), an acronym used by the US Department of Defense. NATO uses a similar acronym—DOTMLPF-I, where the I stands for “interoperability.”

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17. H. Williams, “Arms Control and Emerging Technologies: The Limits of History.” 18. Futter and Zala, “Strategic Non-Nuclear Weapons and the Onset of a Third Nuclear Age.” 19. Kranzberg, “Technology and History.” 20. van Hooft, Boswinkel, and Sweijs, Shifting Sands of Strategic Stability. 21. Lieber and Press, The Myth of the Nuclear Revolution; Green, The Revolution that Failed. 22. Ford, “Strategic Stability and the Global Race for Technology Leadership”; Trenin, Strategic Stability in the Changing World. 23. Biddle and Oelrich, “Future Warfare in the Western Pacific.” 24. This chapter has repeatedly emphasized the importance of perceived vulnerabilities, in recognition that the perception of military advantage is just as significant as actual military advantage. 25. This is a broad generalization that follows on from the challenges associated with doing sound work in this space. The author is indebted to several phenomenal scholars in this field. 26. Favaro, “Strategic Upheaval, Overhyped, or Something In-Between?” 27. The combination of new and old systems is particularly problematic, as the old is generally cheap and ubiquitous, but can be given a deadly new use if combined with something new. 28. In practical terms, this comprises data collected via a future-oriented technology assessment, which gives experts the opportunity to evaluate a wide range of emerging technologies according to common parameters. This process ultimately generates a new framework for understanding the similarities and differences between the different types of effect that emerging technologies might have, which policymakers could use to prioritize areas of importance and allocate limited resources appropriately. This aligns with Amy Nelson’s work, wherein she highlights the importance of a “threat-based, rather than technology-based, focus.” Nelson, “How Emerging Technology Is Breaking Arms Control.” 29. Favaro, Renic, and Kühn, Emerging Technologies, International Stability, and Human Security. 30. Equally, economic and military incentives are often opposing. Weapons systems cost money and states would often prefer not to spend this money if they could get away with it. This is apparent in the decades of underinvestment in defense, except in the United States, Russia, and China. 31. West, Marijan, and Standfield, Regulating New Tools of Warfare.

12 Conventional Weapons and Novel Systems Amy J. Nelson

THE PROJECT OF CONVENTIONAL ARMS CONTROL—LIMITING, REGulating, and preventing the spread of dangerous weapons and materials that are not considered weapons of mass destruction (WMD)—has had a long history of success. Conventional arms control treaties and related agreements had, until recently, helped prevent the outbreak of a major war in Europe. Associated confidence- and security-building measures (CSBMs) provided verification and transparency that forestalled crises and mitigated instability. And though not without contemporary challenges from new technologies, export control regimes have largely prevented the sale or transfer of sensitive conventional weapons or dual-use technologies to undesirable actors. However, the purpose or future role for conventional arms control is being increasingly called into question as novel systems proliferate throughout the world and existing conventional arms limitation agreements fail to maintain their relevance in a much-changed security environment. Furthermore, whereas it was once quite clear what was considered a “conventional weapon,” boundaries between conventional and nonconventional are eroding. Much like the rest of the arms control enterprise, for conventional arms control the only constant seems to be change. Though relatively few in number, conventional arms control agreements were in force for decades and their member states were largely compliant. Now, however, these agreements are showing their age. In addition to Russia’s deliberate rollback of conventional arms control measures in Europe as a prelude to its attack on Ukraine, conventional arms control faces multiple challenges, particularly from the rapid evolution of technology and rapid pace of innovation today.1 This means, in part, that while traditional types of conventional weapons like tanks and ammunition continue to present security challenges previously mitigated by arms control solutions, 203

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those conventional weapons are increasingly enhanced or made better by new technologies. Increased precision, lethality, and proliferation of conventional weapons technologies remain ongoing trends. Additionally, new threats from entirely novel technologies present challenges to existing arms control systems and would seem to require new kinds of solutions.2 Consequently, the utility of conventional arms control for a future international security order is increasingly in doubt.3 This chapter explores the existing arms control architecture for conventional weapons, including a case study on the Conventional Armed Forces in Europe Treaty (CFE Treaty). It then turns to new technologies and concerns for conventional arms as well as prospects for arms control.

Definitions Conventional weapons refers to a wide range of equipment, including (but not limited to) armored combat vehicles, combat helicopters, combat aircraft, warships, small arms and light weapons, landmines, cluster munitions, missiles, ammunition, and artillery.4 Today, conventional capabilities are being enhanced by or composed of dual-use and enabling technologies. The dual-use part means the technologies have both civilian and military applications, and the enabling part refers to the use of those technologies to enhance existing capabilities— they are not themselves lethal technologies. Enabling technologies include (but, again, are not limited to) laser guidance systems, artificial intelligence, machine learning and robotics, and semiconductors. Often these dual-use technologies originate in the private sector and are adopted by the military. Another major change to the origins of conventional capabilities is their format. Increasingly, the technology that drives or improves conventional capabilities is digital (intangible)—as are the plans, schematics, or “technical data,” which diagram or describe how the technology works or how to make it. The qualitative shift in how defense innovation occurs (increasingly outside the military-industrial complex), combined with the digitization of potentially sensitive military technologies, all combined with the current “innovation boom,” or fourth industrial revolution, means that sensitive military technologies are emerging at a near-unmanageable pace for meaningful control to take effect.5 In no uncertain terms, it is increasingly difficult for conventional arms control tools and systems to prevent the spread of these private sector origin, dual-use, and digitized technologies—much less their use in conflict. For the project of conventional arms control, this also means that the burden of controlling conventional technologies increasingly falls to polit-

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ically binding export controls or export control regimes in lieu of legally binding treaties. Whereas arms control regimes can be used to limit the quantity or deployment of certain conventional weapons, export controls prevent their spread by providing guidelines to regulate and restrict the transfer of critical information, technology, or services to foreign nations for the protection of national security or an alternative foreign policy goal. Guidelines are then translated into domestic regulations by member states. Many domestically implemented export controls come from multilateral negotiations at both the Wassenaar Arrangement on Export Controls for Conventional Arms and Dual-Use Goods and Technologies (Wassenaar Arrangement),6 which establishes recommendations for the trade of conventional and dual-use technologies, and the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR), which combats missile proliferation by establishing recommendations for the trade of missile and related technologies. Conventional weapons are increasingly enabled by novel technologies. Hypersonic weapons are next-generation missiles that can fly at speeds exceeding Mach 5 and are highly maneuverable.7 It is believed these qualities allow hypersonic missiles to more easily perforate or evade defenses, as well as to penetrate deeper into adversary territory, though this capability remains unproven.8 While intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) were always “hypersonic” insomuch as they have always been able to travel at or around Mach 5, newer hypersonics include cruise missiles, which can be launched at closer range than ICBMs, as well as hypersonic glide vehicles.9 Hypersonic cruise missiles (HCMs) are powered by scramjet (air-breathing) engines, while hypersonic glide vehicles (HGVs) are launched from a rocket or ballistic missile and then glide to their target.10 Rarer and older are hypersonic ballistic missiles that can achieve speeds of up to Mach 10, like Russia’s “new” Kinzhal, which is based on a modified ground-launched Iskander ballistic missile and has been used in Ukraine.11 Missiles have indeed been a major target of innovation in recent years (and have widely proliferated).12 In addition to hypersonic missiles, and as competition for dominance in space intensifies, major powers (the United States, Russia, and China) are developing counterspace capabilities. Precision-guided conventional strike weapons (munitions) have also played an increasing role in military operations in recent years. The broader category of precision-guided munition (PGM) is defined as any “explosive missile, rocket, or bomb that is guided by a ‘seeker’ control system using a laser guidance beam, a global positioning system (GPS), and/or an integrated inertial navigation system for highly accurate acquisition of military targets.”13 PGMs may be air launched, ground launched, or sea launched with laser- or radar-guided navigation systems. Unmanned aerial systems (UASs) or “drones,” also called remotely piloted vehicles (RPVs), or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), have also

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proliferated widely in the past decade. A UAV is either a single air vehicle that relies on a system of surveillance sensors or an air vehicle paired with a pilot-crewed ground control station along with support equipment.14 Nonlethal versions of these systems are used for cargo and resupply; intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance; close air support; communications relay; and aerial refueling. Future systems are likely to be capable of aerial refueling, air-to-air combat, combat search and rescue, strategic bombing, battle management command and control, suppression and destruction of enemy air defenses, and electronic warfare. UASs are sometimes referred to as “uncrewed” systems. Though certain UASs may be armed, they are not technically lethal autonomous weapons systems (LAWS), which operate with full autonomy or without a “human in the loop.”15 Laser technology also plays a prominent role in conventional weapons today. Not only does it aid in the precision guidance of munitions by the same name, directed-energy weapons use high-energy lasers (HELs), as well. Directed energy weapons may also (alternatively) use high-powered microwave (HPM) weapons.16 HELs can be used in short-range air defense, counter-unmanned aircraft systems, or counter-rocket, artillery, and mortar missions.17 They may also be used to “dazzle” or disable adversaries’ satellites and sensors, thus disrupting intelligence gathering, communications, and systems used for targeting. Likewise, HPM weapons can be used to disrupt adversary communications, as well as electronic systems. HPMs produce a greater effect than HELs due to the comparatively broader beam of energy they emit, making them a better candidate for defending against missile barrages and drone swarms.

Global Governance for Conventional Arms: Select Agreements Historically, conventional weapons have been subject to different governance mechanisms relative to nuclear weapons. For example, while nuclear arms control agreements designed to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons and limit the likelihood and cost of nuclear war tend to be formal legally binding treaties largely of finite duration, conventional arms control often takes alternative—often politically binding—forms, including bans, codes of conduct, confidence- and security-building measures, and export controls, with the the CFE Treaty being a rare exception. Of the export controls that address conventional weapons, the Wassenaar Arrangement is a nonlegally binding body in which its forty-two members collectively establish shared guidelines for the implementation of domestic regulations for the transfer or export of conventional weapons and dual-use

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technologies to buyers abroad. It maintains two control lists: the “basic” list, which has ten categories of dual-use technologies and materials, and the “munitions” list, which includes five types of sensitive items. Additionally, the Missile Technology Control Regime is an informal political agreement among thirty-five member states to support the domestic implementation of regulations to limit the proliferation of missiles and missile technology. This, in turn, serves to reduce the risks of WMD proliferation, primarily by blocking exports that might contribute to WMD delivery systems. As such, the MTCR focuses on regulating the export of rockets and unmanned aerial vehicles capable of delivering a payload of at least 500 kilograms (1,100 pounds) to a range of at least 300 kilometers (190 miles) and on equipment, software, and technology for such systems. Additionally, the United States unilaterally enacted a ban on the further testing and deployment of direct-ascent antisatellite (ASAT) missiles to establish an international norm of “responsible behavior” in space.18 In recent years, both the Wassenaar Arrangement and MTCR have been plagued with insufficient modernization to adapt to the changing security environment. Novel technologies are emerging and being exported faster than the control lists can enumerate them (or member states agree to include them on the control lists), leading to severe limitations of the regimes’ utility. Additionally, novel technologies are increasingly digital in nature, lending themselves to widespread diffusion by evading the constraints of any controls.19 The Arms Trade Treaty is a more recent innovation. It establishes common standards for the international trade of conventional weapons to put a damper on illicit arms trade and reduce human suffering, improve regional stability and security, and facilitate transparency on the transfer of conventional arms.20 A politically binding agreement, the treaty aims to “establish the highest possible common international standards for regulating or improving the regulation of the international trade in conventional arms,” and works to “eradicate the illicit trade in conventional arms and prevent their diversion.”21 The treaty requires member states to implement common international standards prior to the authorization of exports, including prohibiting the transfer of arms, technologies, and materials that would violate international law. It also serves to support capacity building in countries that have historically lacked domestic regulations for the responsible export of conventional arms. Several politically binding agreements ban the use of certain conventional weapons on grounds that they are inhuman. The UN Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCWC) was signed in 1980 to ban the use of conventional weapons that are considered “excessively injurious” or have “indiscriminate” effects with the goal of protecting civilians as well as

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combatants from unnecessary suffering.22 The weapons included in the ban are landmines, booby traps, incendiary devices, and blinding laser weapons. The treaty also mandates the clearance of explosive remnants of war.23 Like the export control regimes, the CCWC makes recommendations to member states to enact domestic legislation to implement the treaty’s bans. Similarly, the Convention on Cluster Munitions (CCM), which was signed in 2008, is a legally binding treaty, banning the use, production, stockpiling, and transfer of cluster munitions.24 Like the CCWC, it requires the removal of remnants after war. Notably, the United States, Russia, China, and Ukraine are not members. The legally binding CFE Treaty is a landmark agreement that was negotiated in the wake of the fall of the Soviet Union to preserve a “secure and stable balance” of conventional armaments in Central Europe. Signed in 1990, the CFE Treaty negotiations followed the Mutual and Balanced Force Reduction (MBFR) negotiations, which lasted from 1973 to 1989, and tried to create parity across all conventional forces between the United States and the Soviet Union. The CFE Treaty instead placed limitations on a comparatively smaller set of armaments, equipped with trust-building activities like on-site inspections and other mechanisms of verification. Those states party to the CFE Treaty (and others) also signed the Vienna Document, a politically binding agreement that adopts additional CSBMs, including the notification of states parties prior to conducting a major military exercise. In addition, the Vienna Document requires states to provide one another with information about their military forces on an annual basis (data exchanges).25 In 1992, the United States, Canada, and twenty-two European nations signed the Open Skies Treaty, allowing states parties to conduct unarmed reconnaissance flights over one another’s territories on short notice to collect information on military forces. 26 The overhead flights increased transparency, built confidence, and encouraged cooperation among European nations. The Open Skies Treaty was designed to work in concert with the CFE Treaty and Vienna Document—the third component of the conventional arms control system or architecture in Europe. In 2007, Russia ceased implementation of the CFE Treaty, and later in 2021 withdrew from the Open Skies Treaty following the US withdrawal in 2020.27 Additionally, while Russia is technically still party to the Vienna Document, it has ceased participating (since 2016) and did not abide by its commitments during its military buildup on its border with Ukraine prior to the February 2022 invasion. Moreover, Russia’s 2021 withdrawal from the Open Skies Treaty was in response to the United States’ withdrawal from the treaty in 2020 due to concerns about Russian compliance, with Russia having restricted surveillance flights over a number of areas in that country. Washington also ceased implementation of the CFE Treaty vis-àvis Russia in 2011.28

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The Conventional Armed Forces in Europe Treaty: A Case Study Given the fact that the CFE Treaty was a landmark agreement, and that it enjoyed relative success (it lasted fifteen years with the full participation of the United States and Russia), it tends to serve as a model if not reference point for future conventional arms control and offers numerous lessons learned. On the overwhelming success of the negotiations and treaty, scholar Jane Sharp writes: “The agreement culminated two of the most productive years in the history of East-West arms control since World War II. Under the enlightened leadership of President Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet Union negotiated cooperatively in Vienna, making many concessions to Western positions.”29 The CFE Treaty placed limitations on five categories of conventional land-based weapons and specified conditions for verification of compliance via on-site inspections. These stabilizing measures were specifically designed to hinder the ability to launch a surprise attack and were intended to be complemented by sundry verification procedures. The original agreement was negotiated among twenty sovereign state members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and Warsaw Pact alliances within the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE). For NATO, the talks preceding the CFE Treaty presented an opportunity to obtain steep cuts in Soviet ground forces to correct the imbalance of conventional armed forces in Europe and ensure stability. NATO and the Warsaw Pact eventually agreed that the goals for the talks would be to: (1) establish a stable and secure balance of conventional forces at lower levels; (2) eliminate disparities in holdings that detract from stability and security; and (3) eliminate the ability to launch a surprise attack and to initiate any kind of large-scale offensive military operation. The mandate for the talks also called for an “effective and strict verification regime,” including on-site inspections.30 The CFE Treaty negotiations followed on the heels of the unsuccessful MBFR talks, which had also tried to create a stable conventional military balance in Europe—albeit during the height of the tensions of the Cold War. Only with the end of the Cold War, Soviet reforms under General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev, the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia, the collapse of the Warsaw Pact governments, and the fall of the Berlin Wall would there be a thawing of Cold War tensions and a normalization of relations between East and West. The changes created an environment conducive to reaching a conventional arms control agreement. They also contributed to a new security environment in which deep military cuts to facilitate a defense-dominant set of forces on the continent became conceivable for all parties. When Gorbachev took office in 1990, he removed several roadblocks that had stymied the original MBFR negotiations: a dispute over data the

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Soviets had provided on their own forces, as well as a Soviet reluctance to agree to inspections. 31 The Soviet Union was willing to admit where the Warsaw Pact had been ahead of NATO in some areas of weaponry, thereby indicating a new willingness on the part of the Soviets to accept deeper cuts to their own ground forces than NATO would have to make to achieve parity. The Soviets were also motivated by concern over NATO’s superiority in advanced conventional defense technologies, combined with increased skepticism about the military utility of nuclear weapons. Because the Warsaw Pact also wanted to curb NATO’s ability to launch an air attack that could penetrate deeply into its territory, Gorbachev offered up steep cuts to the Soviet arsenal in exchange for curbing NATO’s “qualitatively superior technologies.”32 Additionally, in the late 1980s the United States grew increasingly concerned about a conventional conflict escalating to a nuclear one and thought a legally binding treaty would be effective for ensuring a conventional balance. Later, the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF Treaty, 1987) between the United States and the Soviet Union would eliminate all land-based intermediate-range nuclear missiles with a range of 500 to 5,500 kilometers, obligating the United States to maintain extended nuclear deterrence for its allies without those missiles. Consequently, the United States valued conventional stability as a precursor for nuclear stability per NATO’s doctrine of flexible response.33 CFE Treaty Negotiations: Managing Changing Conditions

Negotiations over the CFE Treaty were particularly notable for the significant and sustained high-level political will they enjoyed. Leaders on both sides were highly motivated to reach a deal, and the pace of negotiations in 1989 was uncharacteristically rapid as reforms spread across Europe. President George H. W. Bush issued a public statement of support for the Vienna-based negotiations in May 1989.34 In his statement, he also expanded NATO’s original proposal,35 adding even deeper reductions to land-based combat aircraft and helicopters and manpower.36 Bush then called for an agreement to be reached in six to twelve months.37 His statement would be formalized by NATO in a revised proposal issued shortly thereafter, and by the end of the second round all parties had agreed to the five categories of equipment that would be subject to limitations per the treaty. Gorbachev also maintained a prominent role in the negotiations and worked to shore up support for them. When shifting international security dynamics injected the negotiations with uncertainty, Gorbachev and his team worked even harder to show “skeptics and conservatives” that arms control efforts in general, and the CFE Treaty in particular, would continue to serve Soviet security interests.38

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The Agreement Terms

The CFE Treaty entered into force in 1992.39 Per the “sufficiency rule” within the treaty, no one state within each group was permitted to have more than one-third of the total of the category of equipment limited by the treaty.40 Group limits were further subject to zonal sublimits, with zones consisting of concentric circles extending outward from Central Europe (Germany, Benelux, Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia) to the outer flanks. Reductions to treaty-limited equipment (TLE) took place in three phases over forty months. Additionally, the treaty itself provided for the exchange of data on the structure of land and air forces, holdings in each category of TLE, as well as number and types, locations, changes in force levels or structures, entry into service of new TLE, and various aspects of TLE movement. These “stabilizing measures” ensured transparency and established constraints on the movement, deployment, and level of readiness of conventional armed forces. They were specifically designed to hinder the ability to launch a surprise attack and complement verification measures.41 The original CFE Treaty also established the Joint Consultative Group to resolve ambiguities about implementation and compliance, settle disputes, and continually update and modernize the provisions of the agreement. Such disputes could concern any questions pertaining to whether certain types of equipment fell within CFE Treaty provisions. The treaty also established regular review conferences to convene every four years. The CFE Treaty: The Second Act

Efforts to grow the conventional arms control system in Europe to shore up gaps and adapt to the evolving security landscape began immediately on the signing of the CFE-1A Agreement. CFE-1A talks established reductions to troop levels in Europe—a limit of 250,000 per side—and required all participating states to provide notification of increases to their force levels. The politically binding CFE-1A Treaty entered into force at the same time as the original CFE Treaty in 1992. Four years later, the states parties to the CFE Treaty signed the Flank Agreement, which permitted additional troops in the “flank regions,” or vulnerable NATO border areas, of Ukraine and Russia. However, the 1999 CFE Adaptation talks (for the Adapted CFE Treaty) would not prove as successful as prior efforts. The talks aimed at revising TLE levels based on states rather than alliances to accommodate the post– Cold War geopolitical situation in Europe. NATO states refused to ratify the agreement until Russia complied with its obligation to withdraw troops from Georgia and Moldova (per the Istanbul Commitments of 1999).42 Russia likewise refused, openly criticizing the “politicization” of diplomatic arms control efforts, and the Adapted CFE Treaty was never implemented.

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Recent Events: Dismantling the System

The CFE Treaty regime, which includes the treaty itself and associated agreements, practically defined what it means for an arms control regime to be flexible and broad. The treaty’s own CSBMs, as well as those from the Open Skies Treaty and the Vienna Documents, provided an unprecedented degree of transparency by means of the verification regime. In many ways, this may be the regime’s crowning achievement. The CFE Treaty’s annual exchange of information and a schedule of on-site inspections dispelled “suspicion about states’ motives and activities and contributed to the prevention of surprise attack.”43 Furthermore, as Jane Sharp writes, “The confidence-building aspects of a formal agreement should not be underestimated. The lasting legacy of the CFE Treaty will not be the numerical limits imposed on five categories of heavy military equipment, important as those are, but on the extraordinary degree of transparency afforded by the annual information exchanges and schedule of inspections.”44 As a result, the CFE Treaty regime also defines what it means for an arms control agreement to be durable, setting the standard for robustness over time. Indeed, the treaty may have outlived its security benefits to some signatories. Russia ceased implementation of the CFE Treaty in 2007 and invaded Abkhazia and South Ossetia, in Georgia, in December 2008. In 2014 Russia invaded Ukrainian territory for the first time, and in 2022 it returned with even greater territorial ambitions. In addition, the treaty limited equipment enumerated by the CFE Treaty has lost much of its relevance in modern warfare. Rather, Russian attacks on Ukraine have involved long-range missiles and artillery strikes using warplanes, cruise missiles, and rocket launchers, while Ukraine has used a number of Western-designed antitank and antiaircraft missiles.45 Blurred Lines: Where Does the Conventional End and the Nuclear Begin?

Conventional arms and nonconventional arms have always ranged from inseparable to completely enmeshed with nuclear issues. For example, the CFE Treaty focuses exclusively on creating a conventional military balance, leaving nuclear treaties to do the same for nuclear forces. Yet one of the justifications for the CFE Treaty was to prevent the outbreak of a conventional war that could escalate into a nuclear one. Meanwhile, some conventional arms-related export control regimes, including the Wassenaar Arrangement and the Missile Technology Control Regime, were created to prevent the spread of conventional or dual-use technologies that could aid in the creation or delivery of WMD.46 Furthermore, many of the threats and challenges from conventional weapons that we face today emerged contemporaneously with termination of

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the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM Treaty), which had its origins in strategic nuclear arms control. For example, Russian president Vladimir Putin linked Russia’s development of hypersonic weapons to the US withdrawal from the ABM Treaty, a decision Putin rued.47 He said, “During all these years since the unilateral U.S. withdrawal from the ABM Treaty, we have been working intensively on advanced equipment and arms, which allowed us to make a breakthrough in developing new models of strategic weapons.”48 Thus, while conventional and nuclear arm control treaties address conventional and nuclear weapons respectively, there is significant entanglement in their scope, function, and implementation. Evolving Conventional Capabilities Emerging technologies are enhancing existing conventional weapons, moving them into a category that is neither purely conventional nor purely emerging, with destructive power that increasingly rivals weapons of mass destruction. This category includes weapons and systems that are enabled with the ability to function autonomously, with greater precision, or more lethal force. This includes hypersonic missiles, directed-energy weapons, and “smart” munitions. In the United States, improving precision and lethality of conventional weapons and systems through innovation has been a priority of the US Department of Defense (DOD) since 2016, when DOD launched its third offset strategy. 49 Whereas the first offset had given rise to nuclear weapons, remaking war entirely, and the second offset saw the emergence of more intelligent systems like precision-guided munitions, the third offset would seek to remake war, with a focus on leveraging emerging technologies to create a more lethal and effective military.50 The strategy was also designed to develop “the means to offset advantages or advances in antiaccess/ area denial weapons (A2/AD) and other advanced technologies that we see proliferating around the world,” with particular focus on capturing and “spinning in” novel technologies from the private sector, including robotics, autonomous operating guidance, control systems, visualization, biotechnology, miniaturization, advanced computing and big data, and additive manufacturing.51 Smart Munitions

Technically, precision munitions originated for use in military operations in World War II, but were used to successful effect only in the Vietnam War (with so-called laser-guided bombs). That said, they were credited for the rapid US success in Operation Desert Storm in 1991. Since then, the United States has used them in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria because, using advanced guidance systems, PGMs can be launched at long ranges to attack an enemy

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without risking US forces.52 As A2/AD systems continue to proliferate globally, PGMs are likely to only increase in their operational utility.53 These munitions have never been great candidates for arms control limitations. For one, limitation agreements tend to focus more heavily on delivery devices than warheads themselves. For another, they are now so widely proliferated and so essential to operational concepts that it would be difficult to include them in any arms control agreement. That said, the 2015 Minsk Agreement required Russia to withdraw its Tornado-S multiple rocket launcher systems, which can launch PGMs, from Ukraine.54 Hypersonic Weapons

Hypersonics are relatively novel next-generation missiles. The United States, Russia, and China all have robust hypersonic programs, with the United States pursuing two types: hypersonic cruise missiles and glide vehicles. Russia and China claim to have already fielded hypersonic glide vehicles, and hypersonic weapons are also believed to be under development by Australia, France, Japan, and India.55 There has been much hype surrounding hypersonic missiles, and amid this hype concern about the impact of hypersonic missiles on strategic stability.56 Indeed, some have argued that hypersonics stand to be a destabilizing force57 because the missiles’ maneuverability (ability to fly at varying altitudes and trajectories) and speed might make them capable of eluding existing detection and defense systems until late in flight. When defenses can be evaded, and thus rendered useless, the defense community refers to the weapons as “destabilizing” because both sides can hold one another equally at risk and are, therefore, not equivalently deterred. Additionally, while US hypersonic weapons in development are being designed explicitly to deliver conventional warheads, most Russian and Chinese hypersonic weapons can be used for either nuclear or conventional warheads. This ambiguity—not being able to discern whether warheads on the tip of a missile are conventional or nuclear—can exacerbate instability.58 Not all analysts agree, however. Pavel Podvig, a senior research fellow at the UN Institute for Disarmament Research writes: “Fundamentally, I don’t think they [hypersonics] change much in terms of strategic balance and military capability.”59 This is primarily due to the belief that simply having the weapons does not change the strategic balance. Russia and China already have the capacity to overwhelm US missile defenses with their existing arsenal of ICBMs—no hypersonics required. It is highly improbable that either could launch a strike using hypersonic weapons that is sufficiently large to neutralize the US deterrent without being detected. Because hypersonics are still in development and their future deployment largely uncertain, it is quite difficult to say anything useful about whether they are destabilizing. They simply have some of the functions of weapons that have been on the arms con-

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trol agenda previously and are thus often mentioned as candidates for inclusion in a potential arms control treaty. Hypersonic arms race. Regardless the lack of consensus on whether hypersonic weapons are strategically destabilizing, their development is fueling an arms race among the United States, Russia, and China.60 On the seventieth birthday of the Communist Party in 2019, China featured its new category of hypersonic weapons in a military parade: its DF-17 ballistic missile was (re)designed to carry a hypersonic glide vehicle in lieu of a warhead.61 Later, in 2021 China launched a hypersonic glide vehicle using a fractional orbit bombardment system, flying in low orbit before missing its target by only about twenty-four miles and surprising the United States with its level of technical advancement.62 Russia announced that its Avangard hypersonic glide vehicle had entered service only weeks after China’s 2019 announcement.63 Russia’s Kinzhal (an air-launched ballistic missile that is hypersonic) was used in Ukraine.64 Russia has also developed a sea-launched hypersonic cruise missile, the Tsirkon. Though the purpose of such weapons remains controversial in the United States, as Russia and China have claimed to have advanced their hypersonics capabilities, the United States has increased spending on its own programs.65 In the United States, hypersonic missile capabilities were borne from the Conventional Prompt Global Strike program, which originated in 2003. The program sought to produce long-range conventional hypersonic weapons capable of attacking targets anywhere in the world within an hour from their launch.66 At the time, the United States was working to counter threats from terrorism. Existing missiles were the only “prompt” option, but far too destructive to provide a proportionate response. The United States thus determined that it needed a long-range high-precision option for counterterrorism purposes. Shortly thereafter, the United States also identified the need for A2/AD capabilities, which also rely on hypersonics, to prevent countries from establishing a foothold in key regions (e.g., the Indo-Pacific).67 Today, the United States funds eight hypersonic programs across its joint forces.68 Some argue that the billions of dollars the United States has poured into hypersonic missile development is justified: hypersonics will level the playing field with adversaries who are also developing and already deploying these kinds of weapons.69 Additionally, not only do hypersonics serve counterterrorism and counter-A2/AD purposes, they also provide a conventional counternuclear capability and could be used to preempt any Chinese threat to US low-orbiting satellites critical to command and control.70 Critics have charged that the program is producing a “weapon without a mission,” and also that the program is resulting in the aforementioned dangerous arms race with China and Russia.71 Others have argued that hypersonic weapons could be most useful in the denial of nuclear threats from

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North Korea and Iran, attacking ASAT of a potential attacker, in addition to the more well-known functions of countering A2/AD strategies, deterring terrorists, and counterterrorism.72 Arms control for hypersonic weapons? Hypersonic weapons present a concern for those who would seek to constrain their use, due to their lethality and number in all their forms. When the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) was negotiated, hypersonics were deliberately left off the table, though Russia has since acknowledged that its hypersonic glide vehicle, Avangard (deployed in 2019), falls under New START warhead limitations and counts them toward the treaty’s totals.73 Were the idea of including hypersonics in an arms control treaty to become broadly desired or accepted, there is the question of negotiating a separate agreement de novo, versus broadening the scope of New START, to include hypersonic weapons placing ceilings on the number of these weapons that states parties to the treaty may have. It has been suggested that negotiating a new treaty either explicitly for or that includes hypersonics is preferred to broadening New START in light of the treaty’s looming expiration date of 2026, which makes the latter a short-term solution.74 As an alternative to a legally binding treaty, some have proposed confidence-building measures for hypersonics, which would amount to, for example, basing restrictions for the weapons. These might include a ban on storing conventional and nuclear forces in the same place, or a prohibition on basing any heavy bombers that can carry hypersonic weapons not covered by New START.75 Data exchanges on the acquisition or deployment of hypersonics could also increase transparency and stability.76 More traditional limitation approaches include capping the number of hypersonic vehicles a country may have or trading off nuclear warheads allowed under New START for hypersonics.77

Unmanned Aerial Systems

UASs are a prime innovation target. In the works are a number of experimental concepts, including aircraft system-of-systems, which is “a collection of systems, each capable of independent operation, that interoperate together to achieve additional desired capabilities.”78 In addition, the United States is pursuing programs for manned-unmanned teaming, enabled by artificial intelligence, which combines crewed and uncrewed aircraft to leverage the capabilities of each. This may include UASs providing mission support for crewed aircraft, for example, to augment situational awareness and lethality, sometimes referred to as the “loyal wingman” concept. Third, UASs grouped together and coordinating autonomously, sometimes referred to as “swarming,” a concept that has a number of applications, at least across US programs.79

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Arms control for UASs. UASs have been subject to export controls designed to prevent their transfer to potential bad actors via the MTCR as well as national export controls, yet Russia has been weaponizing Chinese civilian off-the-shelf drones (not subject to export controls) for use in Ukraine, rendering export controls useless.80 Most arms control efforts for UASs have focused on LAWS, with 30 countries and 165 nongovernmental organizations calling for a preemptive ban on their deployment due to ethical concerns from the lack of a “human in the loop” as well as from vulnerability to hacking. The United States has opposed such a ban, preferring to deploy lethal UASs in alignment with international law.81

Directed-Energy Weapons

Directed-energy weapons include high-energy laser and high-powered microwave weapons. HEL weapons could be used by ground forces in a variety of missions to interfere with intelligence-gathering operations, military communications, positioning, navigation, and timing systems by disabling (“dazzling”) or damaging enemy satellites and sensors at fairly low cost.82 Whereas HEL weapons emit a narrower beam of energy, HPMs are effective over a broader area. HPMs could be used in a similar way, disabling enemy electronics and communications systems, but also potentially in a defensive role against oncoming missiles and drone swarms, as well as for nonlethal crowd control, perimeter defense, or patrol and convoy protection.83 It has been noted that the United States has been researching directed-energy systems since the 1960s at great cost, and technological benchmarks have frequently remained unmet.84 The United States deployed its first directed-energy weapon in 2014.85 Arms control for directed-energy weapons? According to a 2017 dis-

cussion paper released by the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, directed-energy weapons “are not authoritatively defined under international law, nor are they currently on the agenda of any existing multilateral mechanism.”86 Nevertheless, some applications of directed-energy weapons are prohibited by an additional protocol to the CCWC: “laser weapons specifically designed, as their sole combat function or as one of their combat functions, to cause permanent blindness to unenhanced vision” are prohibited.87

Forecast for the Future There is no getting around the fact that conventional capabilities and the technologies underlying their qualitative improvements are increasingly diffuse.88 While closing loopholes that terminate pathways for proliferation has worked for nuclear weapons and nuclear-related technologies, a similar

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system of mechanisms to prevent actors, especially nonstate actors, from acquiring or developing lethal capabilities from conventional weapons is less feasible today, when these technologies tend to originate in an open environment, or may be shared due to their digital format and the ease of transfer of digital files. Increasingly, the world must rely on export controls to do the work of conventional arms control, preventing the spread of the most lethal or enabling technologies. Yet these export control regimes are less well suited to the project of preventing the diffusion of dual-use and enabling technologies because there are now so many more technologies emerging at such a rapid pace. The regimes simply cannot keep up. Additionally, digitization facilitates the export or transfer of technologies that may now be exported with the click of the send button on an email. All of this suggests a certain futility. But it may also be the driver of an increase in alternative conventional arms control movements such as bans and codes of conduct. This includes the ongoing pursuit of bans on the use of lethally autonomous weapons systems or drones,89 for example, as well as proposed bans on the use of cyber weapons against nuclear command and control or other forms of critical infrastructure.90 In other words, such bans may reflect the fact that control over who has these technologies is no longer feasible, but restrictions on how they may be used can be. This is not to say that conventional weapons themselves no longer warrant arms control limitations. This need remains particularly true for more traditional conventional weapons that pose new kinds of concerns and threats, such as hypersonic weapons, and possibly precision-guided munitions, all of which remain unregulated. The conventional arms control architecture in Europe is in dire need of evolution, particularly in light of Russia’s war in Ukraine. That said, the future of conventional arms control remains highly uncertain. Notes 1. Nelson and Twardowski, “How the Demise of an Arms Control Treaty Foreshadowed Russia’s Aggression Against Ukraine.” 2. Nelson, “Innovation Acceleration, Digitization, and the Crisis of Nonproliferation Systems.” 3. Charap et al., “A New Approach to Conventional Arms Control in Europe.” 4. “Conventional Weapons.” 5. “The Fourth Industrial Revolution.” 6. “About Us.” 7. Acton, “Hypersonic Weapons Explainer.” 8. “Complex Air Defense”; A. H. Montgomery and Nelson, “Ukraine and the Kinzhal” 9. “Hypersonic Weapons.” 10. Kemburi, “From Subsonic to Hypersonic Cruise Missiles.”

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11.V. Kim and Schmitt, “Ukraine Says It Shot Down Hypersonic Russian Missiles over Kyiv.” 12. Barrie, “Trends in Missile Technologies.” 13. “Precision-Guided Munitions.” 14. Hoehn, Sayler, and DeVine, “Unmanned Aircraft Systems.” 15. Sayler, “Defense Primer.” 16. “Joint Publication 3–13, Information Operations.” 17. Sayler, “Defense Primer.” 18. White House, “Fact Sheet: Vice President Harris Advances National Security Norms in Space.” 19. Nelson, “Innovation Acceleration, Digitization, and the Crisis of Nonproliferation Systems.” 20. “The Arms Trade Treaty.” 21. Ibid. 22. “Convention on Prohibitions or Restrictions on the Use of Certain Conventional Weapons Which May Be Deemed to Be Excessively Injurious or to Have Indiscriminate Effects.” 23. “Protocol on Explosive Remnants of War.” 24. “Convention on Cluster Munitions.” 25. “Vienna Document 1990.” 26. “The Open Skies Treaty at a Glance.” 27. Reif, “Russia Completes CFE Treaty Suspension.” 28. Woolf, The Open Skies Treaty; US Department of State, “2021 Adherence to and Compliance with Arms Control, Nonproliferation, and Disarmament Agreements and Commitments.” 29. Sharp, Striving for Military Stability in Europe, 3. 30. “NATO-Warsaw Pact.” 31. Remnick, “Gorbachev Elected President.” 32. Sharp, Striving for Military Stability in Europe, 12. 33. Foerster et al., Defining Stability, 19. 34. Bush, “A Whole Europe, A Free Europe,” speech. 35. NATO’s original proposals, from March 9, 1990, proposed ceilings for main battle tanks, artillery, and armored troop carriers. 36. “CFE Chronology.” 37. Apple, “Bush Wins Backing for His Arms Plan from NATO Allies.” 38. Sharp, Striving for Military Stability in Europe, 11. 39. Each group was permitted 20,000 battle tanks (3,500 of those must be in storage); 30,000 amphibious combat vehicles (with 2,700 in storage); 20,000 artillery pieces (with 3,000 in storage); 2,000 attack helicopters; and 6,800 combat aircraft. 40. “CFE Chronology.” 41. NATO, “Conventional Arms Control.” 42. Nelson and Twardowski, “How the Demise of an Arms Control Treaty Foreshadowed Russia’s Aggression Against Ukraine.” 43. Peters, CFE and Military Stability in Europe. 44. Sharp, Striving for Military Stability in Europe, xiii. 45. “What Weapons Are Being Used in the Russia-Ukraine Conflict?” 46. US Department of State, “Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR) Frequently Asked Questions.” 47. Putin, “Presidential Address to the Federal Assembly.” 48. Ibid. 49. US Department of Defense, “Remarks by Deputy Secretary Work on Third Offset Strategy.”

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50. US Department of Defense, “The Third U.S. Offset Strategy and Its Implications for Partners and Allies.” 51. Ibid. 52. Hoehn, “Precision-Guided Munitions.” 53. Antiaccess refers to “enemy military movement into an area of operations” and uses weapons to strike key targets. Area denial refers to the denial of “enemy freedom of action in areas under friendly control” and uses more defensive systems. “China’s Anti-Access Area Denial.” 54. “Ukraine Crisis.” 55. Nelson and Hammes, “Inevitable Bedfellows?” 56. A. H. Montgomery and Nelson, “Ukraine and the Kinzhal.” 57. R. J. Smith, “Hypersonic Missiles Are Unstoppable.” 58. C. A. Lee, “Asking the Right Questions.” 59. Podvig, as quoted in Mackinnon, “Russia’s New Missiles Are Aimed at the U.S.” 60. Bugos and Reif, “Understanding Hypersonic Weapons”; see also Stone, “‘National Pride Is at Stake.’” 61. See Tiwari, “China Flashes ‘Rare Footage’ of DF-17 Hypersonic Missile.” 62. Sevastopulo and Hille, “China Tests New Space Capability with Hypersonic Missile.” 63. Frans, “The Impact of Hypersonic Missiles on Strategic Stability.” 64. “Russia Uses Hypersonic Missiles in Strike on Ukraine Arms Depot.” 65. “Defense Budget Overview”; “Hypersonic Weapons.” 66. Acton, “Debating Conventional Prompt Global Strike.” 67. Quadrennial Defense Review Report 2010. 68. Reim, “8 Key Hypersonic Missile Efforts for the US Department of Defense.” 69. Sirota, “Biden’s Defense Budget Is a Big Win for Hypersonic Weapons Contractors.” 70. Vasani, “How China Is Weaponizing Outer Space.” 71. “A Weapon Without a Mission.” 72. Acton, “Debating Conventional Prompt Global Strike.” 73. Tracy, “Fitting Hypersonic Weapons into the Nuclear Arms Control Regime.” 74. Ibid. 75. See “Hypersonic Weapons.” 76. Acton, “Debating Conventional Prompt Global Strike,” 13. 77. H. Williams, “Asymmetric Arms Control and Strategic Stability,” 802–803. 78. See “Systems Engineering Innovation Center.” 79. Scharre, “Robotics on the Battlefield Part II.” 80. See Dobberstein, “Russian Military Uses Chinese Drones and Bots in Combat, over Manufacturers’ Protests.” 81. See Unmanned Aircraft Systems. 82. Sayler, “Department of Defense Directed Energy Weapons,” 38. 83. Ibid. 84. Scharre, “Directed-Energy Weapons.” 85. Sayler “Department of Defense Directed Energy Weapons,” 38. 86. “Directed Energy Weapons.” 87. UN, “Additional Protocol to the Convention on Prohibitions or Restrictions on the Use of Certain Conventional Weapons.” 88. Nelson and Hammes, “Inevitable Bedfellows?” 89. “Lethal Autonomous Weapons.” 90. Ibid.

13 Arms Control in Cyberspace and Outer Space George Perkovich

TECHNOLOGIES OFTEN DICTATE THE SOCIOPOLITICAL STRUCTURES that are suitable for managing them.1 The production and deployment of nuclear weapons, for example, require specialized expertise, sizable budgets, and authoritarian-like security and control arrangements. Decisions to seek these weapons have been made by a small group of apex leaders of states whose adversaries already possess nuclear weapons.2 Few commercial excuses or narratives suffice to hide a state’s intentions to acquire such weapons.3 The weaponry needed to deliver nuclear weapons—missiles, planes, submarines, or ships—are by and large countable and subject to monitoring from a distance. Importantly, nuclear weapons are meant to deter adversaries from acting rather than to facilitate one’s own offensive actions. Though states with nuclear weapons have been attacked by each other since August 1945—and by non-nuclear weapons states and terrorists—nuclear deterrence has helped keep such conflicts from escalating and nuclear weapons have not been detonated in war. The Cuban missile crisis of 1962 and the 2001–2002 Kargil War between India and Pakistan illustrate how the presence of nuclear weapons can stimulate military crisis or conflict and then deter escalation.4 Nikita Khrushchev deployed nuclear weapons in Cuba to redress a US nuclear advantage, thus creating the crisis, but the prospect of nuclear war deterred both sides from escalating. Pakistan’s successful nuclear weapon tests in May 1998 emboldened its army leadership in early 1999 to take mountain outposts that had been held by India in the Kargil region of Kashmir, but the prospect of nuclear war deterred both sides from escalating the conventional conflict that ensued. None of these arms control–friendly characteristics obtain with cyber weaponry and many space-related capabilities. Most distinctively, most 221

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cyber and space capabilities are quadruple dual use. They are made, owned, or operated by commercial as well as state actors; they are used for peaceful as well as hostile purposes; they are used for espionage as well as attack; and when used for attack, they can help deliver nuclear as well as nonnuclear weaponry onto targets.5 Furthermore, cyber and space capabilities are used daily by states and others in their competition for relative advantage in security, economics, and political influence. Thus, neither their possession nor use will be prohibited or deterred in comprehensive ways. For these and other reasons the focus of space and, especially, cyber arms control will be much different than it has been with nuclear arms control (or landmines, biological weapons, or chemical weapons). Prospective arms control will focus less on prohibiting or limiting cyber and space capabilities and much more on restraining behaviors, targets, and effects of operations involving cyber and space capabilities. Dueling might be a helpful metaphor: rules did not prohibit men of old (prideful, idiotic, or drunk) from carrying weapons and having duels; rather, they prescribed acceptable conduct and, in many cases, resulted in less violence than alternate forms of conflict would have. Whatever the technology, arms control is desirable as far as it can help minimize the costs of arms racing, enhance stability among military competitors by making their weapon inventories and intentions more predictable, and reduce destructiveness if deterrence fails and weapons are used.6 Without a willingness to restrain oneself (in return for restraint by others), arms control is neither desirable nor feasible. This need for mutual accommodation is a major reason arms control is so hard to achieve and sustain. In democracies like the United States, this challenge is all the greater as domestic political opponents must eschew the temptation to denounce an administration for making compromises with adversaries. The US Constitution requires ayes from two-thirds of senators present to ratify a treaty. Inasmuch as no political party has had a two-thirds majority in the Senate since 1977, it is reasonable to expect that bipartisan cooperation is necessary for the foreseeable future. Presidents can make nonlegally binding agreements with other states, but such agreements are less dependable and therefore less attractive. Indeed, it is unrealistic to think about arms control apart from the political-security dynamics among the states whose arms are to be controlled. In cyber, this currently means the United States, Russia, China, Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), and Iran. In space, the key players are the United States, Russia, and China; if they could find agreement, they may then seek to enlist European Union (EU) states, Japan, India, Brazil, and others over time. Russia, China, and the United States are the most likely aggressors or defenders in most regional conflict scenarios where advanced technologies might be used to cause harm. If the United States

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and at least one of the other two do not cooperate, agreed frameworks of restraint and protocols for managing compliance will not be possible. Assuming that the United States and some combination of Russia, China, Iran, and the DPRK would be interested in negotiated restraints or rules of engagement, this chapter sketches types or forms of restraint in the cyber and space domains that could be useful. The conclusion addresses how compliance with any restraints could be verified and enforced.

The Cyber Domain To date, cyber attacks have caused few if any deaths. Nevertheless, cyber threats to the socioeconomic-political well-being of societies and governments abound. Depending on the threat-actor (e.g., Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, or their proxies), threats include thefts of money and intellectual property in some form or another, and espionage that reveals vulnerabilities or plans, or exposes covert or clandestine assets. More damaging operations could corrupt data and confidence in transactions that could cause a breakdown of financial or other systems, or propagate influence and disinformation campaigns to weaken if not remove adversary governments. All advanced cyber powers, especially the United States, seek the capability to disable vital military systems during an armed conflict. Can something like arms control prevent or mitigate such threats? The short answer is “Probably not much, but it doesn’t hurt to try.”7 Why? As noted above, the number of actors and instruments that would have to be “controlled” is boundless—any proficient hacker and potentially any computer.8 International diplomacy can motivate states to enact laws and do more to curtail criminal activity, but arms control generally deals with state actors and actions. Moreover, many state actors, tools, and operations are devoted to espionage, which is not subject to arms control–like constraints. Finally, these actors and tools and pathways of operations might operate in ways that cannot be attributed to specified entities or individuals with accuracy that meets international legal standards. These and other factors make it nearly impossible to design, verify, and enforce prohibitions or limitations on weapons (hardware and software). Something could be done, however, to restrain how actors under state control use code and hardware—who or what they target and under what conditions, or the scale of disruption or destruction they seek. In the cyber domain where countries like the United States persistently spy on, defend against, and prepare to attack adversaries if necessary, restraint would most feasibly involve rules of engagement.9 In armed conflict—as distinct from civil conflict and less violent forms of interstate contestation—the Law of Armed Conflict and its principles of necessity, discrimination, and

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proportionality should apply to whatever types of weapons are used. But the most pressing need for rules of engagement or restraint in the use of cyber capabilities is in contests short of armed conflict. Rules of engagement would seek to: (1) enhance confidence that care is being taken to eschew cyber operations that could cause conflict or instability in the international system; (2) reduce destructiveness and costs on states, businesses, and citizens if cyber weapons are used; and (3) become a basis of state practice that could lead to customary international law that would reinforce such restraints and their beneficial effects over time. The most direct effort to formally restrain conduct in and through cyberspace has been the UN Group of Governmental Experts (GGE) on Developments in the Field of Information and Telecommunications in the Context of International Security, known as the UN GGE process. Since 2004 there have been six iterations of this process, involving between fifteen and twenty-five countries. The United States, China, France, Russia, and the United Kingdom have participated in all. The third GGE, in 2013, concluded that international law is applicable to cyberspace. The 2015 GGE was unable to reach consensus on how specifically to apply international law; instead, it produced a set of nonbinding, voluntary norms, rules, and principles of responsible state behavior. These included: 13(a) States should cooperate in developing and applying measures to increase stability and security in the use of ICTs [information and computer technologies] and to prevent ICT practices that are acknowledged to be harmful or that may pose threats to international peace and security; (c) States should not knowingly allow their territory to be used for internationally wrongful acts using ICTs; (f) A State should not conduct or knowingly support ICT activity contrary to its obligations under international law that intentionally damages critical infrastructure or otherwise impairs the use and operation of critical infrastructure to provide services to the public.10

These formulations are quite broad. They are not legally binding and do not necessarily apply to nonpeacetime situations (and “peacetime” is difficult to define). Still, a 2021 report affirmed that international humanitarian law (also known as the law of armed conflict) applies to cyber operations.11 Indeed, the 2021 GGE overcame the impasse of the 2017 GGE in this affirmation and acknowledged the legal right to conduct countermeasures in response to wrongful acts under the law of state responsibility should be applied in cyberspace.12 This would include considering countermeasures that would be permissible in response to wrongful acts. Turning broad norms into more meaningful and potentially binding rules of acceptable versus unacceptable behavior is difficult and usually takes many years. Something other than formal negotiations by diplomats

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from a wide range of countries will be necessary to redress the most immediate and persistent threats. A more dialectical process has a greater chance of succeeding, albeit incrementally and with ambiguity. Leading cyber powers will engage each other’s deeds as well as their words, and jostle and bargain to demonstrate what their greatest priorities and redlines are, what principles of conduct they will abide by, and what they are willing and able to do to impose costs on others for transgressing them. Cyber-capable states will continue to penetrate networks in each other’s governments and businesses for espionage and to prepare capabilities for war. Recognizing this, competing states could mutually benefit from delineating boundaries between acceptable and wrongful behavior and restraining themselves (mutually) from crossing such boundaries. Establishing Boundaries and Rules of Behavior

One step in this direction is for states to specify functions and related data, software, and networks that they deem most critical to their existence and well-being. The Joe Biden administration did this in 2021, designating sixteen critical infrastructure sectors. President Biden, in a June summit in Geneva with Russian president Vladimir Putin, proposed that these sectors “should be off-limits to attack, period—by cyber or any other means.”13 Implicitly or explicitly the message is that the United States will not attack these functions and infrastructures in other states and is willing to inflict countermeasures against those who attack these specified vital interests. Examples of potential off-limit targets include chemical plants, nuclear reactors, financial services, and dams and waterways.14 (The proposed restraint from attack does not apply to espionage: looking inside others’ space to assess their intentions and capabilities has always been common state practice; the focus of arms control–like restraints is on actions that harm the functioning of systems). The idea over time is to build customary international law that protects such vital interests and restrains others from attacking them, in part by normalizing countermeasures against those who violate such restraints.15 To do this, as Michael Fischerkeller, Emily Goldman, and Richard Harknett emphasize, states must explicitly identify the international laws that would make it wrongful for someone to attack a function and related infrastructure that law-minded states insist should be off limits.16 Each state making such claims also would need to make explicit policies and plans to refrain from attacking similar functions and assets in other states. Like-minded states as well as businesses and international civil society could buttress the customary lawmaking processes by decrying actors who transgress and by supporting countermeasures against them. To strengthen the norm or lawbuilding function and reduce risks of escalation, the United States (and

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others) could tell adversaries that countermeasures are being taken and that such operations would not be conducted if adversaries desisted from wrongful acts. Proscribing certain targets or effects can create the impression— intentionally or not—that other targets or effects are tolerable. States will probably not want to be explicit about this. As with espionage historically, the idea is to develop unwritten rules to limit damage, keep the behavior tolerable, and avoid actions grievous enough to provoke war. This is akin to “honor among thieves.” The challenge of delineating tolerable cyber espionage from unacceptable attack is enormous insofar as the tools and techniques used to gain access to a network and then navigate through it are often the same, regardless of the end goal.17 Nevertheless, when it comes to cyber attacks, states should be able to delineate not only acceptable from wrongful targets, but also acceptable from wrongful methods. Norms of responsible offensive cyber operations could be articulated by leading states and, perhaps more importantly, practiced by them.18 Perri Adams, Dave Aitel, J. D. Work, and George Perkovich detailed several such norms: test malware and the exploits used to deliver it in realistic test ranges before unleashing in the real world; avoid indiscriminate targeting; constrain automation or other uncontrolled propagation of malware; prevent criminals or other third parties from using “backdoors.”19 The idea is that state practices like these can become the basis for norms and codes of conduct through “tacit bargaining”—behaving in ways that signal to competitors that one will keep competing but will do so in respectful, damage-limiting ways, and tacitly invite competitors to do the same. Then there is the challenge of verification. In nuclear arms control, verification of compliance with agreements is done by national technical means and on-site inspections that do not reveal sensitive military or commercial information. The various forms of cyber restraint discussed above do not lend themselves to a similar model of verification. If a state is promising that it will not steal from banks, for example, but bank security officers detect intrusions into their systems, it will be extremely difficult to verify that the implanted capabilities are only for spying or law enforcement and not for attack. Moreover, businesses and states often do not want to reveal when or how they detect adversaries’ penetrations of their systems. They do not want to reveal their own vulnerabilities and detection capabilities; they do not want to alarm customers, investors, or citizens; they want to observe the adversaries’ behaviors. Verification of a violation after it has occurred is much more likely, especially for the most advanced states in contests with less-advanced ones. This type of verification may facilitate and justify countermeasures, but it does not enhance one’s security in the sense of giving warning that enables one to prevent harm in the first place.

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The Space Domain Space capabilities—principally, satellites—and cyber capabilities are mutually dependent. Satellites are built, deployed, and operated by governments to perform socioeconomic services (like weather forecasting and crop monitoring), intelligence gathering, and reconnaissance and command and control for nuclear and conventional military operations. Indeed, many of the cyber applications we use with mobile and handheld devices depend on satellite communications. Both categories of technology are increasingly developed and operated by private companies that, in some cases, perform for governments. For example, the US and Iranian security establishments procure commercial satellite imagery to gather intelligence and plan military operations.20 A key difference between the cyber and space domains is that space is a physical place and therefore is much less resilient than the web of code, data, servers, cables, and radio wave signals that make up the internet. Whereas cyber attacks occur every day below the level of armed conflict— and, increasingly, as part of modern warfare—attacks are not publicly known to have occurred in space. Whereas no one has crashed the internet yet, attacks that produce debris in space can cause cascading collisions, as more debris can cause more collisions, which then produces more debris, and so on, threatening all the satellites in that orbital plane. The risk of systemic environmental catastrophe in valuable orbits grows as more governments and businesses plan to launch thousands more satellites with no enforceable rules of the road for civilian or military operations. Countries and societies face direct and indirect threats in space. New offensive capabilities are being developed to interfere with satellite functions or to destroy them entirely. This damage can be inflicted by weapons or seemingly benign satellites deployed in outer space, or by missiles, lasers, and electronic weapons deployed on land, sea, and air, or by malware conveyed through ground-based or space-spaced networks. If operations against space assets produce debris, wide swathes of the orbital environment will become dangerous to the governments, businesses, and societies that rely on space-borne capabilities. Unlike the internet which has no treaty prohibiting certain tools or actions from coursing through it, space is governed by the 1967 Outer Space Treaty. That treaty renders outer space free for exploration and use by all, with no right for states to claim sovereignty over its parts, and with a prohibition on the stationing of weapons of mass destruction in space or on celestial bodies. Yet the Outer Space Treaty does not regulate the space capabilities and behaviors that now threaten to destabilize and otherwise harm competing states and the international community at large. There are few agreed restrictions on dangerous capabilities and actions below weapons of mass destruction. Nor, as Victoria Samson and Brian Weeden write, is

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there agreement on “how international humanitarian law applies to an armed conflict that extends into space.”21 Below armed conflict, a basic need exists for enforceable rules of orbital roads to reduce risks of debris-generating accidents that can over time threaten everyone.22 Thus, in thinking about “arms control in outer space” key questions are: What is desirable and feasible to control or restrain? And what modalities are desirable and feasible for structuring and, hopefully, enforcing controls or restraints? Diplomats (primarily) have proposed arms control, transparency, and confidence-building measures, and codes of conduct to restrain internationally destabilizing actions in space in multiple international forums: the UN General Assembly, the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva, the European Union, and six successive UN Group of Governmental Experts processes. Russia, China, and the United Kingdom have all proffered possible restrictions. But none of these forums or national governments has successfully produced meaningful international agreements. Russia and China in 2008 proposed in the UN Conference on Disarmament (CD) a draft Treaty on the Prevention of the Placement of Weapons in Outer Space and of the Threat or Use of Force Against Outer Space Objects, which they revised in 2014. It would obligate states to not “place in orbit around the Earth any objects carrying any kinds of weapon” nor “resort to the threat or use of force against outer space objects.” This proposal has not garnered sufficient support in the CD to proceed, in part due to rules that require unanimity to proceed in that body. In 2008, the European Union proposed a draft International Code of Conduct for outer space activities, but that proposal also has languished.23 These efforts and others to establish arms control or confidence-building measures in space have been bedeviled by disputes over whether it is feasible to prohibit space weapons per se or, instead, certain behaviors by actors in space; whether bans or controls should focus on potential space-based weapons that could strike targets in space or on the ground and exclude earth-based antisatellite capabilities, or include them under controls; and whether potential agreements should be legally binding or voluntary.24 All of these diverging views have resulted in a stalemate that reflects and reinforces geopolitical differences. Much as with cyber capabilities, space capabilities are dual use in multiple ways that make it hard to identify particular systems as weapons. Satellites perform commercial and basic scientific purposes as well as military missions; they are invaluable for espionage as well as war; in deterrence or, if that fails, in war they are crucial for command, control, communications, and reconnaissance related to conventional as well as nuclear forces. A satellite can perform all these functions and, as a desperate measure, could be used in an attempt to crash into another satellite or a space

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station. In explaining why it is impossible to define and therefore prohibit space capabilities as “weapons,” former US under secretary of state Christopher Ford likened them to the human hand. The hand “with its dexterous digits and opposable thumb is marvelously good at using tools for human betterment, yet also quite good at scratching and poking, and makes a very effective fist. How would one define and prohibit possession of a ‘hand weapon,’ or its ‘deployment’ by the end of a human arm?”25 The constructive arms control response to this is to say the hand becomes an illegal weapon when it punches someone’s face or breaks a pane of glass at the front of a jewelry store and steals diamond rings. Similarly, a satellite or computer code or ground-based missile or laser need not be the object of control; what must be forbidden is the avoidable production of debris in space, especially via destructive tests of antisatellite weapons; the nonconsensual maneuvering of satellites in close proximity to other actors’ assets; and, some would say, the use of space-based weapons to attack targets on the earth. In other words, as the United Kingdom proposed in 2020, it is not currently feasible to ban or control specific technologies other than weapons of mass destruction in space, but global interests could be served by restraining actors’ behaviors and their effects, as discussed in more detail below.26 Restraining Behavior: Codes of Conduct

For the near future, legally binding treaties probably are not feasible. In Washington, there is currently a near-zero chance that a two-thirds majority of the Senate would vote for any agreement that the leaders of Russia or China would sign. One reason is that the United States has long enjoyed superiority in the space-based technologies for intelligence gathering and war-fighting and would be extremely reluctant to “tie its hands.” Russia and China suspect that anything Washington proposes will preserve options for US advantage while constraining them. Washington, conversely, argues that recent Russian and Chinese proposals to prohibit deployment of weapons in outer space ignore their own active development of ground-based weapons intended to threaten US and allied assets in space.27 Further, and perhaps even more complicated, businesses like Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Starlink and Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin and Project Kuiper are racing to dominate the commercial use of low-earth orbit satellite services. They and their Chinese, European, Japanese, and Indian competitors will struggle to agree on codes of conduct, monitoring, and management rules necessary to preserve the space environment for current and future generations of all nations to use. Unlike in national jurisdictions where impartial judges in courts assess and potentially remedy the harm posed by monopolies or duopolies, there is no such authority for outer space.

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Given these forces of national, political, and commercial self-interest, if negotiations of restraints are possible, they are most likely to take the form of voluntary guidelines, codes of conduct, or transparency and confidencebuilding measures. What might such agreements cover? To begin a nonexhaustive list of objectives, leading space powers should find it relatively easy to do more to prevent the accidental production of new debris that can jeopardize everyone’s use of space resources. The UN Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space has facilitated and published the creation of “Guidelines for the Long-Term Sustainability of Outer Space Activities of the Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space.”28 These twenty-one guidelines in four categories apply to increasingly important commercial actors as well as states, and they can redress the kinds of “antisocial” or antienvironmental behaviors that over time can produce or exacerbate conflicts. Put another way, if arms control is meant to civilize international relations, guidelines on safe and sustainable practices in space contribute to this end, too. More directly, the debris threat can be mitigated by practices that avoid generation of debris in the process of launching or commissioning spacecraft and managing their retirement from service. Here, too, the United Nations has produced seven useful guidelines.29 One gets very close to arms control and deserves special emphasis.30 It urges avoiding “the intentional destruction of any on-orbit spacecraft and launch vehicle orbital stages or other harmful activities that generate long-lived debris.” The most obvious case in point is the destructive testing of anti satellite weapons. The United States, Russia, China, and India are the only countries that have conducted such tests. As far as arms control in space goes, banning the purposeful creation of debris is the most important achievable objective. The problem with this guideline, and with all the guidelines for sustainability and debris mitigation, is that states and commercial operators are free to ignore them. They are not legally binding and, perhaps more importantly, there are no compliance or enforcement mechanisms, and no monitoring and sanctioning provisions. To protect societies’ interests in space, states need to turn these guidelines into norms, and then mobilize each other to uphold them and impose political or economic costs on those who do not. This process would be much like the approach to building customary international law in the cyber domain discussed above. The United States took a step in this direction in April 2022 by becoming the first country to adopt a voluntary moratorium on the destructive testing of direct-ascent antisatellite missile systems. If Russia, China, and other actors want to stabilize relations and protect the space environment, they could reciprocate the moratorium and propose to broaden it and make it legally binding. Beyond preventing creation of debris, a third objective in space would be to develop capacities and procedures to remove extant debris. At first

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glance, this objective seems more about sustainability and safety than international security, but that perception overlooks the dual-use challenge. Satellites and other equipment that would be benignly used to remove (or repair) debris such as nonfunctioning satellites also could be used hostilely to remove another state’s or commercial actor’s valuable intelligence-gathering or command and control satellites. Thus, norms or rules for the technologies, procedures, and permission processes involved in removing debris need to be negotiated in ways that reassure competing powers that the benefits of such operations will outweigh the risks of boosting states’ capacities to steal or disable each other’s space assets. Related to the above, a broader objective would be to negotiate rules and notification protocols for inspecting or repairing objects in orbit. To enhance the security of satellites that might be part of nuclear command and control systems, China, Russia, and the United States could pursue a joint commitment to establish “keep-out zones” around their highaltitude satellites. That is, each should commit to maintain minimum separation distances between its satellites and the satellites in high-altitude orbits that belong to other participants.31 Otherwise, a maneuver that brought a satellite into proximity with one involved in nuclear operations could be misconstrued as preparation for an attack against the latter. Even if a state that subscribed to keep-out zones decided to attack another’s satellites, the need to move the attacking satellite into proximity with the target would buy time for the targeted state to react. Achieving the foregoing objectives would enhance the predictability and stability of relations between major powers in and through space and reduce risks of environmental harm and conflict that would adversely affect much of the world’s population. This would mitigate security dilemmas and create a more salutary environment for investment and economic development in and through space. Reluctance to pursue more ambitious or restrictive controls on spacerelated activities is intensified by doubts about verification. The worry is that a “cheater” would not be detected in time to warn others to take countermeasures before an attack occurs. Victoria Samson and Brian Weeden address this concern well in a 2020 article: Countries and special interest groups hostile to the concept of space arms control often assert that it is impossible to verify space weapons and therefore space arms control is not feasible. . . . This assertion, however, hides two things. It is possible to verify many types of actions in space, such as a close approach of another object or a collision that generates large amounts of orbital debris. Also, it is more difficult to use a satellite to harm another satellite than often postulated, and militaries are much more likely to choose custom-designed weapons to achieve desired effects than try to modify a commercial or civil satellite.

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The bigger challenge is that if states ban or restrain types of actions, targets, or effects in cyberspace or outer space, rather than instruments per se, then verification of a violation will come after the damage is done. This is much less security-enhancing than verifiable prohibitions on weapons or limitations on their numbers that give states confidence that they could detect cheating and respond before the adversary can damage them. This raises the importance of motivating actors to comply with commitments. More accurate and readily available space situational services could serve this and other important objectives. Space situational awareness involves “the practice of tracking objects in space, identifying them, establishing their orbits, understanding the environment they’re operating in, and predicting their future positions and threats to their operations.”32 As the number of government and commercial satellites being launched into orbit skyrockets, the United States and other governments and commercial enterprises strive to increase these capabilities and service. These capabilities— some of which presumably remain heavily classified—would enable the United States to verify many arms control or confidence-building measures. Other states, including China and Russia, lack equivalent capabilities. Cooperative international ventures, including with private actors, could partially redress this problem while providing other international benefits.33

The Compliance Challenge The foregoing analysis suggests that prohibitions or limitations on cyber and space weapons per se are unlikely, but restraints could be negotiated on the targets and effects of cyber and space operations. Such restraints are unlikely to be codified in treaties. But the United States and others can practice self-restraint in these areas that over time can become the basis for establishing customary international law (or recognized norms). Perhaps the most important questions raised by this modest form of arms control would relate to compliance: What would give states and societies confidence that others would do what they promise? What would be done if someone broke their commitment or the standard of restraint that others are upholding? With nuclear weapons, the United States and Russia recognized that violating or withdrawing from an agreement would invite the counterpart to respond in ways that would revive the costliness and instability of arms racing that each wanted to avoid. It would raise (indirectly at least) concerns that conflict would be more likely to escalate to nuclear war. (These concerns, however, did not stop Russia from technically violating the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM Treaty) in the late 1980s and more alarmingly the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty around 2011, nor the United States

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from withdrawing from the ABM Treaty in 2002 and the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action with Iran in 2018.) The multiple-use nature of the technologies involved in the cyber and space domains and the types of restraints that are practiced make it difficult to prove that a violation is imminent and perhaps needs to be preempted. If the most likely incentive to comply would be the costs imposed after violation, what costs would be sufficient to incentivize restraint? And what is the probability that costs of this magnitude would be imposed? In response to espionage campaigns and cyber attacks on Western targets, the United States and others since 2014 have tried naming and shaming, criminal indictments of alleged perpetrators, economic sanctions, and perhaps some undisclosed cyber countermeasures.34 But observers do not feel these responses—punishments—have had much deterrent effect, nor have they imposed enough costs on the alleged attackers to outweigh the financial or other gain they get from their attacks.35 Moreover, US public accusations, indictments, and sanctions have not helped build customary international law insofar as US authorities do not specify which international laws they believe have been violated (as distinct from US domestic laws).36 One possible reason for this reticence is that the United States wants to maintain legal freedom of maneuver for its own cyber operations in other states’ networks. Would other threats, countermeasures, or rewards more effectively motivate Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, and their proxies to eschew or desist from stealing intellectual property and money, interfering in vital political processes, and disabling key socioeconomic infrastructure? The United States alone or with partners likely has a more sophisticated repertoire of cyber operations it could conduct than Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran do. But the digital sophistication and dependence of the US economy also leaves it with much more to lose than these adversaries in an allout cyberwar if US ICTs are not much more secure than today. This gives the United States a national interest in restraining cyber conflict rather than threatening to escalate it. By signaling that the United States (or China, the United Kingdom, or others) has the capacity to exploit others’ vulnerabilities but is willing to restrain itself—in terms of targets and effects—so long as counterparts reciprocally restrain themselves, leading cyber powers can distinguish responsible from wrongful behavior in the cyber domain and gradually build rules to this effect. Far from perfect, such an outcome would be better than unrestrained competition. A similar dynamic may exist or develop in space. Compared with its potential adversaries—primarily Russia and China—the United States depends more on assets working in and through space. In contests to disable or destroy space assets, it would have more to lose directly and through space environmental pollution than they would. Further, US-based companies are now leading the race to grab and exploit low-earth orbits.

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Others understandably feel this is inequitable and struggle to contest it. If the United States does not promote forms of self-restraint in its military and commercial operations in space, its adversaries will have more reason to threaten those operations in various ways. Here again, if the United States has more to lose in such contests, it will rationally find it unwise to threaten others’ assets in space to motivate them to adhere to restraints. It can threaten economic and other forms of sanctions, but there is little evidence that these will change the behavior of the targeted actors.

Conclusion In cyber and space domains as in much else, the capacity to motivate compliance with norms or laws depends on the states and circumstances involved. Russia’s aggression against Ukraine mobilized many states to impose severe sanctions even at considerable cost to themselves, yet it is not clear that these sanctions caused Russia to end its aggression, let alone remediate it. On the other hand, Russia —like North Korea and Iran—has become a state that talented young people seek to emigrate from rather than immigrate to, where the future looks bleaker than the past. So, Russia’s bleak future is a warning to others that violating or traducing international laws and norms is not a winning strategy. China is a more aspiring great power than Russia, on track to be the world’s first- or second-leading economy and source of technology, capital, and so on. It has much more to lose than Russia, but it also has greater resources with which to resist or counter international pressures. Both countries can block the UN Security Council from conducting military interventions or imposing legally binding sanctions. North Korea and Iran are less capable, but their regimes appear more able to withstand coercion. War is the ultimate enforcer, but states need to ask themselves whether the consequences of initiating armed conflict in response to attacks on cyber or space assets would result in much worse harm to themselves. The answer will probably be yes. Based on precedent, the kinds of attacks that would be conducted in cyberspace and outer space would not be as devastating to life and property as a major conventional war. Once a major conventional war is under way, the challenge of deterring or managing cyber and space battle would be different. Restraint could still be in antagonists’ interests, but the disposition to reciprocate or escalate in response to any violation would be strong. Thus, the main practical objective of restraints— whether negotiated explicitly or tacitly through actions—is to keep the harm done by cyber and space operations below levels that would likely trigger escalation to armed conflict and, if armed conflict occurs, to keep it from escalating to nuclear war.

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Notes 1. Winner, “Do Artifacts Have Politics?” The author had the honor of being Langdon Winner’s research assistant in 1980. 2. The United States’ Manhattan Project was begun on the assumption that Nazi Germany was seeking to build nuclear weapons. Thus, every country that has acquired nuclear weapons did so as a reaction to perceived threats from others that already or may soon possess them. 3. North Korea and Iran claimed their programs to acquire fissile materials were for civilian purposes, but outside observers correctly judged the programs were primarily to provide them an option to build nuclear weapons. 4. Sechser and Fuhrmann, Nuclear Weapons and Coercive Diplomacy. 5. For example, penetration testing tools are used by commercial and state actors for peaceful defensive purposes to identify vulnerabilities that adversaries could exploit; these tools also could be used to spy on or attack adversaries. Commercially owned and operated satellites may provide reconnaissance and other imagery and data to government intelligence or military agencies. Some cyber- and space-based assets provide command and control functions for both nuclear and conventional war-fighting. 6. Schelling and Halperin, Strategy and Arms Control. 7. The most comprehensive and insightful early treatments of cyber arms control are Denning, “Obstacles and Options for Cyber Arms Controls”; H. Lin, Arms Control in Cyberspace. 8. Fischerkeller, Goldman, and Harknett, Cyber Persistence Theory. This is because we live in a time and space of what the authors call “ubiquitous networked computing.” 9. Fischerkeller, Goldman, and Harknett, Cyber Persistence Theory, 36. 10. Markoff et al., Report of the Group of Governmental Experts on Developments in the Field of Information and Telecommunications in the Context of International Security, 7–8. 11. Markoff et al. Report of the Group of Governmental Experts on Advancing Responsible State Behaviour in Cyberspace in the Context of International Security, 18. 12. Schmitt, “The Sixth United Nations GGE and International Law in Cyberspace.” 13. Soldatkin and Pamuk, “Biden Tells Putin Certain Cyberattacks Should Be ‘Off-Limits.’” 14. “Critical Infrastructure Sectors.” 15. Borelli, “State Responsibility in International Law.” 16. Fischerkeller, Goldman, and Harknett, Cyber Persistence Theory, 98, 125. 17. Adams et al., “Responsible Cyber Offense.” 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid. 20. Dunlap, “Are Commercial Satellites Used for Intelligence-Gathering in Attack Planning Targetable?” 21. Samson and Weeden, “Enhancing Space Security,” 6. 22. For a series of publications and videos on this set of issues, see “Space Situational Awareness and Space Traffic Management.” 23. The draft for this has been revised a couple times since 2008, yet no EU members have joined. See “Draft International Code of Conduct for Outer Space Activities Fact Sheet”; “EU Proposal for an International Space Code of Conduct, Draft.”

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24. See, for example, Silverstein, Porras, and Borrie, Alternative Approaches and Indicators for the Prevention of an Arms Race in Outer Space; “Making Space for Security?” 25. Ford, “Arms Control in Outer Space,” 2. 26. UN General Assembly, Reducing Space Threats Through Norms, Rules, and Principles of Responsible Behaviours. 27. “Statement by Ambassador Wood.” 28. UN Office for Outer Space Affairs, “Guidelines for the Long-Term Sustainability of Outer Space Activities of the Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space.” 29. UN General Assembly, “UN Space Debris Mitigation Guidelines.” 30. Guideline #4—Avoid intentional destruction and other harmful activities states: “Recognizing that an increased risk of collision could pose a threat to space operations, the intentional destruction of any on-orbit spacecraft and launch vehicle orbital stages or other harmful activities that generate long-lived debris should be avoided. When intentional break-ups are necessary, they should be conducted at sufficiently low altitudes to limit the orbital lifetime of resulting fragments.” 31. Acton, MacDonald, and Vaddi, “Protecting the Valuables.” 32. “Space Situational Awareness.” 33. Samson and Weeden, “Enhancing Space Security.” 34. Hinck and Maurer, “Persistent Enforcement.” 35. Fischerkeller, Goldman, and Harknett. Cyber Persistence Theory, 140–146. 36. Ibid., 147–148.

PART 4 The Way Ahead

14 The Return of Geopolitics David Santoro

THE UNITED STATES CONCLUDED IN THE MID-2010S THAT COMPEtition among major powers had returned to the forefront of the international security agenda.1 The key concern was China, which the United States identified as its primary challenger, even as troubles with Russia were reemerging. Since then, relations between the United States and both Russia and China have worsened and intense competition seems here to stay, with potentially far-reaching implications at all levels, including arms control. This chapter sets the stage for a look ahead by explaining the reemergence of major-power competition in recent years, what it may mean for arms control, and options for managing the most virulent impacts of that competition.

The Rise and Fall of the Post–Cold War World After the Cold War, there were great expectations that competition among major powers would give way to good relations and cooperation, and that peace and prosperity would thrive globally as a result. But problems soon emerged, and the security environment worsened from the late 1990s. A transition back to competition began to take shape in the late 2000s. Great Expectations

Many were optimistic that the end of the Cold War meant that cooperation would replace competition as the principle on which major-power relations organize themselves, and that it would help advance peace and prosperity. Initially, these hopes seemed well founded. The United States, Russia, and China made progress to improve their relationships and, by the mid-1990s, 239

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seemed on track to achieve more. It appeared that George H. W. Bush’s 1990 idea of a “new world order” was correct.2 At the heart of that order was the liberal democratic model. The United States was urging others (including Russia and China) to implement democratic reforms and liberate market forces, which it saw as the essential pathway to achieving peace, security, and prosperity. The United States and Russia achieved much in arms control in the 1990s. Building on efforts that began in the 1970s, Washington and Moscow agreed to important reductions in their strategic nuclear arsenals with the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty and, that same year, to reciprocal reductions in substrategic weapons with the Presidential Nuclear Initiatives.3 Washington and Moscow also cooperated to repatriate to Russia the nuclear weapons deployed in Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine and to strengthen nuclear, biological, and chemical security. Moreover, there were advances in conventional arms control in Europe and initial steps toward improving the security architecture in Asia. The Association of Southeast Asian Nations was formed in 1994 to advance security dialogue in the region, for instance. While the United Kingdom and France, too, downsized their nuclear arsenals, China continued to refuse to engage in nuclear arms control, arguing that its arsenal was too small to justify reductions. Beijing, however, began to endorse the multilateral nonproliferation and disarmament regimes that it had previously rejected. In 1992, Beijing acceded to the Nuclear NonProliferation Treaty (NPT) and helped negotiate and promote the Chemical Weapons Convention, Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, and model Additional Protocol, among other instruments. The United States, Russia, and China (along with the United Kingdom and France, the two other permanent members of the UN Security Council) also began to cooperate to address proliferation challenges. They acted in concert to address the hard problems posed by Iraq and North Korea with, for the first time, coordination at the Security Council to address their proliferation efforts. Problems Emerge

Problems soon reemerged, however. From a US perspective, good relations and cooperation among major powers largely depended on Russia moving away from Soviet-style rule and China confirming the opening to the world it had begun in the 1970s, while also undertaking structural reforms. Yet by the mid-1990s, there was evidence of difficult political-economic dynamics in both countries. Major crises also broke out: in the Balkans and Chechnya in Russia’s case and, with China, over Taiwan and after the US bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, and with continuing repercussions from the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. Moreover, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) expanded to the East and, while Russian interests

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were not ignored, Moscow expressed concerns.4 The United States, meanwhile, was committed to promoting the liberal democratic model, but also asking itself questions about its role in the world.5 Nuclear weapons were less prominent in major-power relations than during the Cold War, but they continued to matter. The United States, Russia, and China each still sought to deter the other two. Moreover, by the late 1990s, the United States and Russia were engaged in debates about the place of nuclear weapons in their defense postures; both continued to believe that they should undertake additional nuclear reductions but did not know precisely what roles they should give to these weapons. China continued to modernize and expand its small arsenal, while remaining silent about its intentions and the place and roles that its weapons would play.6 Disagreements emerged over nonproliferation between Washington, London, and Paris on the one hand, and Moscow and Beijing on the other. The latter did not see eye to eye with the former over the management of Iraq’s and North Korea’s weapon programs. There was progress after the attacks of September 11, 2001, against the United States, notably in nuclear security, but disagreements persisted and even sharpened, especially over the so-called rogue states—Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. Shift Back to Competition

A transition back to competitive dynamics began to take place from the late 2000s. Both Russia and China changed their stance vis-à-vis the United States and the West, and major-power relations (and cooperation) became difficult. In his second term in office, President Vladimir Putin was saying that he regarded the United States, and by extension NATO and the European Union, as threats to Russia. By 2010, Russian military doctrine identified NATO as its “main external military danger” and its expansion eastward a US-led effort to destabilize Russia.7 During this time frame, Russia took measures to establish a strong, more authoritarian state at home to protect its interests against enemies, both foreign and domestic. Several developments motivated this shift. The Kosovo War of 1999 led many in Russia to conclude that the United States was menacing. Washington’s 2001 decision to withdraw from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and 2003 decision to act militarily in Iraq without a clear mandate from the United Nations intensified these suspicions, as did the Baltic states’ accession to NATO one year later. The pro-democracy uprisings in Georgia and Ukraine following disputed elections (in 2003 and 2005, respectively) then convinced Moscow that Washington was fomenting upheaval on Russia’s periphery and that its next move might be against Russia. After NATO’s 2008 pledge that Georgia and Ukraine would eventually become members, Russia invaded Georgia.

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Despite the shock of Russia’s invasion of Georgia, US-Russia relations remained difficult, but not dire. Even after the invasion, there were attempts at stabilization, including via the United States’ “reset” policy. The United States, for instance, helped Russia join the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2012. Arms control efforts continued. Washington and Moscow signed the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) in 2010 and the United States cancelled research and development on further improvements to a missile defense system in Eastern Europe, which some US analysts criticized as a concession to Russia. Washington and Moscow also agreed on sanctions against North Korea and cooperated to restrain Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Similar dynamics took shape with China. After Beijing’s decision to open up in the 1970s, Washington hoped that China would become a “responsible stakeholder” and embrace democratic reforms, endorse market forces, and accept the international order.8 Beijing, however, had agreed to reforms but in the context of a “hide-and-bide strategy,” which consisted in improving the Chinese economy by linking it to those of more advanced countries, and refraining from appearing as a rival to other major powers.9 Beijing thought that the world would accept a nondemocratic, nonliberal China, and that strategy paid off: China grew significantly and was accepted in the WTO in 2001. Then, when the 2007–2009 recession hit and weakened the West (and as the United States was in trouble in Afghanistan and the Middle East), Beijing abandoned its previous strategy and adopted a more assertive international role. In addition to slowing democratic and economic reforms, Beijing tightened the screws in Xinjiang, Tibet, and Hong Kong, and made clear that preventing Taiwanese independence was a Chinese “core interest.”10 Beginning in 2009, Beijing became combative over its maritime and territorial claims in the East and South China Seas. It intercepted US military vessels and aircraft operating near its coasts and used its increasingly powerful coast guard capabilities to bully Japanese and Filipino crews. Beijing also continued its military (and nuclear) modernization, while refusing to engage in strategic dialogue (or arms control). US-China relations became difficult, and the United States responded, albeit slowly, with its proposed “pivot” to Asia.11 While hedging, however, the United States continued to engage China, hoping that it would change to Washington’s liking. So, by the early 2010s, it was clear that the distinction that the United States had made between major powers (with which it deemed cooperation possible) and rogue states such as North Korea or Iran (which had to be countered) began to lose relevance. Major-power relations were once again becoming competitive, with looming problems across the board, including in arms control. The post–Cold War era was ending.

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Competition in Action Competition began to crystalize in the early 2010s and intensified throughout the decade, accelerating in the early 2020s with the Covid-19 pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The Arab Spring that began in 2010 and the 2011 NATO intervention in Libya confirmed Moscow’s perception that the United States and NATO were a threat. Moscow then sought to insulate its “near abroad.”12 It strengthened the Collective Security Treaty Organization as an alternative to NATO, and in 2014 proposed the Eurasian Economic Union as a substitute to the European Union. Moscow also conducted cyber and disinformation campaigns against pro-democracy protests in Ukraine before conducting offensive operations via proxies and unmarked forces, paving the way for its annexation of Crimea in 2014. It also threatened the West and promised to “snap back hard” if challenged as it was annexing Crimea.13 Moscow also asserted its interests in the pro-Russian uprising in eastern Ukraine. In 2015, it intervened in Syria to defend its Middle Eastern ally and roll back US influence there. Finally, Moscow tried to shape political developments in the West through information campaigns during the 2016 Brexit referendum and US presidential election to favor disunity in Europe (in Brexit’s case) and the candidate least likely to support NATO enlargement, further European integration, and democracy promotion (in the case of the US presidential election). Moscow declined when, in 2013, Washington proposed a new US-Russia arms control agreement. Moscow said that the next agreement should include not only nuclear weapons, but also missile defense, strategic conventional weapons, and space weapons—areas in which the United States held the lead. It also insisted that the agreement should include the other three NPTrecognized nuclear weapons states: China, France, and the United Kingdom. Yet Washington wanted a narrower agreement and no constraint on missile defense (to protect against rogue states). US officials tried to address Russian concerns about missile defense, unsuccessfully. Competition also set in with China. Under Xi Jinping’s leadership, remaining hopes that China would change to the United States’ liking vanished. Under Xi, China became authoritarian at home, backtracked on economic reforms, and sought to reshape the international order in its image. After seizing the Scarborough Shoal from the Philippines, Beijing constructed and militarized new manufactured islands in the South China Sea. It then established control of much of that space, gaining the ability to project power in surrounding waters, and assert itself in the broader region. In 2013, it launched the Belt and Road Initiative, an infrastructure program targeting especially South, Southeast, and Central Asia, and designed to benefit Chinese state-owned enterprises and gain political influence (and

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later perhaps military access) in host countries. Beijing also sought to advance its interests internationally, pushing back against WTO rules and the human rights regime. These developments took place against the backdrop of rapid Chinese military modernization. It became clear that Beijing sought the ability to neutralize the United States in the Pacific. Nuclear modernization continued unabated, too, and Beijing’s response to US invitations to nuclear dialogue was still “no.” Competition Intensifies

The United States did not immediately react to these developments. Its initial response was piecemeal, perhaps because it could not react after the Great Recession, or because the American public would not support given developments in Afghanistan and Iraq. Moreover, even in the early 2010s it was difficult to gauge whether Russia and China had abandoned cooperation with the United States, especially since there were occasional successes, such as the conclusion in 2015 of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), a multilateral agreement over Iran’s nuclear program. By 2017, however, the United States had reassessed the strategic landscape and declared Russia and China to be “revisionist powers.”14 It also identified the “reemergence of long-term, strategic competition” and called for a “seamless integration of multiple elements of national power” and the enlisting of US allies to counter Russia and China.15 While the United States deemed it essential to check Russia, its focus was China, given its greater potential. As Elbridge Colby, lead author of the 2018 National Security Strategy put it: “The [strategy] calls for a substantial increase in investment for European posture designed to quickly and materially address the imbalance in military power on NATO’s Eastern flank and improve the Alliance’s ability to defeat [Russia], followed by a plateauing of this investment in the medium term to focus on the more substantial long-term Chinese threat.”16 The US decision to embrace competition as the new organizing principle of its relations with China and Russia left many unanswered questions, however. Washington did not say what it wanted to compete for, or what “winning” looked like. It also emphasized security competition, not economics, and there was a yawning gap between words and deeds: the United States said it wanted to compete, but budgetary realities told another story.17 Finally, it was unclear whether US allies would join Washington to push back against Beijing and Moscow. Still, by 2017 the United States had entered the competition and, from then on, it intensified. Relations between the United States, the West, and Russia further deteriorated. Putin unveiled novel strategic nuclear weapons while the Donald Trump administration advanced new concepts for nuclear

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weapons to meet perceived gaps in the ladder of escalation.18 Moreover, the United States withdrew from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty and Open Skies Treaty (in 2019 and 2020), arguing that Russia had violated them, and several in Washington began to question the need to renew New START past its 2021 expiration date. There was also an unsuccessful push for a US-Russia-China arms control agreement. By the late 2010s, the USRussia arms control relationship was falling apart. It was no different with China. US-China tensions skyrocketed over trade, technology, Taiwan, the South China Sea, and values and human rights, as the United States became critical of Beijing’s unfair trade practices, control over and theft of technology, bullying of regional countries, iron-fist authoritarian style, treatment of its minorities, and handling of the protests in Hong Kong. Especially problematic was Beijing’s announcement, in 2017, that it would initiate an overhaul of its military to develop “world-class forces” by 2049.19 Despite Chinese assurances that this overhaul would not affect its approach to nuclear weapons, which Beijing always promised to keep to minimum numbers, the discovery in 2021 of hundreds of new missile silos in China suggested otherwise and raised concerns, especially given continued Chinese reluctance to engage in nuclear dialogue with the United States, let alone arms control.20 Russia and China also ramped up cooperation, building on years of good relations since the 1990s.21 By 2019, cooperation had expanded so much that Putin talked about “almost an alliance-type relationship.”22 That relationship had one target: the United States (and its allies). Competition Accelerates

Competitive dynamics did not subside in the early 2020s. On the contrary, they gathered steam due the Covid-19 pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The Covid-19 pandemic, which originated in Wuhan, China, in late 2019 and quickly spread worldwide, caused massive health and economic havoc and worsened US-China relations. It became the catalyst for growing US-China rivalry because of disagreements over where (and how) the virus emerged and over the effectiveness and appropriateness of their national response. As one analyst put it, “The COVID-19 crisis has injected an already-inflamed U.S.-China relationship with new levels of ill will as each side blames the other for the disease’s spread and struggles to spin global opinion in their favor. The stakes grow ever higher as the blame game further aggravates U.S.-China competition over matters of governance, values, and ideals.”23 Russia’s decision to conduct, per Putin’s terminology, a “special military operation” in Ukraine in early 2022 gave competitive forces an additional

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boost.24 It triggered a US-led Western pressure campaign against Russia, with the United States and others sending significant military and humanitarian aid to Ukraine. As a result, Western-Russia relations reached their lowest point since the Cold War. Because of Putin’s nuclear threats, many also feared that the invasion could lead to a conflict between the United States, NATO, and Russia involving the use of nuclear weapons.25 In addition to sinking US-Russia relations, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine led to a further deterioration of US-China relations. Signs that relations would worsen were apparent shortly before the invasion. The first followed a bilateral meeting where Xi and Putin said that their friendship had “no limit.”26 Another sign was when the United States shared intelligence with China revealing that Russia was planning to invade Ukraine and, instead of trying to prevent the invasion, Beijing gave the information to Moscow.27 After the invasion, China’s decision not to criticize (let alone sanction) Russia, and instead largely blame the United States for the war, brought US-China relations to a new low. Many in Washington feared growing convergence between China and Russia, and that China could emulate Russia and (sooner than previously anticipated) make good on its threat to take over Taiwan.28 These developments confirmed the US outlook on the strategic landscape. Since then, US officials have made clear that Washington will maintain its assessment that competition with China and Russia still is and will remain, for now, the dominant feature of the international system.29 Practically, that has translated into investments in security and nonsecurity areas, strengthening alliances, and, to respond to China, propping up coalitions (e.g., the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue) or creating new ones such as the Australia, United Kingdom, and United States (AUKUS) partnership. What lies ahead? There are three possible futures. One could see a reduction of tensions, an easing of competitive pressures, and a return to some level of cooperation between the three powers. Another could feature an increase in tensions, stronger competition, and conflict between the United States and Russia or the United States and China (or both), possibly involving nuclear weapons. Yet another future could entail more tensions, more competition, but no conflict, and occasional, albeit limited, forms of cooperation. Nothing indicates that competitive pressures will evaporate. At present, the most likely future is a continuation and further acceleration of competitive pressures in both US-China and US-Russia relations, with a potential for conflict and little room for cooperation. The China-Russia partnership is also likely to continue to solidify. Consequences and Implications What are the consequences of these developments, and what are the political, economic, and security implications?

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A Divided World?

The consequence of concurrent competitive pressures in the US-Russia and US-China relationships is further decoupling of these relationships. A related consequence is greater coupling of the Russia-China relationship. US-Russia decoupling began in the late 2000s, but accelerated after Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014. After annexation, the United States and its allies in the Group of 8 (G8) suspended Russia’s membership. US and Western sanctions then further isolated Russia, and so did the subsequent US retaliation to Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election. In the years that followed, each side also imposed sanctions against the other over several issues and expelled each other’s diplomats on multiple occasions. Decoupling increased substantially after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in early 2022. The invasion triggered new sanctions from the United States, the West, and several others. These sanctions targeted Putin and other Russian officials and included restrictions or bans across the board of economic and industrial sectors. Moreover, the West suspended Nord Stream 2, a gas pipeline project from Russia to Germany running through the Baltic Sea, financed by Gazprom. The European Commission adopted a partial embargo on Russian oil.30 Widespread boycotts of Russia also took place in entertainment, media, business, and sports, notably in the West. While the United States and especially European countries did not cut off all relations with Russia, they sought hard to decouple. Russia’s response was best exemplified by former Russian president and top security official Dmitry Medvedev, who dismissed Western actions, adding: “We don’t especially need diplomatic relations [with the West]. It’s time to padlock the embassies and continue contacts looking at each other through binoculars and gun sights.”31 Starting in the mid-2010s, and especially from 2017, the United States and China also grew increasingly at odds over geopolitical and human rights issues, leading to rising tensions, crises, and even rounds of sanctions (and occasional expulsion of diplomats) that pulled the two countries apart. Disputes over trade and technology were the sharpest and drove the US-China decoupling process. That process began in the spring of 2018, when Washington announced national security levies on steel and aluminum imports from China, and Beijing responded with tariffs of its own on other US goods. These developments jumpstarted a trade war and efforts on the US side to reroute supply chains away from China. Concurrently, Washington sought to protect itself from technological theft and prevent Beijing from accessing cutting-edge technologies with significant commercial and military applications, especially given China’s military developments and increasingly assertive regional posture.32 The United States took steps to disentangle itself technologically from China, either by revoking US visas to Chinese students and researchers thought to

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have ties to the Chinese military, or by putting restrictions on high-tech transfers such as semiconductors. China responded in kind, leading to what two analysts have called a “technology security dilemma.”33 US-China decoupling should not be overestimated, however. Both sides agreed to stay connected and collaborate on projects such as climate change or pandemic prevention (though there is still no progress on nuclear dialogue or arms control). But, for now, this is an agreement in words only. In addition, nuance about US-China trade and technology interactions is in order. In absolute terms, US-China trade has not stopped growing. In fact, in absolute terms China continues to grow in importance to the US supply chain. To be sure, there is a realignment under way, with the United States placing a greater weight on suppliers other than China. Yet it is a slow-motion realignment that may reflect the growth of other economies. Still, China remains and will continue to be part of the US supply chain, especially considering the United States’ reluctance to embrace trade agreements in the Indo-Pacific, despite recent efforts to address that problem with the IndoPacific Economic Framework.34 In reaction to US-Russia and US-China decoupling forces, there is also greater coupling of the Russia-China relationship.35 Some countries have also rallied to the couple’s side such as Belarus or, it seems, North Korea.36 Contrary to Moscow’s and Beijing’s assurances, however, the Russia-China friendship has limits. It is unclear if either would defend the other in a conflict with Washington, for instance. After its invasion of Ukraine, Russia also cannot expect full economic relief from China to counter Western sanctions because Chinese officials fear retaliation from the West. More generally, there are strong Russia-China tensions in Central Asia, the Arctic, Africa, and Latin America. Still, as one analyst put it, “The deterioration of relations with the United States facilitates the driving together of China and Russia.”37 From a Russian and Chinese perspective, plainly their mutual problems are manageable in the face of a bigger problem, their common competitor: the United States (and its allies). Difficulties Ahead

The implications of an increasingly divided world will be far-reaching and create serious problems, many already apparent today. At the macro level, it means the return of a form of “bloc politics” akin to, albeit vastly different from, the one that existed during the Cold War; a world again divided into largely distinct, separate entities that have few and challenging relations, and between which the potential for confrontation and conflict is real. Today, that world includes a mostly democratic, liberal bloc led by the United States and Western countries on one side and a primarily autocratic, illiberal bloc dominated by China and to a lesser extent Russia on the other,

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with the remaining (previously called “nonaligned”) countries such as India, Indonesia, and South Africa stuck in-between. A return to bloc politics creates significant problems. At the political level, it means an ideological contest between the liberal democratic and illiberal autocratic models. That contest was sharpened with the US decision to host, at the end of 2021, a virtual international Summit for Democracy to “set forth an affirmative agenda for democratic renewal and to tackle the greatest threats faced by democracies today through collective action.”38 Attended by over 100 world leaders, the summit focused especially on defending against authoritarianism, fighting corruption, and advancing respect for human rights; it did not go smoothly, and several nondemocratic countries were not invited. In response, China held its own dialogue, pushing the idea that Beijing’s political system is efficient, delivering better results for its people than the broken US system.39 This ideological contest now colors all US-China (and US-Russia) interaction, creating fertile ground for confrontation and conflict, and reducing and possibly even eliminating the chance of any form of cooperation. At the economic level, a return to bloc politics means the onset of deglobalization (i.e., the decline of international trade and investments), at least between the emerging blocs. The result will be the disruption of existing supply chains, the exacerbation of delays in production, and an important increase in prices for companies and consumers throughout the world, all of which are already apparent today. Significant problems might be just around the corner. As the World Bank put it in a recent analysis: “Just over two years after COVID-19 caused the deepest global recession since World War II, the world economy is again in danger. This time it is facing high inflation and slow growth at the same time. Even if a global recession is averted, the pain of stagflation could persist for several years—unless major supply increases are set in motion.”40 These developments will lead to social problems and likely increase the potential for confrontation and conflict between the blocs. Finally, a return to bloc politics promises serious security challenges. It will fuel arms races, a process that, as mentioned, is already well under way. Arms races will in turn make crises and wars between the blocs, including the use of nuclear weapons, more likely. Implications for Arms Control

These developments do not have to augur poorly for arms control. During the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union concluded arms control agreements despite fierce competition. Still, there is currently no appetite for arms control in Russia and China, and an anti–arms control undercurrent is gaining strength in the United States. Another challenge is that several countries must be involved in future arms control negotiations.

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Those countries have different arsenals, and there are more issues than “just” nuclear weapons.41 This new multiplayer and multitechnology strategic landscape is troubling: scholarship has shown that stability can be achieved more easily in bipolarity than in tripolarity or multipolarity.42 More recently, some have highlighted the problems posed by “security trilemmas”; that is, actions taken in one bilateral relationship that risk triggering cascading effects in another. And a 2021 volume reviewing USChina strategic nuclear relations also showed that maintaining stability (and reaching arms control) is becoming increasingly difficult.43 Granted, Washington and Moscow extended New START in early 2021 and, one year later, the permanent members of the UN Security Council reaffirmed that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.”44 Still, with the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine and Putin’s suspension of New START in 2023, many believe that the US-Russia arms control relationship is dead. There is also no movement toward a US-China nuclear dialogue, and little good news elsewhere. US-China-Russia cooperation on hard proliferation cases is equally unlikely; it is nonexistent regarding North Korea, and efforts to revive the JCPOA with Iran are yet to pay off. The prospects for arms control (and nonproliferation cooperation), then, appear bleak. In that context, it might be more productive to focus on reducing nuclear risks and avoiding or managing crises. Plainly, if controlling arms is out of reach, the next best thing might be to try to prevent and manage escalation, be it through dialogue or new mechanisms such as hotlines or other cooperative security approaches. Doing so could also help lay the foundations for a future rebirth of arms control.

Conclusion Geopolitical drama was quick to leave the international stage when the Cold War ended. Yet it came back with a vengeance just a couple of decades later. Now at the end of the first quarter of the twenty-first century, the security environment is once again competitive. Competition between major powers has been intense over the past decade and a half and, in recent years, it has accelerated so much that future historians may call this period a defining moment for the next international order. Assuming current dynamics do not change, that order will be dominated by two blocs—one led by the United States and the other by China and to a lesser extent Russia— with several other countries stuck in-between. As during the Cold War, bloc relations will be difficult and will create problems at all levels. In the short term, there appears to be little if any good prospect for arms control. Neither Russia nor China seem interested, and many in the United States doubt its usefulness and utility. Longer term, however, the return of arms control cannot and, arguably, should not be ruled out. Until

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then, the focus should be nuclear risk reduction and crisis management to try and avoid inadvertent escalation and, if a conflict breaks out, increase the odds that it will not get out of hand. This agenda of work may not appear ambitious, but in current circumstances even small advances would stand as significant breakthroughs. In this case as in many others, making the perfect the enemy of the good would be counterproductive.

Notes 1. National Security Strategy of the United States of America, 27. 2. Bush, “Address Before a Joint Session of Congress.” 3. In 1972, the United States and the Soviet Union concluded the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks agreement and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. In 1987, they concluded the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. 4. For instance, when Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic joined NATO in 1999, the Russian Foreign Ministry issued a statement indicating that “the enlargement of the North Atlantic alliance will not promote a strengthening of trust and stability in international relations.” Russian Foreign Ministry official quoted in “From East to West,” March 12, 1999. 5. Some scholars asked whether it was wise for the United States to act as the global policeman, for instance. The debate sharpened after the disastrous US intervention in Somalia in 1993. 6. For a long time, what was publicly known about China’s nuclear strategy was based solely on the statements made by Chinese leaders. References to China’s “self-defense nuclear strategy,” for instance, first appeared in the 2006 Defense White Paper. See Information Office of the State Council of the People’s Republic of China, China’s National Defense in 2006. 7. “The Military Doctrine of the Russian Federation.” The same themes appear in subsequent Russian doctrine documents. 8. “Remarks by Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick for the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations.” The terminology “responsible stakeholder” was first used in 2005, but it crystalizes the US approach to China since the 1970s. 9. That strategy is based on former Chinese president Deng Xiaoping’s dictum “Hide your strength, bide your time.” 10. “Core interests” is China’s preferred terminology to characterize its vital interests. 11. The US “pivot” or “rebalance” to Asia was first articulated by US secretary of state Hillary Clinton, “America’s Pacific Century.” A month later, President Barack Obama delivered a speech in Canberra stating that the United States is “here to stay as a Pacific Power”; see “Obama Tells Asia U.S. ‘Here to Stay’ as a Pacific Power.” 12. “Near abroad” is the terminology used by Moscow to refer to the newly established independent republics surrounding Russia after the dissolution of the former Soviet Union. 13. Putin, “Address by President of the Russian Federation.” 14. National Security Strategy of the United States of America, 27. 15. Summary of the 2018 National Defense Strategy of the United States of America, 2, 4. 16. Colby, Testimony Before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Hearing on Implementation of the National Defense Strategy, 11. 17. Several reports have highlighted these realities, including Providing for the Common Defense; Townshend, Thomas-Noone, and Steward, Averting Crisis.

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18. Putin, “Presidential Address to the Federal Assembly.” 19. Xi first announced his intentions to launch military reforms at the 2013 Third Plenum of the Eighteenth Party Congress. Four years later, he stressed that the people’s armed forces should become “world-class forces” by mid-century. See Saunders et al., Chairman Xi Remakes the PLA. 20. The first batch of evidence (there were a few) suggesting that China may be engaged in a nuclear buildup emerged in June 2021. See Warrick, “China Is Building More than 100 New Missile Silos in Its Western Desert, Analysts Say.” 21. Bilateral cooperation began to grow, especially after Moscow and Beijing signed a comprehensive strategic partnership in 2011. That cooperation took several forms, also expanding into the military domain. 22. Putin, “Valdai Discussion Club Session.” 23. Gill, “China’s Global Influence,” 97. 24. Putin, “On Conducting a Special Military Operation.” 25. Ibid. 26. “Joint Statement of the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China on the International Relations Entering a New Era and the Global Sustainable Development.” 27. Glaser, “Putin’s War Further Strains U.S.-China Ties.” 28. B. Lin and Culver, “China’s Taiwan Invasion Plans May Get Faster and Deadlier.” 29. “Fact Sheet: 2022 National Defense Strategy,” 1. 30. Europe remains dependent on Russian oil and, especially, on Russian natural gas. For more, see “Shedding Light on Energy in the EU—2023 Edition,” Eurostat, n.d., 31. Medvedev, as quoted in Osborn, “Russia Doesn’t ‘Especially Need’ Diplomatic Ties with West.” 32. China’s “civil-military fusion” is of key concern. It refers to a Chinese strategy that seeks to deregulate the defense industry in China and direct the private sector to invest in, develop, and manufacture military equipment. 33. Lim and Ferguson, “Conscious Decoupling.” 34. “Fact Sheet: In Asia, President Biden and a Dozen Indo-Pacific Partners Launch the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework for Prosperity.” 35. For an updated account of Russia-China coupling and its implications, see Brands, “The Eurasian Nightmare.” 36. Minegishi, “North Korea’s Shift Closer to China and Russia Comes at Hefty Cost.” 37. Quoted in Maizland, “China and Russia: Exploring Ties.” 38. US Department of State, “The Summit for Democracy.” 39. State Council Information Office of the People’s Republic of China, “China Democracy that Works.” 40. World Bank Group, Global Economic Prospects, xv. 41. This problem is described by the phrase “second nuclear age” first coined in the 1990s and then expanded and popularized by Bracken, The Second Nuclear Age. 42. See Wight, Systems of States, 176, 179; Kilgour and Brams, “The Truel”; Harkavy, “Triangular or Indirect Deterrence/Compellence.” 43. Brooks and Rapp-Hooper, “Extended Deterrence, Assurance, and Reassurance in the Pacific During the Second World War.” These ideas were further developed by Koblentz, Strategic Stability in the Second Nuclear Age. See also Santoro, U.S.China Nuclear Relations. 44. “Joint Statement of the Leaders of the Five Nuclear-Weapon States on Preventing Nuclear War and Avoiding Arms Races.”

15 New Horizons for Cooperative Security Kerry M. Kartchner

COOPERATIVE SECURITY IS A SHARED APPROACH TO PREVENTING, resolving, and mitigating emerging threats, a mechanism that has provided the tools to successfully confront some of the most challenging and potentially catastrophic threats collectively faced by the global community. Although cooperative security approaches rose to the forefront of international politics in the 1990s as a collective means to reduce the proliferation risks of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union, their legitimacy and salience subsequently lapsed as US-Russian relations deteriorated. Today, however, the need, rationale, and urgency for cooperative security has never been greater. The re-emergence of great-power nuclear competition, critical threats to the global nuclear nonproliferation regime, and possible frictions in US extended deterrence relationships have rendered invalid many of the foundational assumptions of early post–Cold War cooperative security efforts. To be relevant for the future, cooperative security’s conceptual framing, tools, programs, and priorities need to be reenvisioned for a different security environment. The next generation of cooperative security efforts will build on a number of unwelcome realities: that military aggression has returned to Europe and is possible in other regions of the world, that the prospective use of nuclear weapons is real, that the principles of strategic and regional nuclear stability need to be reconsidered and possibly reconceptualized, and that the appeal of acquiring nuclear weapons among regional aspirants may in fact have resurged in the wake of Russia’s attack on Ukraine. This will necessitate revising the international nuclear nonproliferation regime and other key security assurance commitments. This chapter begins by proposing a new and revised concept of cooperative security, and distinguishing cooperative security from arms control and 253

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other similar approaches. It summarizes what might be called the first two generations of post–Cold War cooperative security, including their assumptions and the specific threats and challenges faced during those periods. It offers a series of lessons learned from these previous generations of cooperative security with salience for an emerging third generation of cooperative security. The chapter concludes with recommendations for the future of cooperative security, especially with respect to charting a stable way forward for increasingly problematic US-Russian and US-Chinese relations.

Defining and Scoping Cooperative Security Cooperative Security

In its modern iteration, cooperative security was defined in the early days of the post–Cold War era as “a commitment to regulate the size, technical composition, investment patterns, and operational practices of all military forces by mutual consent for mutual benefit.”1 Other definitions focused on preventing conflict and framed cooperative security as the search for “a long-term, persistent political basis for cooperative action on issues and events seen as likely causes of great risk while simultaneously finding and creating new barriers to future armed conflict and nuclear war.”2 Both of these definitions rested implicitly on the idea of taking action to prevent a potential security threat or reduce one that already exists.3 According to Lewis Dunn, the concept of cooperative security was based on the following underlying principles: • A shared commitment among partnering countries to manage their security choices to enhance their mutual security; • A readiness to acknowledge the security interests and perspectives of partners to find mutual accommodation of interests; • Recognition “that there will be differences of interests and perspectives between countries, and on occasion these differences can be quite pronounced”; and • Readiness to manage areas of disagreement to reduce their scope and contain their spillover effects on areas of mutual interest.4

A contemporary definition of cooperative security might be broadened to encompass resolving, containing, or mitigating national or international security risks through collaboration, diplomacy, and international norms that strengthen global security and stability. This definition goes beyond the focus on military forces of the original definition given above, and implicitly includes the objective of creating barriers to future armed conflict. It may take on different forms and characteristics depending on the nature of the security issue being addressed and the willingness and capabilities of rele-

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vant nations and organizations to respond and participate. It may be bilateral or multilateral, regional or global. It may use formal agreements or informal understandings in part or in combination. Distinguishing Cooperative Security from Arms Control and Other Similar Concepts

It is important not to confuse or conflate cooperative security with other terms such as security cooperation or collective security. Security cooperation involves formal collaboration with allies and partners in the pursuit of specific programs on behalf of shared security goals. Collective security is any arrangement among states at the regional or global level in which each state in the system accepts the principle that the security of every other state is the concern of all members of the collective, and in which each member state commits to individually and collectively respond to attacks on any of the other member states. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), for example, has both collective and cooperative security functions. Some terms, however, are used synonymously with cooperative security, depending on the context, such as consensual security, cooperative engagement, global security engagement, or collaborative security. These terms all have essentially the same connotations. Some authors place arms control under the broader rubric of cooperative security, thus framing cooperative security as an all-encompassing conceptual arena that includes formal and informal approaches to security issues at the national, regional, and global levels. From this perspective arms control is considered a narrower approach that focuses on formally agreed mutual restraint, limitation, or reduction in forces.5 Cooperative security has the same primary objectives as arms control: to reduce the risk of war, the cost of preparing for it, and the damage should war occur.6 In contrast, as its original architects stated: “The central purpose of cooperative security arrangements is to prevent war and to do so primarily by preventing the means for successful aggression from being assembled. In the process, the potential destructiveness of military conflict—especially the use of weapons of mass destruction—is also reduced.”7 Moreover, there are several ways in which cooperative security may be distinguished from arms control. These include: (1) a wider scope of issues often addressed by cooperative security such as counterterrorism and capacity building; (2) the concept of preventing or forestalling security threats from arising before they become so serious as to be the object of arms control negotiations or even military actions; (3) the use of executive agreements rather than legally binding pacts subject to national ratification processes; and (4) the use of incentives and inducements instead of formal compliance enforcement mechanisms. Thus, cooperative security encompasses a greater

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range of techniques and modalities than arms control and incorporates considerably more flexibility and nimbleness. Perhaps most importantly, cooperative security approaches benefit from a lower threshold of political capital to participate than arms control, in part because it can represent less of a compromise to national sovereignty. To summarize, cooperative security, in its fullest expression, has at its disposal all the features and procedures of arms control, and more. This broad spectrum approach to cooperation is manifest in the evolution of cooperative security across multiple generations of conceptual and programmatic iterations.

The First Two Generations of Cooperative Security in Theory and Practice While cooperative security may have existed in earlier forms, the focus here is on its post–Cold War iterations. The post–Cold War history of cooperative security can be divided into two generations. The first generation dates from around 1992 to 1999, encompassing primarily the formal US Cooperative Threat Reduction (CTR) program and focused on containing the spread of nuclear weapons, material, and knowledge from the former Soviet republics. The second generation lasted from about 2001 to 2014, with an expanded mission set including counterterrorism and global counterproliferation. During this second period, cooperative security came to increasingly complement or even supplant more formal nuclear and nonnuclear arms control approaches. While the conceptualization of cooperative security remained consistent throughout this period, its roles, missions, and scope evolved in two distinct phases. The first generation began in 1991 with a focus on preventing the proliferation of nuclear, chemical, and biological expertise and material as a consequence of the collapse of the Soviet Union. This reflected the “preventive defense” doctrine incorporated into many of the cooperative security agendas for this period. A second generation became discernible in the late 1990s, although its features and scope did not become clarified and substantively focused until the early 2000s. This second generation saw the expansion of cooperative security programs to encompass partners and recipients beyond the former Soviet republics, to place greater prominence and priority on securing, managing, and disposing of chemical and biological weapons in troubled regions around the globe, and to emphasize collective action and cooperation on counterterrorism in addition to nonproliferation. The need for a third generation in cooperative security thinking and practice has been precipitated by the unraveling of much of the preexisting strategic arms control regime, the aggressive rise of China, and the devo-

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lution of US-Russia relations demarcated by Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea and 2022 invasion of Ukraine. This new generation of cooperative security will need to manage and mitigate the emergence of great-power hostility, competition, and conflict; attend to possible damage to the nuclear nonproliferation regime and other institutions of global governance; socialize new concepts of global security and stability in light of new and potentially destabilizing technologies; and restore a sound basis for future arms control and nuclear arms reductions. The First Post–Cold War Generation of Cooperative Security

The first generation of post–Cold War cooperative security started with a comprehensive series of US measures to assist the former Soviet republics in managing and eliminating the nuclear legacy of the former Soviet Union, and later to consolidating and eliminating chemical and biological weapons. Most major cooperative security actions during this generation were conducted and administered by the US Department of Defense under the auspices of the Cooperative Threat Reduction program (so named in 1993). But as noted below, there were several other effective cooperative security initiatives outside the scope of CTR during this time frame. The most immediate threats addressed by first-generation cooperative security initiatives were securing “approximately 650 metric tons of fissile material existing in forms such as metals, oxides, solutions, and scrap” (enough to produce more than 40,000 nuclear bombs, spread among eight former Soviet countries), as well as nearly 30,000 assembled nuclear weapons, located at 50 sites.8 Some of these sites suffered from a collapse of the security system with only minimal physical protection for the weapons or materials therein.9 Coupled with low morale, these circumstances heightened the chances that insiders would steal nuclear materials or share weapons information for financial gain. For example, an International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) report allegedly confirmed more than 550 incidents of nuclear trafficking between1993 and 2002.10 During this period, cooperative security primarily assumed the form of CTR activities, and was organized into four main categories (which also served as the principal congressional funding streams): 1. Dismantle former Soviet weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and associated infrastructure, 2. Consolidate and secure former Soviet WMD and related technology and materials, 3. Increase transparency and encourage higher standards of conduct, and 4. Support defense and military cooperation with the objective of preventing proliferation.11

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These principal program objectives also involved providing technical and economic assistance to accelerate reductions under the previously agreed Strategic Arms Reductions Treaty, and preventing a so-called brain drain of former Soviet nuclear weapon experts.12 While the Cooperative Threat Reduction program was the main vehicle for cooperative security initiatives and funding during this period, it was not the only arena for cooperative security actions. Non-CTR cooperative security initiatives included the 1991 Presidential Nuclear Initiatives, providing for parallel unilateral reductions in US and Russian nonstrategic nuclear weapons, and the 1991 Cartagena Declaration on Nuclear Weapons (a prelude to the Latin American nuclear–weapons-free zone). In addition, implementing agreements and protocols to the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe were negotiated and signed during this period, providing for, among other things, annual exchanges of information, consultations on risk reduction measures, provisions for military-to-military contacts, prior notification of and right to send observers to certain military activities, constraints on the scale of military exercises, and detailed procedures for inspections and verification.13 The Open Skies Treaty was also negotiated and signed in 1992; that same year the United States and Russia issued a series of Joint Statements and Joint Understandings on further reductions in strategic offensive arms and on a Global Protection System, and Ukraine, Russia, and the United States negotiated a trilateral statement on transferring nuclear weapons from Ukraine to Russia, in exchange for US financial assistance. These were in addition to other Russian, US, and UK security assurances to Ukraine. Other developments that might fit within the scope of cooperative security during this period included the signing of the Treaty of Pelindaba (the African nuclear-weapons-free zone, 1996), and the Mine Ban Treaty (Ottawa Convention, signed in 1997). During this first post–Cold War generation, cooperative security approaches were paramount in US national security policy, and commanded substantial presidential attention. Cooperative security on nuclear nonproliferation issues surpassed nuclear deterrence on the list of security priorities. Cooperative security efforts during this period owed much of their success to ameliorated political relations with Russia and other cooperative security participants, and also to aspirations for continued improvements in democratization in the former Soviet states. US-Russian cooperative security programs benefited from broad international support, and even modest financial contributions from non-US sources such as Japan. This period was also notable for producing a wide range of innovative cooperative security initiatives related to securing and eliminating nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons. The number of US personnel traveling to Russia and other former Soviet states was unparalleled, as was the enormous level of resources devoted to these projects. By the late 1990s Russia had begun to regain its economic and political footing, and prospects

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were optimistic that Russia would be willing and able to shoulder a greater share of the material, labor, and financial burden of securing and eliminating much of the Soviet WMD legacy. For twenty-five years CTR and other cooperative security programs administered by the Departments of Defense, State, and Energy—with participation and support from numerous US allies—scored remarkable achievements in consolidating, securing, and eliminating a large portion of the WMD legacy of the Soviet Union, as well as WMD materials in other troubled regions around the world. Nevertheless, according to Susan Koch, who played a key role in implementing the CTR program and other similar programs, by 1999 the cooperative security agenda “no longer had the same political salience, particularly for Russia, that it had in 1992. The U.S.Russian relationship was no longer novel, no longer characterized by the great, somewhat naive optimism and sense of change which marked its first months.”14 The Russian government viewed many parts of the CTR Umbrella Agreement as “artifacts of the early days of Russian independence, of a time when the Russian government was too inexperienced and too eager to forge a positive relationship with the United States to negotiate an agreement that best served its interests.”15 The Second Generation of Cooperative Security: Arms Control by Other Means

The second generation of cooperative security in the post–Cold War era was precipitated by new and emerging threats from nonstate actors such as al-Qaeda and A.Q. Khan, and from the risks posed by newly emboldened rogue states pursuing WMD programs such as Iran, North Korea, Syria, Libya, and Iraq. This era was also characterized by a move away from traditional arms control mechanisms, and the search for ways in which cooperative security could support or even substitute for formally negotiated and ratified arms control agreements, especially in maintaining restraints on US and Russian strategic nuclear weapons. The need and rationale for a second generation of post–Cold War cooperative security stemmed from dramatic international security challenges that began emerging in the late 1990s.16 The Tokyo subway system was subjected to biological weapons attack by Japanese doomsday cult Aum Shinrikyo in March 1996, ushering in a new concern with nonstate actor terrorism, which would become a focus of second-generation cooperative security priorities and initiatives. On the nuclear front, new proliferation threats were also arising. On May 12, 1998, India conducted a series of nuclear tests and inaugurated an open program to acquire a modern and robust nuclear arsenal. Pakistan responded a few days later with its own tests. In October 2006, North Korea would conduct its first nuclear test, becoming the third new nuclear-armed state within less than a decade.

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Furthermore, in 1998 Osama bin Laden published a fatwa declaring jihad against Jews and “crusaders,” presaging the attacks of September 11 three years later. Iraq denied access to IAEA inspectors, underlining the newly energized WMD threat from rogue states and prompting President Bill Clinton to order a series of air strikes against Iraq. The Russian economy collapsed, with a 70 percent devaluation of the ruble against the US dollar over a six-month period, rendering Russia even less financially capable of sustaining critical cooperative threat reduction activities and putting more pressure on the United States and others to increase their funding and subsidies, just as domestic support in the US Congress for such monetary outlays began to cool. Moreover, by the late 1990s relations between the United States and Russia had become increasingly fraught over NATO enlargement and crises in the Balkans, further complicating cooperative ventures. In October 1999, the US Senate voted against ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty that President Clinton had termed “the longestsought, hardest-fought prize in arms control history.”17 Two years later, in 2001, the new George W. Bush administration entered office with a jaundiced view of formal arms control treaties.18 The Bush administration regarded treaty-based arms control as inflexible and in some cases counterproductive to new US national security interests (e.g., countering rogue state missile threats), as having a poor track record, and as an obstacle to establishing a new nonadversarial relationship with Russia. Instead, the Bush administration assigned higher priority to a “growing set of ad hoc cooperative initiatives” to meet nascent global security challenges.19 In this context, cooperative security began taking on the role of a substitute for arms control. As two observers put it, cooperative security had become “arms control by other means.”20 This was the hallmark theme of the second generation of cooperative security. Responding to these new challenges required a new set of cooperative security priorities, including the following: 1. Managing the strategic relationship between the United States and Russia, and between the United States and China, to reduce uncertainties, build habits of cooperation, and to contain pressures to renew any strategic arms competition. 2. Dealing with emerging strategic relationships in other parts of the globe and among US allies. 3. Building cooperation among the Permanent Five (P5) members of the UN Security Council. 4. Preventing the acquisition or use of chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear weapons by terrorist groups or nonstate actors; and, 5. Heading off runaway proliferation based on increasingly sophisticated mastery of commercial nuclear infrastructure.21

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In addition to continued efforts to contain, consolidate, and eliminate the WMD legacy of the former Soviet Union, the second generation of cooperative security was characterized by an expansion of its scope to countries beyond those of the former Soviet republics to include Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, and by an enlargement of its agenda. It added to its roster of priority issues counterterrorism cooperation, assistance with border security and export control, biological weapons security and elimination, and chemical weapons consolidation and disposal, with a greater emphasis on partner capacity building, among other programs and initiatives. Along with this increase in scope and agenda came the development and deployment of new “tools” in the cooperative security toolbox that were leveraged to decrease misinformation, miscalculation, accidents, and tension, further blurring the distinction in some ways between arms control and cooperative security. These new tools included strategic dialogue and the exchange of information and data, liaison arrangements, joint endeavors, and unilateral and reciprocal actions, as well as traditional arms control agreements.22 The second generation of cooperative security saw the flourishing of such new institutions as the Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI) to deter and interdict the shipment of WMD materials; the Group of 8 (G8) Global Partnership Against the Spread of Weapons and Materials of Mass Destruction, designed to attract and consolidate international support for expanded antinuclear terrorism efforts; and UN Security Council Resolution 1540 that required each UN member state to criminalize trafficking in WMD components and materials. Nevertheless, the relationship between Russia and the United States with its NATO partners continued to deteriorate into the early 2000s. By 2012, Catherine Kelleher observed, “The concept of cooperative security has entered a period of semi-dormancy.”23 Cooperative security programs shifted to more modest non-Russian assistance programs following the lapse in 2013 of the CTR Umbrella Agreement. While substantial cooperative security efforts continued related to counterterrorism and securing or eliminating chemical and biological agents, for the purposes of this chapter the lapse of the CTR umbrella demarcates the end of the second generation of post–Cold War cooperative security.

Lessons Learned from Previous Generations of Cooperative Security Over the course of the first two generations of post–Cold War cooperative security, from 1991 to 2013, cooperative security took on many roles. It was most prominently a form of cooperative threat reduction, an adjunct to

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existing nuclear nonproliferation regimes, and a virtual substitute for arms control when formal agreements were not politically feasible. As the international community faces the need for a third generation of cooperative security amid potentially dangerous changes in the global security environment, what lessons can be learned from previous cooperative security efforts? Not surprisingly, the lessons learned from previous generations of cooperative security often coincide with the lessons learned from arms control.24 Among those are that arms control is not an end in itself, it must be coordinated with other instruments of national strategy, it requires some modicum of common ground, and it may be trumped by problematic political relationships. Cooperative security, like arms control, is a means to an end. While some may see cooperative security as a stepping stone to improving damaged or troubled political relationships and placing them on a more constructive path, it is clear from the record that cooperative security approaches may be more difficult to achieve in an atmosphere of political tensions and hostility. Politics often trumps cooperation. Cooperative security must be considered an adjunct to broader national security policies, doctrines, and strategy. Cooperative security assistance must be coordinated with other instruments of national strategy such as arms control, deterrence, and alliance relationships. If cooperative security is not in congruence with established US national security doctrine and objectives, it risks working at cross-purposes and losing critical domestic support, especially in Congress. Corollaries to these lessons are found in a substantial literature on lessons learned from the Cooperative Threat Reduction program, with relevant applicability to cooperative security in general.25 Much of this literature focuses on programmatic lessons and best practices, but other lessons learned are widely pertinent to mapping out the future of cooperative security. Here are four principal lessons learned at the level of national strategy that are most relevant to a third generation of cooperative security: 1. Cooperative security must be based on some degree of common interest. Because the success of cooperative security is grounded in principles of collaboration and voluntary participation, it must be based on shared interests. Some degree of shared national security values and threat perceptions are necessary to launch any cooperative security initiative. Often, this is a recognition of self-interest, that an initiative will be to the benefit of the country’s own national security objectives, or in its economic or diplomatic interests. The depth of shared interest may be only minimal at the outset of any given initiative, but may grow stronger and more robust as the initiative becomes successful and expands in membership, and through socialization among the partners. 2. Symmetry of stakes is critical to success. Common interests are a stronger basis for successful cooperative security if there is a genuine sym-

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metry of interests where each party has a generally equivalent stake in the outcome. It is enhanced by coordinated and parallel involvement in the management and sponsorship of the cooperative security undertaking, particularly if the parties can agree to an equitable burden-sharing arrangement. 3. Robust and regular communications are crucial. The frequent and routine exchange of information, ideas, and assessments can ensure the collective achievement of cooperative security objectives, and the lack thereof can spell disaster. External coordination among members, and systematic and reciprocal reporting of activities, requirements, and problems as they arise, can help avoid delays, duplications, and missed deadlines. Transparency through regular communications can build trust and legitimacy. Internal communication can ensure the support of critical domestic stakeholders and can help planners and funders better match resources to priority needs and gaps. 4. US leadership is essential. The United States has been the principal (but not only) initiator of cooperative security initiatives. It has also been the largest financial contributor to cooperative security activities. American presidents have used their considerable convening power to launch cooperative actions and garner a critical mass of other leaders with shared interests. Certainly, other nations and civil society organizations have initiated cooperative security projects. But it would be difficult to conceive of a cooperative security engagement on a global scale that did not involve significant leadership and participation from the United States. Likewise, lack of US support can often thwart even the most popular international cooperation idea.26 Two undertakings stand out as effective examples of these lessons learned, and which may serve as a model for future generations of cooperative security endeavors: the G8 Global Partnership, originally announced at the 2002 G8 summit in response to the terrorist attacks of September 11; and the Proliferation Security Initiative, first announced in May 2003. These two initiatives grew out of the challenges and priorities of the second generation of cooperative security, and both reflected the core principle of voluntary associations of like-minded nations addressing urgent international security threats through collaborative diplomacy and reciprocity, rather than through military coercion. In addition, both sought to strengthen and enhance existing international norms. The G8 Global Partnership

The G8 Global Partnership focused on preventing the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction to terrorists, other nonstate actors, and states of proliferation concern. Initially, the United States pledged to match contributions from

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other nations up to $10 billion to be allocated over the following ten years, and proposed that other countries contribute a combined equivalent amount over the same period (for a nominal total of $20 billion).27 The original intent was on funding the continued operation of first-generation cooperative threat reduction efforts to mitigate proliferation risks posed by Soviet-era WMD legacies. However, its mandate and funding were extended at the 2011 G8 summit, where leaders agreed to expand the geographic focus of the Global Partnership beyond Russia and the former Soviet republics, and to target WMD proliferation threats wherever they appeared (which is entirely consistent with a revised second-generation cooperative security agenda). The G8 (today the Group of 7 (G7), since Russia lost its membership) Global Partnership continues to serve as the primary multilateral group that coordinates funding and in-kind support to assist national partners around the world to combat the spread of weapons and materials of mass destruction. Soon after its inception, leaders of the G8 Global Partnership announced guidelines for new or expanded cooperative security projects, incorporating principles and lessons learned from the cooperative threat reduction experience, and explicitly integrating the basic regime design elements recommended above.28 These guidelines provide an excellent template for future third-generation cooperative security initiatives. Consistent with UN Security Council Resolution 1540, the G8 placed responsibility for adhering to these guidelines primarily on each nation-state, but with promises of support from other states and international organizations. At the inauguration of the first generation of cooperative security programs, few domestic legal frameworks were in place in the former Soviet republics, and cooperative threat reduction program directors chartered new legal ground with implementing agreements. However, by the advent of the second generation, the Russian government, among others, had passed a set of laws that placed increasingly burdensome restrictions on further cooperative assistance programs (e.g., constraining or eliminating tax and liability exemptions). According to the 2002 statement of G8 leaders, cooperation projects under this initiative would be decided, funded, and implemented, “taking into account international obligations and domestic laws of participating partners, within appropriate bilateral and multilateral legal frameworks.”29 The G8 statement further specified that agreements and memorandums of understanding governing new cooperative security initiatives seeking sponsorship through the G8 mechanism would need to include provisions providing a blueprint for future cooperative security arrangements, including at a minimum: (1) mutually agreed monitoring, auditing, and transparency measures; (2) clearly defined milestones, including the option to suspend or terminate a project if milestones are not met; (3) exemptions from taxes, duties, levies, and other charges; (4) adequate liability protections from claims related to the cooperation will be provided for donor countries and their per-

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sonnel and contractors; and (5) appropriate privileges and immunities for government donor representatives working on cooperation projects.30 Policymakers interested in pursuing future cooperative security initiatives will want to look to these project management features as a template. The Proliferation Security Initiative

The Proliferation Security Initiative was, like the G-8 Global Partnership, a product of the second generation of post–Cold War cooperative security. The PSI was first established in 2003 to counter the proliferation and transfer of weapons of mass destruction, their means of delivery (primarily ballistic missile technologies and components), and associated materials.31 The necessity of its creation was revealed when an interdicted shipment of Scud missiles turned out to be a legitimate transaction that predated stricter nuclear nonproliferation measures ushered in by UN Security Council Resolution 1540, and the act of interdiction itself proved to have tenuous international legality.32 More broadly, PSI was designed to fill a loophole in the global nonproliferation regime, which had not heretofore strictly prohibited the transfer or transit of WMD-related materials to and from rogue states and nonstate actors, nor had it provided the legal framework for interdicting such transfers. Since its founding in 2003, more than 100 nations have endorsed the PSI’s Principles of Interdiction, each of which has pledged to cooperate across diplomatic, military, intelligence, and law enforcement channels to interdict the illicit transfer of WMD and WMD-related components and materials.33 The PSI does not in and of itself create any new international law, and explicitly aims to operate consistently with respective national laws and international obligations, while adopting streamlined consultation, intelligence sharing, and ship-boarding consent procedures.34 The PSI is implemented through a series of cooperative security mechanisms that involve requiring each participating nation to leverage its respective counterproliferation efforts across interagency channels; contribute diplomatic, financial, military, customs, and law enforcement personnel and assets to joint exercises and operations; host PSI meetings, workshops, and exercises among PSI-endorsing states; and collectively enhance mutual capacities for combating the proliferation of WMD and related materials. PSI is not without controversy, which can be expected of any international endeavor. Future cooperative security initiatives will have to take these into account, including contested legality, concerns with targeting individual countries, transparency, and claims of imposing Western-centric norms on unreceptive countries and regions. Nevertheless, both the G8 Global Partnership and the Proliferation Security Initiative represent thorough applications of some of the most

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important project management lessons learned from experiences of the first and second generations of post–Cold War cooperative security. They also represent applications of the key principles and modalities that should be explicitly incorporated into future cooperative security projects, initiatives, and programs. Both represent efforts to work within the context of existing national and international legal confines, and to support existing internationally recognized security norms. In some cases, however, future cooperative security initiatives may conflict with the domestic laws of certain nominative states, and flexible adaptations may be necessary. But the power of established international norms governing collective efforts provided under cooperative security projects such as the G8 Global Partnership and the PSI will be a formidable influence for resolving such frictions, and a powerful precedent for pursuing new cooperative security initiatives.

New Horizons: A Third Generation of Cooperative Security? By the time of the 2014 annexation of the Crimean Peninsula by Russia, a substantial shift was occurring in national security and global stability priorities and perceptions.35 The first thing to note about these new priorities and perceptions is that change is happening rapidly and on a large scale, defying prediction and full assessment.36 Among the new emerging challenges are the return of great-power conflict, leading to concerns about the viability of key pillars of the liberal global order (including sovereignty, noninterference, nonproliferation norms, and the system of nonproliferation security assurances); the rise of a progressively more belligerent and assertive China; increasingly capable regional nuclear actors; and the development and early deployment of advanced conventional technologies that may have the potential to blur the distinction between conventional war and strategic nuclear conflict. The Donald Trump administration’s 2018 Nuclear Posture Review had spoken of a “rapid deterioration of the threat environment,” and explicitly acknowledged that a new strategic environment characterized by the reemergence of great-power conflict had altered the national security priorities of the United States and its allies.37 Strengthening deterrence and revitalizing alliances replaced the prior emphasis on disarmament and nonproliferation as the nation’s top national security priorities. The Joe Biden administration, shortly after taking office, issued an Interim National Security Guidance that explicitly acknowledged many of these altered circumstances, even prior to Russia’s war in Ukraine.38 This document characterized the shift in national security priorities in the following terms:

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• Democracies across the globe, including our own, are increasingly under siege; • The distribution of power across the world is changing, creating new threats; • The alliances, institutions, agreements, and norms underwriting the international order the United States helped to establish are being tested; • Running beneath many of these broad trends is a revolution in technology that poses both peril and promise. The administration’s 2022 National Security Strategy confirmed and elaborated on these new challenges, noting that: The People’s Republic of China harbors the intention and, increasingly, the capacity to reshape the international order in favor of one that tilts the global playing field to its benefit, even as the United States remains committed to managing the competition between our countries responsibly. Russia’s brutal and unprovoked war on its neighbor Ukraine has shattered peace in Europe and impacted stability everywhere, and its reckless nuclear threats endanger the global non-proliferation regime. Autocrats are working overtime to undermine democracy and export a model of governance marked by repression at home and coercion abroad.39

While many of the cooperative threat priorities and initiatives from the first and second generations remain pertinent, these tectonic shifts in the global security environment have recast national and international security priorities to such a degree that it is now necessary to contemplate the prospects and requirements for a third generation of cooperative security, with new and revitalized tools, initiatives, and objectives. This new generation must build on the successes and lessons learned of the previous generations of post–Cold War cooperative security, while charting a new path with emphasis on meeting the challenges of renewed great-power competition and conflict. Recommendations for the Future of Cooperative Security

The third generation of cooperative security must first be based on thoroughly rethinking the central assumptions of cooperative security at the end of the Cold War. To summarize those assumptions: 1. There was no longer a need to fear major conventional aggression in Europe. 2. The prospect for nuclear weapons use had receded in significance. 3. Safely managing nuclear weapons had become a greater priority than refining the principles of strategic nuclear stability.

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4. Relegating nuclear weapons to a background role in security affairs would help stem nuclear proliferation.40 Virtually none of these assumptions apply any longer. Laying the groundwork for the third generation of cooperative security will require acknowledging that military aggression has returned to Europe, that the prospective use of nuclear weapons is real, that the principles of strategic and regional nuclear stability need to be revitalized, and that marginalizing US and Russian nuclear weapons has not diminished the appeal of acquiring nuclear weapons among regional aspirants. In fact, the apparent success of Russian nuclear escalation dominance in the European theater has possibly increased the attractiveness of nuclear weapons to existing non-NPT nuclear-armed states and to states aspiring to acquire nuclear capabilities. These are the issues that new cooperative security approaches must be marshalled to confront. In addition to the traditional agenda and tool kit for cooperative security—all of which remains available to current policymakers—new challenges and opportunities for the third generation of cooperative security should include: (1) addressing US alliance relationships; (2) strengthening WMD nonproliferation norms; and (3) shoring up global political and geostrategic stability. This chapter offers ten specific recommendations across these three categories. First, strengthen both US European and Asian alliance relationships by: 1. Restoring/reviving/reinvigorating European and Indo-Pacific security architectures and discourse adapted to an era of great-power competition and potential conflict; 2. Renewing and reestablishing a transatlantic and trans-Indo-Pacific consensus on the meaning and implementation of extended deterrence; 3. Revisiting and enhancing international cooperation on regional missile defenses in response to the indiscriminate use of ballistic missiles to attack cities and other urban, nonmilitary targets in certain contemporary conflicts.41 Second, enhance international nuclear and conventional nonproliferation norms by: 4. Addressing or repairing damage to the integrity of global nonproliferation regimes; 5. Developing processes for strengthening and reconfirming taboos on the use of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons; 6. Repairing and strengthening damage to US and P5 security guarantees (in connection with the global nuclear nonproliferation regime);42

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Third, restore global political and geostrategic stability by: 7. Reconceptualizing and building a consensus on new or revived notions of strategic and regional stability; 8. Articulating and navigating modernized approaches to crisis management; 9. Scoping and establishing cooperative measures related to common standards of responsible conduct in space, and improving cybersecurity;43 and, 10. Establishing and strengthening existing global and regional modalities for addressing urgent security concerns in Southeast and Southwest Asia44 and the Middle East,45 including confidence-building and transparency mechanisms, along with crisis management tools such as regional stability dialogues. Cooperative Security and the Future of US-Russian Relations

The future of US-Russian relations deserves special mention and some comment. Building a new relationship with Russia will be one of the most important objectives of the third-generation cooperative security agenda, no matter how unrealistic that may seem under today’s circumstances. USRussian relations may be at an all-time low, but reconciliation with Russia at some point in the future will be essential to establish a new security order in Europe, to restore functionality to the UN Security Council, to achieve global climate change goals,46 to stabilize the global economy, and to repair and shore up the nuclear nonproliferation regime. Salvaging and consolidating the gains of US-Russian nuclear arms reductions is an urgent priority. It will be critical to the future of arms control to restore lines of communication with Russia, and given the state of US-Russian relations, some forms of cooperative security may be necessary to reconstruct consensus on common interests and the conditions necessary for further progress in nuclear arms reductions, including engaging China in this process. In many poignant ways, current US-Russian relations with respect to nuclear arms reductions may be reminiscent of the 1950s and early 1960s, when trust was in short supply, tensions were high, and the stakes were existential. The United States and its allies may need to revive selected measures implemented during that era to reduce tensions, build trust, and find common ground on which to build. In some ways this may be easier now than it was in the 1960s, since a normative institutional basis is already well established. For example, both countries continue to ostensibly support the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the work of the International Atomic Energy Agency, and a few other international regimes. The United States

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and Russia also continue to share a commitment to countering WMD terrorism, and to resolving complex regional concerns, although disagreements remain on how to prioritize and address these concerns.47 They could salvage the nuclear arms reduction process by renewing discourse on the future of strategic stability, on evolving challenges to the offense-defense relationship, and on the consequences of new types of strategic offensive arms. Much the same could be said about US-Chinese relations, which would benefit from both formal and informal engagements, possibly through cooperative security–like mechanisms.

Conclusion Russia’s brutal and unprovoked invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 shattered many of the most enduring tenets of post–World War II peace and stability, violated assumptions of sovereignty, flagrantly flouted norms of international cooperation, defied the authority and legitimacy of the United Nations, and inflicted serious damage to the security assurances that critically underwrite the international nuclear nonproliferation regime. These consequences, as well as the rise of China as a peer competitor, will make cooperation across the spectrum of global security and stability concerns all the more difficult and could jeopardize prospects for near-term progress on arms control and WMD proliferation, thereby leaving a gap in certain global security governance and regulation regimes. Cooperative security, in a third-generation iteration and working in consonance with arms control, may be the best approach to fill that gap.

Notes 1. Carter, Perry, and Steinbruner, A New Concept of Cooperative Security, 6. 2. Kelleher, “Cooperative Security in Europe: New Wine, Old Bottles,” 6. 3. The goal of preventive action as a primary objective for cooperative security was more fully developed in Carter and Perry, Preventive Defense. 4. Dunn, “The Role of Cooperative Security,” 177. 5. Larsen, “Introduction,” 3. 6. See Kartchner, “The Objectives of Arms Control.” 7. Carter, Perry, and Steinbruner, A New Concept of Cooperative Security, 7. 8. Roberts, “Cooperative Security Measures,” 181–182. 9. Ibid., 181–182. 10. Ibid., 183. 11. “Cooperative Threat Reduction Programs.” 12. Roberts, “Cooperative Security Measures,” 183. 13. Goldblat, Arms Control, 644–656.

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14. Koch, “Cooperative Threat Reduction Negotiations,” 44. 15. Ibid. 16. Miller and Arbatov, Nuclear Perils in a New Era, 26–27. 17. “Clinton Asks Senate to OK Nuclear Test Ban.” 18. For a discussion on the George W. Bush administration’s critical attitudes toward arms control, see Kartchner, “The Evolving International Context,” 50–55. 19. Dunn, “The Role of Cooperative Security,” 176. 20. Dunn and Alessi, “Arms Control by Other Means.” 21. Dunn, “The Role of Cooperative Security,” 183–184. 22. Ibid., 175–194. 23. Kelleher, “Cooperative Security in Europe,” 13–14. 24. See, for example, Sloss and Davis, A Game for High Stakes; Thompson, Arms Control. For a more contemporary assessment, see Evans, Strategic Arms Control Beyond New START. 25. This section draws on the following: George, Farley, and Dallin, U.S.-Soviet Security Cooperation; Walker, “Cooperative Threat Reduction in the Former Soviet States”; Knopf, International Cooperation on WMD Proliferation; Potter and Shields, “Lessons from the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction Program”; Koch, “Cooperative Threat Reduction Negotiations”; Pifer, “The Trilateral Process.” 26. There are, of course, exceptions. The 1997 Mine Ban Treaty (Ottawa Convention) was inaugurated with lackluster encouragement from the United States, and the 2017 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons has entered into force without US (or any other P5) support. 27. National Academy of Sciences, Global Security Engagement, 151–153. See also Nuclear Threat Initiative, “10 Plus 10 over 10 Program.” 28. The G8 Global Partnership Against the Spread of Weapons and Materials of Mass Destruction. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid. 31. The Proliferation Security Initiative. 32. Safire, “Bush’s Stumble,” 1. 33. US Department of State, “About the Proliferation Security Initiative.” 34. The bilateral ship-boarding agreements reached between the United States and various flag-registry countries to facilitate the legal interdiction and boarding of vessels suspected of transporting WMD, in connection with PSI principles, could nevertheless be said to represent the creation of new international law. 35. Others may date the beginning of this shift to Russia’s 2008 war against Georgia, or Putin’s speech at the 2007 Munich Security Conference. 36. Prompting newly installed undersecretary of state Bonnie Jenkins, as she presented policy priorities for the Department of State, to caution that “adjustments will be made as we continue to better understand the changes that are taking place.” See Jenkins, “Priorities Regarding the New and Emerging Challenges to International Security.” 37. US Department of Defense, Nuclear Posture Review. 38. Biden, Interim National Security Strategy Guidance. 39. US Department of Defense, National Security Strategy, 23. 40. Carter, Perry, and Steinbruner, A New Concept of Cooperative Security, 1. 41. An excellent starting point for further exploring the context and potential for cooperation on missile defense is National Academy of Sciences, Regional Ballistic Missile Defense in the Context of Strategic Stability. See also the thoughtful essays in Kelleher and Dombrovski, Regional Missile Defense from a Global Perspective.

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42. Security assurances can be a critical incentive for engaging partners whose security may be placed at risk by drawing down or transferring WMD materials and components. However, confidence in security assurances, such as the Budapest Memorandum, may have been seriously compromised by Russian aggression against Ukraine and the annexation of portions of Ukrainian territory, and therefore deserve special mention on this list. 43. Meyer, “Cooperative Measures for International Cybersecurity,” 25–30. 44. Wibowo, “Prospects for Cooperative Security and Disarmament in South East and South West Asia,” See also Y.-K. Lee, “A New Framework for Cooperative Threat Reduction with North Korea.” 45. Thomas, “Cooperative Security in the Middle East.” 46. Potter and Bidgood, “Reflections on the Past and Thoughts About the Future,” 265–266. 47. Bidgood and Potter, End of an Era, 268–270.

16 Arms Control’s Uncertain Future Brad Roberts

WHEN THE COLD WAR ENDED MORE THAN THIRTY YEARS AGO, arms control’s future seemed bright. The end to bipolar competition and confrontation held the promise of increased cooperation to address shared dangers, including to move away from heavily nuclearized strategic relationships among the major powers and toward deep nuclear reductions. It also promised increased cooperation to strengthen the multilateral treaty regime. In the first decade after the Cold War, as the chapters in this book amply demonstrate, many of these hopes were realized. But already in the 1990s storm clouds were gathering on the horizon. Both Washington and Moscow were becoming uncomfortable with the way in which legacy treaties blocked desired adjustments to changing security environments, with the former chafing against the limitations of the AntiBallistic Missile Treaty (ABM Treaty) and the latter against the limitations of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF Treaty).1 The strategic partnerships among the major powers envisioned in the 1990s and early 2000s were not created and cooperation was slowly undermined by disappointment, suspicion, and resentment in Washington, Moscow, and Beijing. US efforts to move nuclear weapons out of the foreground of its political relationship with Moscow and to keep them in the background in its relationship with China only reinforced their suspicion that the United States was trying to shift the balance of power further to its advantage.2 In addition, the multilateral treaty regime struggled with multiple compliance challenges, including nuclear weapons development by India, Pakistan, and North Korea, as well as growing doubts about Russian compliance with its chemical and biological disarmament obligations. Russia’s reluctant endorsement of the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) in 2010 and its modest reductions, its simultaneous violation of the INF Treaty, and its 273

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fierce attack on the European security order and international norms added insult to injury.3 In 2021, the Joe Biden administration arrived with a clear presidential commitment to restore US leadership of the arms control process.4 But neither Russia nor China has chosen to follow and neither seems likely to do so soon. Accordingly, arms control’s future now seems quite dim. As the chapters in this book have also amply demonstrated, arms control has faced significant challenges in adapting to new circumstances. But it must adapt—or it will die. The preceding chapters have touched on multiple new challenges. Cooperation among the major powers has been overtaken by competition and confrontation, albeit this time in a much more multipolar and multidomain context. Bilateral nuclear arms control as the United States and Russia have practiced it appears to be coming to an end. Multilateral arms control is struggling under the weight of difficult implementation and compliance challenges, the complexities of a dynamic technology environment, and shifting military perspectives on the utility of chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons. It is also struggling with Russia’s shift to the role of spoiler—with the use of banned weapons and its complicity in enabling Syria’s employment of chemical weapons.5 Moreover, the functions of the UN-based mechanisms for treaty compliance enforcement have been undermined by the efforts of Presidents Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping to replace the liberal international order with a balance of power system more to their liking. A final troubling factor in this complex picture is the critical dependence of bilateral and multilateral arms control mechanisms on US leadership—which can generously be described as episodic. The dependence seems clear, as no other actor or coalition of actors has the influence of the United States on the political, diplomatic, and military processes that produce arms control results. The episodic nature of US engagement also seems clear. But the criticism of some administrations as less interested in arms control than others mask a deeper debate about the nature of the required leadership. Principled and purposeful arms control leadership requires something more than showing up. It requires a sound understanding of the relationship between security and restraint, and of the interactions of arms control with deterrence strategy. It also requires a capacity to understand the interests of negotiating partners and develop proposals that credibly address at least some of those interests. And it requires understanding the interests and equities of other stakeholders, especially US allies.

The Coming Interregnum In the future history of arms control, February 4, 2026, looms especially large. This is the date of expiration of New START between the United

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States and Russia. Unless some replacement agreement is put in place, formal nuclear arms control will end on that date. If this comes to pass, there will be no legally binding and verifiable agreements between the two largest nuclear powers, no further nuclear reductions by them, no legal constraints on China’s nuclear buildup, no transparency beyond that required by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), no expectation of major-power cooperation in support of the multilateral treaty regimes, no regional conventional regimes, no codified norms beyond the NPT, and no expectation that this would change for the better any time soon. This raises important questions about the likelihood of unconstrained competition for strategic advantage and about the impact of such potential competition on international stability and the risks of war. The collapse of bilateral US-Russian nuclear arms control does not also imply the collapse of the multilateral treaty system. But it would likely have significant consequences for those parts of the system that depend on cooperation among the major powers to ensure effective enforcement of its main provisions. This is especially likely if Russia continues to be led by an elite hostile to existing international rules and norms of behavior. In fact, the multilateral treaty system has already lost some effectiveness and political support from Russia and China and thus has, in a sense, begun to enter an interregnum. It is possible that the 2026 date will be overtaken by other developments. A new bilateral agreement before then is notionally possible. But it is highly unlikely so long as President Putin remains in power, as his aggression against the state and people of Ukraine has all but eliminated the political space in the United States for compromise. More likely is that one or both parties to New START will withdraw before the 2026 date. An interregnum (defined here as a lapse or pause in a continuous series) has a beginning point and an end point. The premise of this closing chapter is that such an end point will emerge sooner or later. Precisely why and how is a matter of conjecture and debate. Assuming there will be an interregnum, how long might it last? How might it end? What would be its principal attributes? What implications follow for US arms control strategy between now and 2026? To find answers to these questions, this chapter looks to prior interregna in the history of arms control for potentially useful insights. The Brief Interregnum of 2010

The recent past provides one useful model: the period between the expiration on December 5, 2009, of the original Strategic Arms Reductions Treaty (START) and the entry into force of its successor, New START on January 26, 2011. The gap proved unavoidable as the negotiations dragged on, which may have had something to do with the conviction of each side that

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it had more to gain by waiting than dealing. The risks of competition during this interregnum were recognized and largely eliminated with the joint political commitment of Presidents Barack Obama and Dmitry Medvedev to abide by the provisions of START while finalizing New START. Their willingness to do so was informed, in part, by the fact that they had already agreed in principle to a successor to START and to its general parameters.6 A similar interregnum in 2026 is plausible, but not particularly likely. It is plausible because stalling can be good negotiating art.7 But it is unlikely for many reasons. It requires a joint political commitment that appears possible only on the basis of US acceptance of Russia’s “new strategic equation” that requires a grand bargain encompassing offense and defense as well as nuclear and non-nuclear capabilities. As Valery Gerasimov, chief of the Russian general staff, has explained: “These days a new approach is required to devising mechanisms of arms control. Russia has proposed a new equation of security, encompassing all types of offensive and defensive weapons influencing strategic stability, as well as new spheres of confrontation, such as cyberspace, outer space, and artificial intelligence.”8 Such a grand bargain is not politically plausible in the United States for the foreseeable future, especially if it involves legal limitations on missile defenses and non-nuclear strike systems. Such an interregnum would also require that Presidents Biden and Putin, or their successors, be willing to work together to lead such a negotiation—something that seems highly unlikely in the wake of Russian aggression against Ukraine and its crimes against humanity. Of course, Putin’s removal from the political scene could alter this calculus fundamentally, as would the election of a US president sympathetic to Putin’s view. Putin has also conditioned arms control negotiations on agreement of a comprehensive settlement of its grievances against the existing European security order. As Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov put it in the winter of 2022 (in explaining Russian draft treaties for a new European security architecture), Russian concerns about the stability of the nuclear deterrence relationship with the United States are now “of a secondary and even peripheral nature” relative to its concerns about the existing European security order.9 Of course, this conditionality may not stand the test of time, especially if that order proves durable. If in the unlikely event such a brief interregnum were to occur in 2026, it would seem far more likely than in 2010 to be overwhelmed by competitive pressures. In 2010, Russia was just starting its nuclear modernization program and the United States was simply stewarding an aging force. In 2026, each will have hot production lines (as will China). Both Russia and China would be well positioned to grow their forces and supplement them with new weapon types if they were motivated to try to gain new strategic advantages.

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The Long Interregnum of the 1930s and 1940s

This period is not well remembered in the history of arms control but is relevant today in various ways.10 It began with the Treaty of Versailles of 1919, which obliged Germany to disarm. Diplomacy then focused on two lines of effort. One addressed the desire to limit naval competition in capital ships and resulted in the five-party Washington Naval Treaty of 1922, the Locarno Treaty of 1925, and the London Treaty of 1930. The other addressed the aspiration to implement a broad program of disarmament. This interregnum is demarcated less clearly than the short 2010 variant. It began in approximately 1933 with Germany’s withdrawal from the Treaty of Versailles and Japan’s from the League of Nations. It was reflected also in growing disputes in the early 1930s about how to remake naval constraints to reflect shifting balances of power and geopolitical ambitions, which led to the treaty’s demise in 1936. The disarmament project culminated in the World Disarmament Conference of 1932–1934, which produced but one tangible result: an “armaments truce” by which governments were asked to refrain from arming for one year (and with which only the democracies generally complied). Walter Lippmann describes the disarmament movement of that period as “tragically successful in disarming the nations that believed in disarmament,” and whose net effect “was to dissolve the alliance among the victors of the first world war and to reduce them to almost disastrous impotence on the eve of the second world war.”11 The war wiped the arms control slate clean. This interregnum ended with the end of World War II. As in 1919, there were new restraints on the losers, reflected in provisions written into their constitutions banning the acquisition of missiles and atomic, biological, and chemical weapons. There was also a renewed effort to pursue general and complete disarmament, but this time with specific roles and enforcement authorities for the major powers and others serving on the UN Security Council. The debate about whether and how to try to eliminate nuclear weapons also began at this moment. Three attributes of this interregnum stand out as relevant to the current moment in arms control history. First, the partial collapse of the regime in the first half of the 1930s through the period that the democracies complied but the dictators did not, was valued and exploited by those dictators to shift the balance of power. Second, the multipolar order proved unmanageable from an arms control perspective once relations of power became dynamic. Third, idealists lost credibility; this strengthened the influence of defense and deterrence strategies in the postinterregnum context. Sadly, and alarmingly, in the 2020s a collapse of the international system into major power war is not inconceivable. Today, war rages in Ukraine while China readies for war in Taiwan. Presidents Putin and Xi have made

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clear their shared intention to remake the regional and global orders to their liking and with all means available to them if need be. Putin has gotten quite far in his campaign for “new rules or no rules”—a campaign he set out explicitly in 2014 with a description of his contempt for existing norms and constraints on the exercise of Russian power.12 Russia has also gained new military advantages by violating its self-accepted arms control commitments.13 It has also sought improved political relations with states in violation of UN Security Council resolutions that it has the duty to enforce as a permanent member of that Council.14 All this foreshadows a possible catastrophic collapse of the international order into war if and as that order further erodes through the decade ahead. The Early Cold War Interregnum

A third model is provided by the early Cold War. More than two decades passed between the start of the Cold War in the late 1940s and the agreement in 1972 of the first major US-Soviet arms control agreement, the ABM Treaty. This period was marked by a rapid and large-scale buildup of tactical, theater, and strategic nuclear weapons. It was marked also by a series of probing activities by the Soviet Union aimed at testing US and allied resolve and the resulting crises over Berlin and Cuba. The agreement of the ABM Treaty reflected a significant shift in US strategic thought during this period. As explained by Thomas Schelling, US recognition in 1958 of the “delicate balance” of strategic forces in Europe, given their vulnerability to Soviet preemptive strikes, fueled rising US interest in assured retaliation to reduce its incentive to go nuclear first in a crisis. It also fueled a rising appreciation that the US interest in avoiding nuclear war required that the Soviets too have confidence in the assured retaliation capacity of their forces. Thus was mutual assured destruction born. One important result was to enshrine strategic stability as a key organizing concept for the design of US nuclear forces and for arms control strategy.15 A similar interregnum seems quite possible in 2026. Russia, China, and the United States are all competing for strategic advantage with the modernization of general purpose military forces and for “dominance” in cyber space and outer space. In the nuclear domain, Russia and China are competing aggressively—though toward what end remains unclear. None seems ready to conclude that further competition will not materially improve its strategic posture. Nor does any of the three seem to believe that the instabilities generated by such competition and capabilities are of a kind and character to create significant new nuclear risks. Thus, the interregnum seems unlikely to be short-lived. But it also seems likely to generate its share of frightening episodes as probing continues, including with multiple new cyber and space tools, lead-

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ing to militarized crises under the nuclear shadow of an unprecedented kind. In the United States at least, the desire remains strong to try to avoid such crises and instabilities through strategic dialogue and cooperation. As in 1958, US experts believe that the balance is too delicate and vulnerable and that we have shared interests with Russia and China in this regard. And as in 1938, we may not appreciate the ways in which our reluctance to compete and fear of nuclear escalation may fuel the misperception among our enemies that democratic states are unwilling to defend their interests. Competition post-2026 could be quite intense. In an unconstrained context, Russia will be well positioned to continue to adapt and to increase its nuclear forces, given its active nuclear weapons complex. In 2026, its program of nuclear modernization will be at a decision point: whether to close production lines on conclusion of the replacement of aging systems, or to continue to produce additional delivery vehicles. Over the decade 2026– 2036, it could increase substantially its arsenals of strategic and non-strategic warheads. The scale of potential future growth is suggested by the scale of past production—as Russia has replaced most of its nuclear forces over the past decade, it could presumably roughly double its force in the decade ahead.16 But a substantial nuclear modernization program would come at the expense of repairs to Russia’s general purpose military forces—an obvious priority now for Moscow. Although China is not a party to New START, the potential future growth of its nuclear forces is an important consideration for Washington (and Moscow) in contemplating a possible future of unconstrained competition. China’s “strategic breakout” raises significant questions about the scale, speed, and ultimate purpose of its nuclear buildup. The common US assumption that China seeks parity with the United States contrasts sharply with the absence in China of any discussion of parity or of the value of being a nuclear peer to the United States. Instead, Western experts are left to wonder what Xi’s vision of a future China “at the center of the world stage, in the dominant position” might mean for China’s future nuclear posture.17 With the completion of 360 new missile silos in the near term, China will have approximately doubled the number of fixed nuclear targets that the United States seeks to put at risk with its deterrence strategy.18 There is nothing to suggest that China intends to stop at 360, that Xi believes that there is no military or political value in nuclear superiority, or that there are significant technical or financial barriers to further force growth. In sharp contrast, the United States is poorly positioned to compete in an unconstrained environment. In the near term, it could gradually upload the warheads it has downloaded from intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs); but as it modernizes delivery systems, it will reduce its available upload capacity. Also, in the near term, it could put nuclear-armed bombers back on alert;

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but this might be rejected as reintroducing some unwanted risks. In the longer term, the United States could build additional delivery systems— though only after completing replacement of existing delivery systems. It could also build additional nuclear warheads and bombs—though the nuclear infrastructure is not scaled to do so. Thus, whatever arms control constraints it may or may not face in the decade ahead, the US nuclear posture of 2036 will be essentially the same posture as in 2026.

Taking Stock of the Possibilities Of these possibilities, the most likely is the third. The short version might become possible if President Putin departs the political scene and his successor seeks to depart from Russia’s current confrontational path. The interwar version might become possible if the crises generated by probing behaviors unfold too quickly and with too much complexity to prove manageable; alas, this is a realistic possibility. The long early Cold War version is the most likely because a long-term effort to compete for strategic advantage will ultimately teach the lesson that strategic advantage is fleeting if it is achievable at all and comes at a price of chronic instability and unnecessary nuclear danger. The principal danger in such a post-2026 interregnum of the kind reflected in the early Cold War years is that new forms of competition for strategic advantage will emerge, both nuclear and non-nuclear (as an intensification of nuclear competition can be expected to reinforce the intention to compete for advantage in cyberspace and outer space). The key risks in this context are that: (1) Russia and China will keep warm production lines going; (2) China will follow Russia in developing “a nuclear scalpel for every military problem” at the regional level of war; and (3) the United States will be unable or unwilling to compete effectively. The likely result would be that the balance of strategic advantage shifts further and dangerously (by motivating new probing and risk taking by Presidents Putin and Xi). The key risks for Russia and China are that their actions will motivate the United States to overcome internal obstacles with the result that they face a stronger and more resolute United States and a new division of deterrence labor between the United States and its allies that strengthens their alliances. This competition could have far-reaching consequences. It would likely further erode strategic stability among the three great powers. It would inhibit dialogue and negotiations on possible “guardrails.” It would also undermine the broader multilateral treaty system. Multilateral treaty enforcement by the P5 at the UN Security Council and the implementation of the chemical and biological treaty regimes have already been negatively impacted by Russia’s shifts to the spoiler role and its cynical exploitation of

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multilateral diplomacy to advance Putin’s efforts to undermine the “old rules” of the liberal international order. The international community can work around some of Russia’s obstructionism, but concerted Sino-Russian diplomacy promises to be a more difficult challenge.

Toward an Arms Control Strategy for the Interregnum To ensure that it is well prepared for the challenges of a potentially prolonged interregnum, the United States should try to increase the odds of an early and successful escape from the interregnum. Doing so may improve the odds of avoiding it altogether. To do so, its arms control strategy should align with the following objectives. First, the United States must put its own intellectual house in order. Working with allies and partners, it should “go to school” on the theories of victory that US adversaries have developed for peacetime, crisis, and war. It must recreate the capacity to outthink its adversaries. It must also identify what can be done to put those theories in jeopardy and to utilize cooperative measures to isolate and reduce common dangers. It must ensure the agenda includes actions that are not dependent on cooperative responses from Russia or China. Second, the United States should continue to stake its claim to leadership of the multilateral treaty regimes. It must exercise that leadership with practical approaches to compliance and other challenges. It must also encourage others, especially its allies, to assume some leadership responsibilities in support of those regimes. Third, the United States should put President Putin’s “peace through strength” claim to the test. The United States should put on the table a counter to the Russian draft treaties proposed in the winter of 2022. That proposal should go beyond simple bilateral nuclear reductions to address central aspects of the “new strategic equation.” It should also serve some interests of both (or all three) parties while also requiring compromises by both (or all three). Putin is unlikely to agree, but his rejection would contribute to his further political isolation. Fourth, the United States should prepare to compete to deny Russia and China new strategic advantages across the domains of military significance. The purpose of such preparations should be to convince them that they cannot escape a stalemate with the United States. It is not to convince them that the United States seeks dominance over them. If they perceive a stalemate, they are more likely to seek cooperation over competition. The United States should be explicit that this is its objective. Fifth, the United States should develop new concepts for managing the competition in multiple domains so that it does not generate dangerous crises.

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If formal mechanisms are not available during the interregnum, increased emphasis must fall on informal mechanisms. Norms and rules of the road will become more important, even if they are complied with selectively or not at all by competitors. New concepts are also needed to engage the private sector actors that are important in the new domains, whose familiarity with national security concerns is so far limited but rapidly growing. Sixth, and closely related to these last two objectives, the United States should repair its ability to compete. This is a problem of both capability and capacity, largely in the nuclear weapons complex. The changes needed are as much cultural as fiscal. Change agents must be empowered. Sustained leadership focus is required. While repairing its ability to compete, the United States should refrain from baiting Russia or China into more competitive responses to the modernization of US nuclear forces and missile defenses. They would likely call that bluff. Moreover, such bluster robs the United States of the moral high ground and skews public and foreign opinion into unhelpful condemnations of “arms racing.”

Recalibrating the Potential Benefits of Self-Restraint As the United States considers how to become more competitive in an era defined by strategic competition with Russia and China, it must also consider what forms of self-restraint it is prepared to exercise. Such measures have a long lineage in US strategic policy. In the twenty-five years between the end of the Cold War and Russia’s military-backed annexation of Crimea, the United States adopted many practices aimed at encouraging reciprocal nuclear restraint by others. These include the nuclear test moratorium and effective end (until recently) to nuclear modernization; the commitments to homeland missile defenses scaled against only limited strikes, and to conventional precision longrange strike capabilities for only “niche” purposes; the rejection of the weaponization of outer space; and, for a long period, the reluctance to engage in cyber offense. Retrospectively, some of this self-restraint paid dividends, but much of it did not. No country has resumed underground explosive nuclear testing though some conduct tests the United States considers inconsistent with treaty obligations.19 While the United States effectively curtailed its capacity to build new nuclear weapons, Russia and China expanded theirs.20 On missile defense and conventional precision long-range strike capabilities, Moscow and Beijing proceeded with worst-case planning assumptions regarding US intentions and capabilities. In short, the record is mixed. Of note, the messages of strategic restraint were received in Moscow at a time that President Putin was making decisions to violate the INF Treaty, to inter-

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vene in the domestic political affairs of various countries, and to support a ruthless autocrat in Syria as he was near defeat. He was also making decisions to invade Georgia and Crimea, neither of which generated risk-taking behavior by leaders of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Whatever their benefits in the past environment, in the new environment the United States should conduct a fresh assessment of the measures of strategic self-restraint it exercises in the name of nuclear order and stability. These currently include, for example, the moratorium on underground nuclear explosive tests, the rejection of new nuclear weapons with new military characteristics, protection of the US homeland against only limited strikes from countries like North Korea and Iran, and the development and testing of debris-generating direct-ascent antisatellite weapons. In the new strategic environment, the strategic benefits of unilateral restraint are less clear while its costs are increasingly clear. Experts in Moscow and Beijing often see such self-restraint as confirmatory proof of US decline and retreat. Experts in allied capitals sometimes interpret such reluctance as symptomatic of an America that has grown too timid and, thus, as a signal of future US decoupling in times of crisis and war. The United States should pursue only those forms of self-restraint that it deems stabilizing even in the absence of immediate reciprocal responses by China and Russia.

Conclusion From the vantage point of 2023, the future of arms control looks quite grim. A significant chapter will likely close in February 2026. But a new chapter will then open. That chapter may prove to be long-lived, uncertain, and punctuated by alarming crises as the resolve of the democracies to defend their interests is probed by Russia and China. It is also likely to close with a return to arms control, presumably in some new and different form, given the risks of unfettered competition and the inability thereby to gain a decisive and durable advantage. That new form will be shaped by what happens in the intervening period and by the efforts of the United States and its allies to shape the main competitive dynamics of that period. Success in this regard requires that arms control strategy adapt to the multipolar competition now unfolding.

Notes The views expressed here are the personal views of the author and should not be attributed to his employer or its sponsors. The author is grateful for constructive feedback on earlier drafts of this chapter from Lewis Dunn, Jeff Larsen, and Shane Smith.

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1. On US concerns about the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, see Newhouse, “The Missile Defense Debate.” On Russian concerns about the INF Treaty and CFE Treaty, see Stent, The Limits of Partnership, 156–158. 2. “Remarks by President George W. Bush, National Defense University.” 3. US Department of State, “2021 Adherence to and Compliance with Arms Control, Nonproliferation, and Disarmament Agreements and Commitments.” 4. Interim National Security Strategic Guidance. 5. US Department of State, “2021 Adherence to and Compliance with Arms Control, Nonproliferation, and Disarmament Agreements and Commitments.” 6. Gottemoeller, Negotiating the New START Treaty, especially chap. 7, “Losing the Race to December.” 7. Albertson, “Negotiating with Putin’s Russia.” 8. “Russia’s ‘Security Equation’ Can Strengthen Global Stability.” 9. Putin, “Remarks to a Conference on Russia-West.” 10. McKercher, Arms Limitation and Disarmament. 11. Lippman, U.S. Foreign Policy, 55–56. 12. “Remarks by President Vladimir Putin, Valdai International Discussion Club, 2014.” 13. US Department of State, “2021 Adherence to and Compliance with Arms Control, Nonproliferation, and Disarmament Agreements and Commitments.” 14. Lukin, “Russia and North Korea”; Saleh and Yazdenshenas, “The Ukraine War Has Made Iran and Russia Allies in Economic Isolation.” 15. Schelling, “Foreword,” in Colby and Gerson. 16. Woolf, Russia’s Nuclear Weapons. 17. Xi quoted in Zhao, “Why Is China Building Up Its Nuclear Arsenal?” 18. Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China, 2021. 19. US Department of State, “2021 Adherence to and Compliance with Arms Control, Nonproliferation, and Disarmament Agreements and Commitments.” 20. B. Roberts, “Stockpile Stewardship in an Era of Renewed Strategic Competition.”

Acronyms

ABM Treaty ACDA ACOG ACV AI ALCM AoA AP ASAT A2/AD AUKUS BCC BMD BTWC BW BWC CBM CBW CCD CCM CCP CCWC CD CFE Treaty CFE-1A C4ISR

Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty Arms Control and Disarmament Agency Arms Control Observer Group armored combat vehicle artificial intelligence air-launched cruise missile area of application Additional Protocol antisatellite antiaccess/area denial Australia, United Kingdom, and United States Bilateral Consultative Commission ballistic missile defense Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention biological warfare, or biological weapons Biological Weapons Convention confidence-building measure chemical and biological weapons Conference of the Committee on Disarmament Convention on Cluster Munitions Chinese Communist Party Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons UN Conference on Disarmament Conventional Armed Forces in Europe Treaty Conventional Armed Forces in Europe Agreement 1A command, control, communications, computers,   intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance 285

286

Acronyms

CSBM CSCE CSI CTBT CTBTO CTR CW CWC DOD DOTMLPF DOTMLPF-I DPRK ENDC EU FMCT GBI G7 G8 GGE GLCM GMT GPS HCM HCOC HEL HET HGV HPM IAEA IC ICBM ICT IMS INF Treaty INSS IPNDV IRBM ISR JCG

confidence- and security-building measure Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe Container Security Initiative Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Organization Cooperative Threat Reduction chemical weapons Chemical Weapons Convention Department of Defense doctrine, organization, training, materiel, leadership and   education, personnel, and facilities doctrine, organization, training, materiel, leadership and   education, personnel, facilities. and interoperability Democratic People’s Republic of Korea Eighteen Nation Disarmament Committee European Union Fissile Material Cut-Off Treaty ground-based interceptor Group of 7 Group of 8 UN Group of Governmental Experts ground-launched cruise missile Greenwich Mean Time global positioning system hypersonic cruise missile Hague Code of Conduct Against Ballistic Missile   Proliferation high-energy laser human enhancement technology hypersonic glide vehicle high-powered microwave International Atomic Energy Agency Intelligence Community intercontinental ballistic missile information and computer technology International Monitoring System Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty Air Force Institute for National Security Studies International Partnership for Nuclear Disarmament   Verification intermediate-range ballistic missile intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance Joint Consultative Group

Acronyms

JCPOA LAWS LTBT MAD MBFR MIRV MRBM MTCR NATO New START NNWS NPR NPT NSC NSG NTM NWFZ NWS OOV OPCW OSCE P5 PGM PLA PNI POE PRC PSI RCA ROC RPV SALT SDI SLBM SORT SPD SSBN START TLE TPNW TTBT

Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action lethal autonomous weapon systems Limited Test Ban Treaty mutual assured destruction Mutual and Balanced Force Reductions multiple independently targetable reentry vehicle medium-range ballistic missile Missile Technology Control Regime North Atlantic Treaty Organization New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty non-nuclear weapons states Nuclear Posture Review Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty National Security Council Nuclear Suppliers Group national technical means nuclear-weapons-free zone nuclear weapons states object of verification Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe Permanent Five members of the UN Security Council precision-guided munition People’s Liberation Army Presidential Nuclear Initiative point of entry People’s Republic of China Proliferation Security Initiative riot control agents Republic of China remotely piloted vehicle Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, and Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty Strategic Defense Initiative submarine-launched ballistic missile Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty Social Democratic Party submarine, ballistic missile, nuclear powered Strategic Arms Reduction Talks, and Strategic Arms   Reduction Treaty treaty-limited equipment Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons Threshold Test Ban Treaty

287

288

Acronyms

UAS UAV UNGA UNSCOM UNSCR USSR WMD WTO

unmanned aerial system unmanned aerial vehicle UN General Assembly UN Special Commission on Iraq UN Security Council Resolution Union of Soviet Socialist Republics weapons of mass destruction World Trade Organization

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The Contributors

Justin Anderson is senior policy fellow at National Defense University’s

Center for the Study of Weapons of Mass Destruction. Previously he was senior analyst at Science Applications International Corporation supporting the Office of the Secretary of Defense and US Air Force. David A. Cooper is professor emeritus of national security affairs at the US Naval War College and nonresident senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. He previously served for many years in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. Marina Favaro is a researcher focusing on the impact of emerging technologies, including artificial intelligence, on international peace and security. Schuyler Foerster is emeritus professor of political science at the US Air Force Academy and continues to teach and write about international security. In his Air Force career, he served in Brussels, Vienna, and Omaha as a senior advisor on security and arms control policy. Rebecca Davis Gibbons is associate professor of political science at the

University of Southern Maine. She previously served as fellow for the Project on Managing the Atom at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center. Kerry M. Kartchner is adjunct faculty member at Brigham Young University.

He retired in 2018 from a career in the US Department of State and the Defense Department. Jeffrey A. Larsen is research professor of national security affairs at the US

Naval Postgraduate School and president of Larsen Consulting Group. He

317

318

The Contributors

previously served as senior policy analyst on strategic issues for Science Applications International and as a NATO official. Amanda Moodie is director of the Program for Emerging Leaders and policy fellow at the National Defense University’s Center for the Study of Weapons of Mass Destruction. She is currently on detail with the Office of the Biological Policy Staff at the Department of State Michael Moodie was assistant director for Foreign Affairs, Defense, and

Trade at the Congressional Research Service. He previously served as assistant director for Multilateral Affairs of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. Amy J. Nelson is David M. Rubenstein Fellow in the foreign policy pro-

gram with the Center for Security, Strategy, and Technology at the Brookings Institution. George Perkovich is vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Steven Pifer is associated with Stanford University’s Center for Interna-

tional Security and Cooperation and the Brookings Institution. A retired foreign service officer, he served as US ambassador to Ukraine and special assistant to the president on the National Security Council. Brad Roberts is director of the Center for Global Security Research at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. From 2009 to 2013, he was deputy assistant secretary of defense for Nuclear and Missile Defense Policy. David Santoro is president and CEO of the Pacific Forum in Honolulu. Phillip C. Saunders is director of the Center for the Study of Chinese Military Affairs at National Defense University’s Institute for National Strategic Studies. He previously worked at the Center for Nonproliferation Studies James M. Smith was previously director of the US Air Force Institute for National Security Studies and a career military officer. Shane Smith is director of the US Air Force Institute for National Security

Studies and associate professor of political science at the US Air Force Academy. He previously served as senior fellow at National Defense University and in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. Amy F. Woolf served as specialist in Nuclear Weapons Policy at the Congressional Research Service at the US Library of Congress for over thirty years.

Index

A2/AD. See antiaccess/area denial (A2/AD) Abe, Shinzo, 144 Abkhazia, 24, 212 ABM Treaty. See Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM Treaty) action-reaction dynamics, 7, 115 Adams, Perri, 226 ACDA. See Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA) ACOG. See Arms Control Observer Group (ACOG) Adapted CFE Treaty, 211 Additional Protocol (AP), 130(n14), 137, 138, 152, 240 Afghanistan, 21, 38, 53, 122, 213, 244 Africa, 41, 140, 248, 259, 261 Africa Nuclear-Weapon-Free Zone Treaty. See Treaty of Pelindaba Agreed Framework, 101, 130(n14) AI. See artificial intelligence (AI) Aiken, Frank, 135 air-launched cruise missile (ALCM), 81, 85, 121 ALCM. See air-launched cruise missile (ALCM) Anderson, Justin, 12, 147, 317 animal pathogens B. anthracis and P. mallei, 169 Antarctic Treaty, 41, 140 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM Treaty), 7, 19, 38, 47, 52, 56, 62, 72, 95, 103, 109(n73), 121, 125, 154,

212–213, 232–233, 241, 251(n3), 273, 278 antiaccess/area denial (A2/AD), 188, 213, 220(n53) antiballistic missile, 38, 62, 72, 121 antinuclear, 92, 142, 261 antisatellite (ASAT) capabilities, 99–100, 103–104, 146(n35), 195, 207, 216, 228 AoA. See area of application (AoA) AP. See Additional Protocol (AP) Arab Spring, 243 area of application (AoA), 152, 164(n5) Argentina, 139, 146(n28) armored combat vehicle (ACV), 150, 204 Arms Control and Disarmament Act (22 USC 2573), 61 Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA), 6, 59, 172 Arms Control Observer Group (ACOG), 63 arms race, 4, 7, 11, 13, 25, 52–53, 92, 104, 114, 122, 163, 184, 194, 197, 199, 249; biological, 172; hypersonic, 196, 215–216; nuclear, 104, 120–121, 124, 127, 136; zero-sum, 196 arms racing, 26, 31, 113, 115, 187, 193, 222, 232, 282 Arms Trade Treaty, 45–46, 207 artificial intelligence (AI), 26, 46, 177, 185, 187–188, 190–192, 199, 200(n11), 204, 216, 276

319

320

Index

ASAT. See antisatellite (ASAT) capabilities Asia Pacific region, 55, 84 assassination attempts, 9, 27, 134 Association of Southeast Asian Nations, 240 atmospheric nuclear testing, 65, 140 Atomic Energy Act, 54 Atoms for Peace, 35 AUKUS. See Australia, United Kingdom, and United States (AUKUS) partnership Aum Shinrikyo, 259 Australia, 117, 132, 214, 246 Australia Group, 35, 43, 97–98, 138–139 Australia, United Kingdom, and United States (AUKUS) partnership, 246 Avangard hypersonic boost-glide vehicle, 78, 196, 215, 216 balance of power, 273, 274, 277 Balkans, 240, 260 ballistic missile, 18, 26, 38, 52, 57, 68(n28), 72, 77–79, 82, 84, 94, 98, 100, 130(n17), 139, 153, 188, 196, 265, 268. See also intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), intermediate-range ballistic missile (IRBM), medium-range ballistic missile (MRBM), submarinelaunched ballistic missile (SLBM) ballistic missile defense (BMD), 52, 56, 80, 95, 196 Baltic States, 29, 241 Baruch Plan, 35, 117, 135 baseline declarations, 159–161 basic deterrence, 19 BCC. See Bilateral Consultative Commission (BCC) Beckett, Margaret, 87 Belarus, 36, 38, 44, 76–77, 86, 144, 240, 248 Belt and Road Initiative, 24, 243 Bezos, Jeff, 229 Biden, Joe, 8, 40, 53, 66, 72–75, 83, 85, 126–128, 225 Bilateral Consultative Commission (BCC), 66, 74, 78, 157 bin Laden, Osama, 260 biological and toxin weapons, 22, 35, 44 Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention (BTWC). See Biological Weapons Convention (BWC)

biological warfare (BW), 97, 168 biological weapons (BW), 6, 12, 34–35, 45, 97–98, 131, 133–134, 137–138, 152, 167–184, 222, 259, 261, 268 Biological Weapons Convention (BWC), 12, 22, 34–35, 44, 93, 97–98, 130(n9), 131, 152, 167, 170–173, 183(n13), 195; schedules, 151, 174–175 biotechnology, 26, 178, 185, 188, 190, 193–195, 199, 213 bioweapons, 195 Blue Origin, 229 BMD. See ballistic missile defense (BMD) Board of Governors, 136, 157 Bolton, John, 55, 68(n27) Brazilian-Argentine Agency for Accounting and Control of Nuclear Materials, 146(n28) Brexit, 243 Brezhnev, Leonid, 22, 121–122 Brodie, Bernard, 18, 115 BTWC. See Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) Bull, Hedley, 3, 115 Bureau of Intelligence and Research, 59, 69(n38) Burevestnik ground-launched nuclearpowered cruise missile, 78 Bush, George H. W., 39, 53, 60, 122–125, 174, 210, 240 Bush, George W., 2, 7, 40, 53–55, 95, 125–126, 260 BW. See biological warfare or biological weapons BWC. See Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) BWC Implementation Support Unit, 177 C4ISR. See command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (C4ISR) Canada, 41–42, 137, 169, 208 Canberra Commission on the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons, 117 capacity building, 207, 255, 261 Cartagena Declaration on Nuclear Weapons, 258 Carter, Jimmy, 120–123 CBW. See chemical and biological weapons (CBW)

Index CCD. See Conference of the Committee on Disarmament (CCD) CCM. See Convention on Cluster Munitions (CCM) CCP. See Chinese Communist Party (CCP) CCWC. See Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCWC) CD. See Conference on Disarmament (CD) Central Asia, 41, 140, 243, 248 Central Asian Nuclear-Weapon-Free Zone Treaty (CANWFZ), 41, 140 CFE Treaty. See Conventional Armed Forces in Europe Treaty (CFE Treaty) CFE-1A. See Conventional Armed Forces in Europe 1A Agreement (CFE-1A) challenge inspection, 97, 141, 175 Chechnya, 240 chemical and biological weapons (CBW), 9, 12, 34–35, 133–134, 167–184, 256–257, 261, 273, 280 chemical weapons (CW), 6, 8, 12, 21–22, 26–27, 34–35, 44–45, 93, 97–98, 102, 131, 133–134, 138, 151, 167–184, 222, 253, 261, 274, 277 Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), 22, 26, 35, 44, 93–94, 97, 130(n9), 131, 133–134, 138, 148, 150–151, 165(n11), 167, 171–177, 179–180, 184(n22), 240 China-Russia partnership, 246, 250 Chinese Communist Party (CCP), 91–93 Clinton, Bill, 125–126, 130(n14), 141, 260 cluster bombs. See cluster munitions cluster munitions, 34, 45, 47, 142, 204, 208 co-orbital, 195 code of conduct, 206, 218, 226, 228–232 Colby, Elbridge, 244 collaborative security, 10, 16, 31, 51, 65, 255 collective security, 255 Collective Security Treaty Organization, 243 command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (C4ISR), 190–193 compliance, 12–13, 34–35, 37, 39, 43–45, 59–61, 63, 65–66, 67(n12), 74, 85, 116, 133, 136, 147, 154, 164, 171–173, 211, 223, 230, 234, 255, 273, 281; challenge, 232–234, 274;

321

China and, 91, 94–100; monitoring, 148–152, 153, 155–157, 177; Russia and, 95, 133, 208, 273; treaty, 135–136, 274; verification and, 37, 39, 66, 149, 170, 181, 209, 226 Comprehensive Safeguards Agreement, 136–137, 152 Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), 37, 43, 46, 69(n34), 94–96, 117, 125, 141, 240, 260 Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO), 154–155, 193 Conference of the Committee on Disarmament (CCD), 174 Conference on Disarmament (CD), 34, 43, 45, 96, 141, 228 Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), 209, 258 confidence- and security-building measures (CSBM), 14, 21, 31, 38, 42, 62, 85, 104–105, 172, 191, 198, 203, 206, 216, 228, 230, 232 Congress, 30, 51, 53–54, 58–59, 61–66, 77, 94, 260, 262 Constitution (US), 61–62, 222 Container Security Initiative (CSI), 44 control lists, 207 Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCWC), 45, 207–208, 217 Convention on Cluster Munitions (CCM), 4, 45, 65, 142, 208 Convention on the Physical Protection of Nuclear Material, 44 Conventional Armed Forces in Europe 1A Agreement (CFE-1A), 42, 211 Conventional Armed Forces in Europe Treaty (CFE Treaty), 12, 21, 42, 47, 149–151, 155, 157–158, 162, 204, 206, 208–213; Adaptation talks, 211 Conventional Prompt Global Strike program, 11, 81, 215 Cooper, David A., 11, 113, 317 cooperative security, 3–4, 7, 9–10, 13, 34, 40, 42–46, 52–53, 58–61, 66, 129, 250, 253–272 Cooperative Threat Reduction (CTR) program, 39, 40, 44, 256–259, 262, 264 counterproliferation, 2, 33, 256, 265 counterterrorism, 44, 215–216, 255–256, 261 Covid-19, 8, 74, 98, 243, 246, 249 Crimea, 9, 24, 65, 86, 243, 247, 257, 266, 282–283

322

Index

crisis management, 13–14, 19, 52, 66, 251, 269 CSBM. See confidence- and securitybuilding measures (CSBM) CSCE. See Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) CSI. See Container Security Initiative (CSI) CTBT. See Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) CTBTO. See Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO) CTR. See Cooperative Threat Reduction (CTR) program CTR Umbrella Agreement, 259, 261 Cuban missile crisis, 19, 22, 31, 119, 139, 221 CW. See chemical weapons (CW) CWC. See Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) cyber: attack, 24, 105, 191, 223, 226–227, 233; capabilities, 99–100, 104–105, 224–225, 227–228; defense, 45, 193; espionage, 226; operations, 187, 190–191, 224, 226, 233; powers, 223, 225, 233; security, 45, 100, 269; space, 1, 12, 100, 162, 185, 189, 221–236, 276, 278, 280; sovereignty, 99; war, 26, 233; weapons, 218, 221, 224. See domains Czechoslovakia, 209, 211 data exchanges, 5, 14, 73–74, 208, 216 debris in space/space debris, 195, 227, 229 Declaration Assessment Team, 176 decoupling, 247–248, 283 deep fakes, 191 deglobalization, 249 demand side, 134, 137 demilitarization, 4, 33, 34, 41–42 Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), 11, 42, 46, 91, 95, 101–103, 106, 119, 126, 130(n14), 131–133, 136, 138, 141, 143, 145(n3), 155, 162, 175, 184(n24), 216, 222–223, 234, 245(n3), 240–242, 248, 250, 259, 273, 283 Deng Xiaoping, 93, 251(n9) Department of Defense (DOD), 58–60, 97, 100–101, 200(n10), 213, 257, 317 Department of State, 6, 58–59, 74, 96–98, 133–134, 317–318 détente, 21–22, 120–122

deterrence, 5, 8, 14(n8), 40, 56–57, 67, 68(n19), 81, 84–86, 92, 100, 104, 113–114, 117, 119, 123, 125–126, 142, 144, 170–171, 190, 196, 210, 221, 228, 258, 262, 266, 276, 280; by denial, 18, 28; extended, 19, 25, 27, 253, 268; integrated, 10, 27–28, 31, 51; mutual, 105, 115–116, 120–121, 124–125; by punishment, 18, 28; and strategic stability, 17–32; strategy, 274, 277, 279 DF-17 hypersonic boost-glide MRBM, 100, 215 DF-21 MRBM, 98, 100, 108(n55) DF-26 intermediate-range ballistic missile (IRBM), 100 DF-3a ballistic missiles, 98 direct-ascent antisatellite missile system, 99, 207, 230, 283 directed-energy weapon, 187, 195–196, 200(n10), 206, 213, 217; See also high-energy laser, high-powered microwave Discoverer XIV/CORONA satellite, 153 disinformation, 26, 191, 223, 243 doctrine, organization, training, materiel, leadership and education, personnel, and facilities (DOTMLPF), 200(n16) doctrine, organization, training, materiel, leadership and education, personnel, facilities, and interoperability (DOTMLPF-I), 200(n16) DOD. See Department of Defense (DOD) domains, 8, 10, 28, 104, 281–282; arms control, 11, 111; cyber, 11–12, 99, 104, 185, 189, 191, 193, 223–226, 230, 233–234; military, 18, 189; new, 8, 11–12, 14, 23, 25–27, 31, 282; nuclear, 278; space, 11, 12, 99, 227–233, 254; strategic, 1, 162; warfighting, 28 DOTMLPF. See doctrine, organization, training, materiel, leadership and education, personnel, and facilities (DOTMLPF) DOTMLPF-I. See doctrine, organization, training, materiel, leadership and education, personnel, facilities, and interoperability (DOTMLPF-I) double zero proposal, 123 DPRK. See Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) Dreadnought-class submarines, 84 dual-track decision, 20, 123, Dunn, Lewis, 254

Index Egypt, 125, 184(n24) Eighteen Nation Disarmament Committee (ENDC), 135, 171 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 35, 153 emerging technologies, 8, 12, 23, 25, 31, 46, 178, 181, 183, 185–201, 213, 317 ENDC. See Eighteen Nation Disarmament Committee (ENDC) enforcement, 9, 34, 44, 136, 157–158, 178–180, 230, 255, 274–275, 277, 280 enrichment, 36, 96, 138 Epstein, Gerald, 178 escalation dominance, 123, 268 espionage, 12, 153, 222–223, 225–226, 228, 233, 235(n5); cyber, 226 Ethiopia, 133 EU. See European Union (EU) Eurasian Economic Union, 243 European Commission, 247 European Union (EU), 74, 222, 228, 235(n23), 241, 243 executive branch, 58, 61, 63, 94 executive office of the president, 58 export control regimes, 96, 139, 203, 205, 208, 212, 218 export controls, 6, 33, 43–44, 93, 97–98, 205–206, 217–218, 261 extended deterrence, 19, 23, 25, 27, 253, 268 F-35 fighters, 86 F/A-18 Super Hornet, 86 false-flagging, 191 fast-breeder reactors, 96 fatwa, 260 Favaro, Marina, 12, 185, 317 Feinstein, Dianne, 64 Feith, Douglas, 54 Finland, 144 first strike, 18, 20, 22, 26, 52, 56–57, 115, 122, 124, 188, 191 Fischerkeller, Michael, 225 fissile material, 35–36, 96, 102, 125, 136–138, 141, 235(n3), 257 Fissile Material Cut-Off Treaty (FMCT), 43, 96, 125, 141–142 Flank Agreement, 211 flexible response, 20, 28, 210 FMCT. See Fissile Material Cut-Off Treaty (FMCT) Foerster, Schuyler, 10, 17, 317 Ford, Christopher, 229

323

Ford, Gerald R., 120–122 foresight methods, 190, 197 Former Soviet Republics, 29, 39, 256–258, 261, 264 fractional orbital bombardment system (FOBS), 215 France, 38, 46, 83–85, 87, 94, 96, 114, 129, 130(n10), 132, 135, 151, 169, 170, 184(n21), 184(n28), 214, 224, 240, 243 Franco-German Nuclear Disarmament Verification, 87 Futter, Andrew, 188 G7. See Group of 7 (G7) G8. See Group of 8 (G8) gang of four, 4, 64 GBI. See ground-based interceptor (GBI) general and complete disarmament, 4, 96, 117, 136, 277 General Orders No. 100, 183(n5) Geneva, 63–64, 73, 123–124, 175, 177, 225, 228 Geneva Protocol, 34, 133, 167, 174 Georgia, 24, 30, 211–212, 241–242, 271(n35), 283 Gerasimov, Valery, 276 Germany, 86, 123, 132, 169, 184(n21), 235(n2), 247, 277 GGE (Group of Governmental Experts). See United Nations (UN) Gibbons, Rebecca Davis, 11, 131, 317 GLCM. See ground-launched cruise missile (GLCM) Global Initiative to Combat Nuclear Terrorism, 43 global positioning system (GPS), 99, 205 Global Protection System, 258 Goldman, Emily, 225 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 21–22, 39, 94, 123–124, 209–210 Gottemoeller, Rose, 64, 69(n32) GPS. See global positioning system (GPS) great power competition, 23, 27 ground-based interceptor (GBI), 79 ground-launched cruise missile (GLCM), 20, 39, 55, 78, 81–82, 95, 123 Group of 7 (G7), 138, 264 Group of 8 (G8), 44, 182, 247, 261, 263–266; Global Partnership Against the Spread of Weapons and Materials of Mass Destruction, 44, 261 Gulf War, 35, 136 Guterres, António, 181

324

Index

the Hague, 175, 177 Hague Code of Conduct Against Ballistic Missile Proliferation (HCOC), 44, 98, 105 Hague Declaration, 173 Halperin, Morton, 3, 10, 14(n7), 19, 115 hard law, 198 Harknett, Richard, 225 HCM. See hypersonic cruise missile (HCM) HCOC. See Hague Code of Conduct Against Ballistic Missile Proliferation (HCOC) HEL. See high-energy laser (HEL) HET. See human enhancement HGV. See hypersonic glide vehicle (HGV) high-energy laser (HEL), 196, 200(n10), 206, 217 high-powered microwave (HPM), 196, 200(n10), 206, 217 Hiroshima, 75, 132 Hong Kong, 24, 242, 245 horizontal proliferation, 118, 145(n4) Hot Line Agreement, 62, 120 HPM. See high-powered microwave (HPM) human enhancement, 185, 188, 190, 193–195, 199; technologies (HET), 193 human security, 142 humanitarian disarmament, 4; movement, 45 Hungary, 169, 251(n4) Hussein, Saddam, 136 hybrid warfare, 181 hypersonic cruise missile (HCM), 196, 205, 214–215 hypersonic glide vehicle (HGV), 68(n28), 196, 205, 214–216 hypersonic weapon, 26, 82, 195–197, 205, 213–216, 218 IAEA. See International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) IC. See Intelligence Community (IC) ICBM. See intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) ICT. See information and computer technologies (ICT) IMS. See International Monitoring System (IMS) India, 42, 46, 53–54, 92, 94–95, 114, 117, 119, 125, 129, 131–132, 137, 139,

141, 179, 184(n22), 214, 221–222, 229–230, 249, 259, 273 Indo-Pacific, 215, 248, 268 Indo-Pacific Economic Framework, 248 INF Treaty. See Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF Treaty) information age, 25 information and computer technologies (ICT), 1, 100, 224, 233 information technology, 26 innovation boom, 204 INSS. See Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) Institute for National Security Studies (INSS), 318, Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy, 190 integrated deterrence, 10, 27, 28, 31, 51 Intelligence Community (IC), 60–61, 67(n5) intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR), 26, 99, 206 intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), 21, 40, 52, 56–57, 68(n17), 69(n41), 72–73, 75, 77–81, 89(n21), 89(n38), 92, 95, 98, 100, 102, 104, 121–122, 124, 127, 129, 150, 205, 214, 279; silo, 72, 89(n49), 100–101, 153 Interim National Security Guidance, 266 intermediate-range ballistic missile (IRBM), 20, 21, 55, 65, 71–72, 79, 80, 82–84, 86–87, 100, 122, 156, 210 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF Treaty), 8, 21, 38–39, 47, 55, 63, 65, 67(n12), 72, 82, 87, 95, 103, 109(n73), 122–124, 126–127, 155–157, 162, 166(n42), 179, 210, 245, 251(n3), 273, 282 International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), 35, 43, 93, 96, 101, 135–138, 148, 151–152, 156–157, 165(n17), 257, 260, 269 International Convention for the Suppression of Acts of Nuclear Terrorism, 43 International Criminal Court, 74 International Data Centre, 141, 155 International Monitoring System (IMS), 141, 154 International Partnership Against Impunity for the Use of Chemical Weapons, 184(n28)

Index International Partnership for Nuclear Disarmament Verification (IPNDV), 87, 163 Interregnum, 13, 274–282 IPNDV. See International Partnership for Nuclear Disarmament Verification (IPNDV) IRBM. See intermediate-range ballistic missile (IRBM) Iran, 36, 46, 62, 95–96, 125, 134, 136, 138, 141, 143, 162, 174, 179, 216, 222–223, 227, 233–234, 235(n3), 241–242, 244, 250, 259, 283 Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act, 62 Iran-Iraq War, 133, 138, 170 Iraq, 27, 35–36, 125, 134, 136, 138, 152, 174, 213, 240–241, 244, 259–260 Ireland’s nonproliferation proposals, 135 Iskander-M missile, 76, 86 ISR. See intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) Israel, 36, 42, 119, 125, 131–132, 141, 184(n24) Istanbul Commitments, 211 Italy, 133, 169 Japan, 91, 97, 102–103, 106, 133, 142, 144, 154, 169, 214, 222, 229, 242, 258, 277 JCG. See Joint Consultative Group (JCG) JCPOA. See Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) Johnson, Lyndon B., 120 Joint Chiefs of Staff, 60, 69(n34) Joint Compliance Inspection Commission, 158 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), 62, 143, 233, 244, 250 Joint Consultative Group (JCG), 157, 158, 211 Joint Investigative Mechanism, 176 Kalibr sea-launched cruise missile, 81, 82 Kargil War, 221 Kartchner, Kerry M., 13, 253, 317 Kazakhstan, 36, 38, 44, 240 keep-out zone, 231 Kelleher, Catherine, 261 Kennedy, John F., 120, 131 Khan, A. Q., 259 Khrushchev, Nikita, 221 Kim Jong Nam, 175 Kim Jong-Un, 102, 175

325

Kinzhal air-launched ballistic missile, 78, 81, 201, 215 Kissinger, Henry, 64, 115–116, 120 Koch, Susan, 259 Korean War, 91 Kosovo War, 241 Kyl, Jon, 63–64 landmines, 34, 45, 47, 65, 204, 208, 222; antipersonnel, 45, 142 Larsen, Jeffrey A., 1, 317 laser guidance systems, 204–205 laser-guided bombs, 213 Latin America, 139, 248 Latin American NWFZ. See Treaty of Tlatelolco launch on warning, 105 Lavrov, Sergey, 83 Law of Armed Conflict, 223–224 LAWS. See lethal autonomous weapon systems (LAWS) League of Nations, 277 lethal autonomous weapon systems (LAWS), 206, 217 Libya, 36, 44, 46, 243, 259 Limited Test Ban Treaty (LTBT), 19, 37, 120, 130(n13), 140–141, 154 Lincoln, Abraham, 169 Lippmann, Walter, 277 Lisbon Protocol, 39 Locarno Treaty, 277 London Treaty, 277 low-earth orbit, 80, 229, 233 LTBT. See Limited Test Ban Treaty (LTBT) machine learning, 163, 204 MAD. See mutual assured destruction (MAD) malware, 226–227 massive retaliation, 20 MBFR. See Mutual and Balanced Force Reductions (MBFR) medium-range ballistic missile (MRBM), 100 Medvedev, Dmitry, 126, 247, 276 Mexico, 69(n50), 139 Middle East, 6, 143, 242–243, 261, 269 Middle East nuclear-weapon-free zone, 41 Mig-31, 78 Mine Ban Treaty. See Ottawa Convention Minsk Agreement, 214 MIRV. See multiple independently targetable reentry vehicle (MIRV)

326

Index

Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR), 44, 94, 98, 138–139, 205, 207, 212, 217 MK-41 launchers, 79 Mongolia, 41, 140 monitoring, 26, 37, 54, 59–60, 66, 73, 82, 94, 117, 124, 135, 141, 147–166, 176, 191, 193, 195, 221, 229–230, 264; intrusive, 77; regime 12, 31, 147–166 Moodie, Amanda, 12, 167, 318 Moodie, Michael, 12, 167, 318 Moon Agreement, 140 moratorium, testing, 37, 94–96, 230, 282, 283 Moscow Treaty. See Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty MRBM. See medium-range ballistic missile (MRBM) MTCR. See Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR) multiple independently targetable reentry vehicle (MIRV), 20–21, 26, 68(n20), 98, 121–122, 124–125, 127, 129 Musk, Elon, 229 Mutual and Balanced Force Reductions (MBFR), 21, 208–209 mutual assured destruction (MAD), 19–20, 278 Myanmar, 134 Nagasaki, 42, 75, 132 National Defense Strategy 2022, 27, 128 National Intelligence Council, 67(n4), 181 National Security Council (NSC), 58, 318 National Security Strategy 2018, 244 National Security Strategy 2022, 9, 128, 267 National Security Working Group, 63 national technical means (NTM), 37, 94, 121, 148, 150, 154, 163, 191, 193, 195, 226 NATO. See North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Navalny, Alexi, 175 near abroad, 243, 251(n12) Nelson, Amy J., 3, 12, 201(n28), 203, 318 nerve gas, 175 networked multilateralism, 181–183 New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty. See New START Treaty New START Treaty, 9, 23, 47, 57, 60, 62–63, 66, 71, 74–78, 80, 83, 85, 87,

95, 126, 128, 129(n8), 130(n17), 149–150, 154, 157, 159, 162, 164(n2), 166(n42), 166(n43), 216, 242, 245, 250, 273–276; extension of, 8, 65, 72–73, 85, 87, 128, 250; and hypersonic weapons, 216; negotiations, 40, 60, 62–63, 78, 125, 216; Report to Congress on Implementation of the New START Treaty, 62, 74; Russian suspension of participation in, 9, 40, 66, 71, 128, 164(n2), 250 new strategic equation, 276, 281 Next Generation Interceptor, 80 Nixon, Richard M., 34, 62, 120–122, 170 NNWS. See non-nuclear weapons states (NNWS) no-first use policy, 23, 92, 93, 103, 106, 174 Non-Aligned Movement, 174, 184(n27) non-nuclear weapons states (NNWS), 118–119, 135–136, 138, 142, 144, 193, 195–197, 221 non-proliferation, 44, 85, 100, 131, 143, 267 noninterference, 154, 266 nonstrategic nuclear weapons, 10, 47, 57, 71, 72, 75–77, 81, 86, 88, 89(n21), 258 norms, 7, 9–11, 33–34, 92–93, 100, 179, 180–181, 183, 191, 198, 224, 226, 230–232, 234, 265, 267, 269–270, 275, 278, 282; and cooperative security, 42–46; international, 254, 263, 266, 274; nonproliferation, 140, 266, 268 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), 8–9, 20–24, 27, 29–30, 38, 71–72, 74, 76–77, 79, 82, 82, 84–88, 92, 113, 122–124, 144, 158, 188, 200(n16), 209–211, 240–241, 243–244, 246, 251(n4), 255, 260–261, 283; Parliamentary Assembly, 85; Strategic Concept 2022, 85 North Korea. See Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) novel weapons, 11–12, 170, 175, 185, 188, 190, 194–195, 199, 203–220, 244 NPR. See Nuclear Posture Review 2010; Nuclear Posture Review 2018; Nuclear Posture Review 2022 NPT. See Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) NSC. See National Security Council (NSC) NSG. See Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) NTM. See national technical means (NTM)

Index Nuclear Ban Treaty. See Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), 6, 11, 19, 36, 39–43, 46, 53, 71, 92–96, 101, 117–120, 130(n10), 131–132, 135–140, 142–144, 148, 150–152, 156–157, 171, 193, 196–197, 240, 243, 269, 275 Nuclear Planning Group, 84–85 Nuclear Posture Review 2010, 23, 60, 64 Nuclear Posture Review 2018, 266 Nuclear Posture Review 2022, 128 nuclear safeguards, 132–138, 165(n17) Nuclear Security Summit, 8, 44 Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG), 43, 96, 137–138, 146(n28), 146(n29) nuclear terrorism, 43, 261 Nuclear Weapons Ban Treaty. See Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) nuclear weapons complex, 62, 279, 282 nuclear weapon states (NWS), 36, 38, 41–42, 46, 92, 118–119, 130(n10), 135, 142–144, 145(n3), 165(n17), 193, 195–196, 243 nuclear weapons testing, 37, 43–44, 91, 93–94, 96, 101, 117, 120, 125, 130(n13), 140–141, 154, 282 Nuclear-Weapon-Free Zone (NWFZ), 3, 33, 41–43, 139–140, 258. See also Treaty of Bangkok; Treaty of Pelindaba; Treaty of Rarotonga; Treaty of Tlatelolco Nunn-Lugar program, 44 NWFZ. See Nuclear-Weapon-Free Zone (NWFZ) NWS. See nuclear weapon states (NWS) Obama, Barack, 4, 8, 23, 40, 44, 53, 55, 60, 62, 64–65, 118, 125–126, 251(n11), 276 objects of verification (OOV), 150, 158 on-site inspection, 9, 12, 21, 37, 39, 66, 73–74, 78, 124, 147–148, 150, 152, 155–156, 158–163, 164(n2), 166(n43), 208–209, 212, 226 OOV. See object of verification (OOV) OPCW. See Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) Open Skies Treaty, 8, 42, 153, 208, 212, 245, 258

327

Operation Desert Storm, 213 Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), 35, 97, 148, 151, 175–177, 182; OPCW Conference of States Parties, 175–176 Ottawa Convention, 4, 45, 142, 258, 271(n26) outer space, 12, 99, 140, 154, 162, 221–236, 276, 278, 280, 282 Outer Space Treaty, 41, 140, 146(n35), 227–228 Pakistan, 42, 46, 53, 67(n4), 67(n5), 94, 96, 98, 119, 125, 131–132, 141, 221, 259, 273 Partial Test Ban Treaty. See Limited Test Ban Treaty Peaceful Nuclear Explosions Treaty, 37 People’s Liberation Army (PLA), 98, 99; Rocket Force 104, 105 Perkovich, George, 12, 221, 318 Permanent Five (P5) members of the UN Security Council. See United Nations (UN) Pershing II missile, 20–21, 124 PGM. See precision-guided munition (PGM) Philippines, 243 Pifer, Steven, 11, 71, 318 pivot to Asia, 242, 251(n11) PLA. See People’s Liberation Army (PLA) plutonium, 96, 132, 134, 137, 141–142 PNI. See Presidential Nuclear Initiative (PNI) Podvig, Pavel, 214 POE. See point of entry (POE) point of entry (POE), 159, 162 Poland, 79–80, 169, 251(n4) portal monitoring, 156 Poseidon nuclear-powered underwater drone, 78 Post-Cold War era, 6–7, 242, 254, 259 Prague Initiative, 40, 53, 65 precision-guided munition (PGM), 75, 81, 95, 205, 213–214, 218 Presidential Nuclear Initiative (PNI), 39, 125, 240, 258 Pressler Amendment, 53 preventive defense, 256, 270(n3) Project Kuiper, 229 Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI), 44, 182, 261, 263, 265–266, 271(n34) Project Prometheus, 185

328

Index

Propaganda, 191 PSI. See Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI) Putin, Vladimir, 24, 29–30, 40, 73–74, 76, 78, 80–82, 84, 126, 128, 144, 213, 225, 241, 244–247, 250, 271(n35), 274–278, 280–282 Quad Nuclear Verification Partnership, 87 Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, 246 quantum technologies, 187, 192–193 Rafael aircraft, 85 RB-29 Superfortress, 154 RCA. See riot control agents (RCA) Reagan, Ronald, 53, 57, 63, 65, 68(n31), 69(n41), 72, 122–125, 162 remotely piloted vehicle (RPV), 205 reprocessing, 97; technologies, 137–138 Republic of China (ROC). See Taiwan revolution in military affairs, 187, 200(n10), 200(n15) Reykjavik Summit, 124 riot control agents (RCA), 165(n11), 171, 175 Roberts, Brad, 9, 13, 31, 273, 318 robotics, 194, 204, 213 rogue states, 7, 241–243, 259–260, 265 Romania, 79, 89(n38) RPV. See remotely piloted vehicle (RPV) RS-28 Sarmat heavy ICBM, 78, 80, 127 rules of engagement (ROE), 223–224 rules of the road, 2, 10, 13, 31, 42, 45, 99, 227, 282 Rush-Bagot Agreement, 41 Russia-China Joint Statement on International Relations, 24, 32(n16) Russian Military Doctrine 2010, 241 Russian Military Doctrine 2014, 79 Russkiy Mir, 24 Ryabkov, Sergey, 78, 83, 89(n24), 276 Safeguard antiballistic missile system, 62 SALT. See Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, and Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT) Samson, Victoria, 227, 231 sanctions, 74, 92, 97–98, 101, 122, 136, 143, 162, 233–234, 242, 247–248 Santoro, David, 13, 239, 318 satellite, 37, 80, 99, 105, 121, 148, 152–154, 164, 165(n24), 195, 206–207, 215, 227–232, 235(n5)

Saudi Arabia, 46, 98, 143 Saunders, Phillip C., 11, 91, 318 Scarborough Shoal, 243 Schelling, Thomas, 3, 10, 14(n7), 19, 115, 180, 278 Schulte, Paul, 179, 182 Schulz, George, 64 Scud missile, 265 SDI. See Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) Seabed Treaty, 41 secure second strike, 56–57 security cooperation, 54, 63, 255 security trilemma, 250 September 11, 6, 241, 260, 263 Sharp, Jane, 209, 212 Six-Party Talks 2005, 101–102 Skripal, Sergei, 175 SLBM. See submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM) SM-3 Block IIA interceptor missile, 79–80 smallpox,168 Smith, James M., 10, 33, 318 Smith, Shane, 1, 318 Social Democratic Party (SPD), 86 soft law, 198 SORT. See Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty (SORT) South Africa, 35–36, 46, 132, 139, 145(n3), 249 South China Sea, 24, 242–245 Southeast Asian Nuclear-Weapon-Free Zone Treaty. See Treaty of Bangkok South Ossetia, 24, 212 South Pacific Nuclear-Weapon-Free Zone Treaty. See Treaty of Rarotonga South Sudan, 131, 184(n24) Southwest Asia, 6, 269 Soviet Union (USSR), 6, 17, 19–24, 26–27, 32(n9), 34–38, 42, 44, 46, 53, 55–57, 62, 72, 91–92, 101, 114, 119, 123–124, 129(n2), 132–133, 135–136, 140, 153, 155, 157, 165(n26), 169–170, 175, 208–210, 249, 251(n3), 251(n12), 253, 256–257, 259, 261, 278 SpaceX, 229 SPD. See Social Democratic Party (SPD) Special Verification Commission, 157 SS-18/R-36 Satan ICBM, 56, 124 SS-20 missile, 20–21, 123–124 SSBN. See submarine, ballistic missile, nuclear powered (SSBN)

Index Starlink, 229 START. See Strategic Arms Reduction Talks, and Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) Stent, Angela, 24 Stewart, Mallory, 66 Stockholm Agreement, 21 Stoltenberg, Jens, 85 Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, and Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT), 19, 22, 38, 47, 52, 62, 72, 120–121, 129, 154, 251(n3); SALT I Interim Agreement, 38, 52, 62, 121, 154; SALT II Treaty, 21, 38, 58, 69(n34), 121–122, 129(n8) Strategic Arms Reduction Talks, and Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START), 21, 39, 47, 52, 57, 95, 122, 155, 240; START II Treaty, 21, 39, 40, 54, 56, 125, 129(n8); START III Treaty 40, 125, 129(n8). See also New START Treaty Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), 72, 123 strategic dialogue, 261, 279 Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty (SORT), 39–40, 47, 54–55, 67(n8), 78, 126 strategic stability, 2–3, 7, 9–11, 17–32, 38, 51–53, 55, 56–58, 64–65, 71, 74, 87, 115, 122, 124–125, 154, 214, 268–270, 271(n41), 276, 278, 280; Strategic Stability Dialogue, 66, 73, 85 submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM), 40, 72–73, 75, 77, 79–80, 84, 89(n21), 121–122, 124, 150, 279 submarine, ballistic missile, nuclear powered (SSBN), 121 Summit for Democracy, 249 supply chain, 26, 247–249 supply side, 134, 137 swarming, 196, 206, 216–217 Sweden, 144 synthetic biology, 177, 194–195 Syria, 27, 35–36, 45, 81, 133–134, 169, 175–176, 179, 182, 213, 243, 259, 274, 283 taboo, 22, 42–43, 268 tacit bargaining, 226 Taepo Dong-2 missile, 101 Taiwan, 24–25, 29, 91, 113, 240, 242, 245–246, 277 target cycle, 192

329

technological determinism, 135 THAAD interceptor missile, 80 third offset strategy, 213 Tiananmen Square, 240 Tibet, 242 Threshold Test Ban Treaty (TTBT), 37, 121, 140 throw weight, 57, 68(n26), 121 Thucydides, 168, 169 TLE. See treaty-limited equipment (TLE) Tomahawk sea-launched cruise missile, 82 Tornado fighter-bombers, 86 TPNW. See Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) transparency, 7, 22, 26, 31, 37, 51–52, 54, 77, 79, 86–87, 104–105, 129, 148, 153, 157, 162, 164, 172, 179, 181, 192, 199, 203, 207–208, 211–212, 216, 228, 230, 257, 263–265, 269, 275 Treaty of Bangkok, 41, 140 treaty-limited equipment (TLE), 150, 161, 211 Treaty of Pelindaba, 41, 140, 258 Treaty on the Prevention of the Placement of Weapons in Outer Space and of the Threat or Use of Force Against Outer Space Objects, 228 Treaty on the Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, Including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies. See Outer Space Treaty Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), 4, 42–43, 45–46, 65, 69(n50), 118, 142–143, 196, 271(n26) Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons in Latin America and the Caribbean. See Treaty of Tlatelolco Treaty of Rarotonga, 41, 140 Treaty of Tlatelolco, 41, 139, 140 Treaty of Versailles, 277 Trident D5 missiles, 84 trigger list, 43, 137 Triomphant-class ballistic missile submarines, 84 Truman, Harry S., 117 Trump, Donald, 8, 30, 55, 57, 65–66, 82, 83, 95, 98, 102, 126–128, 143, 179, 244, 266 TTBT. See Threshold Test Ban Treaty (TTBT) Turkey, 46

330

Index

UAS. See unmanned aerial system (UAS/drone) UAV. See unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) Ukraine, 11, 25, 36, 38, 40, 44, 66, 74, 76, 81–82, 85, 87, 126, 139, 203, 205, 208, 211–212, 214–215, 217, 234, 240–241, 253, 258, 272(n42), 275–276, 318; invasion of, 2, 8, 24, 29–30, 32(n16), 66, 71, 73, 86, 113, 128, 243, 245–248, 250, 257, 270; war, 11, 29, 71, 73, 74, 76, 85, 143, 144, 218, 266, 267, 277 UNGA (UN General Assembly). See United Nations (UN) United Nations (UN); Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space, 230; First Committee on Disarmament and International Security, 99; General Assembly (UNGA), 135, 228, 235, 236; Group of Governmental Experts (GGE), 100, 224, 228; Institute for Disarmament Research, 214; P5, 87, 260, 268, 271(n26), 280; Security Council, 35, 43, 87, 91, 101, 136, 158, 176, 179, 182, 234, 240, 250, 260, 269, 277, 280; Security Council Resolution (UNSCR), 278; Security Council Resolution 1540 (UNSCR 1540), 43, 182, 261, 264, 265; Special Commission on Iraq (UNSCOM), 35 United Arab Emirates (UAE), 46 United Kingdom (UK), 37–38, 46, 83, 96, 132, 135–136, 140–141, 151, 169–171, 183(n13), 224, 228–229, 233, 240, 243, 246, 258 unmanned aerial system (UAS/drone), 196, 205–206, 216–218 unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), 163, 205, 207 UNSCOM (UN Special Commission on Iraq). See United Nations (UN) UNSCR (UN Security Council Resolution). See United Nations (UN) Uranium, 96, 141, 152; enriched, 67(n4), 132, 134, 141 US renunciation of BW, 170 USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics). See Soviet Union (USSR) US Strategic Command, 60, 89(n49)

Vanguard-class ballistic missile submarine, 845 Vela Hotel satellite, 37 Velvet Revolution, 209 Verbruggen, Maaike, 186 verification regime, 26, 35, 37, 66, 148, 175, 209, 212 vertical proliferation, 119, 145(n4) Vienna Documents, 21, 208, 212 Vietnam War, 171, 213 Votkinsk, 124, 156 Warsaw Pact, 20–21, 42, 209, 210 Washington Naval Treaty, 277 Wassenaar Arrangement, 43, 139, 205, 206–207, 212 WC-135 Constant Phoenix, 154 weapons of mass destruction (WMD), 5–7, 11, 22, 41, 43–45, 91, 94, 130(n9), 131–132, 134–137, 140, 145, 167, 182, 203, 207, 212–213, 227, 229, 255, 257, 259–261, 263–265, 268, 270, 271(n34), 272(n42) Weeden, Brian, 227, 231 Williams, Heather, 187 WMD. See weapons of mass destruction (WMD) Woolf, Amy F., 10, 51, 318 Work, J. D., 226 World Bank, 249 World Disarmament Conference, 277 World Trade Organization (WTO), 242, 244 WTO. See World Trade Organization (WTO) Wunderlich, Carmen, 179 Xi Jinping, 24, 76, 243, 246, 252(n19), 274, 277, 279–280 Xinjiang, 242 Yars/RS-24 ICBMs, 77 yellow fever, 168 Yeltsin, Boris, 39, 125–126, 133, 170, 183(n13) Zala, Benjamin, 188 Zangger Committee, 43, 93, 96, 137

About the Book

IS THERE A ROLE FOR TRADITIONAL ARMS CONTROL IN TODAY’S increasingly complex security environment? What new concepts and mechanisms are needed to make it valuable as a tool for managing competition and conflict amid the rise of new strategic domains and the spread of new technologies and weapons? Addressing these critical questions, the authors of Arms Control at a Crossroads review the foundations of arms control and cooperative security, highlight the perspectives of the major nuclear powers, and assess current initiatives and future potential for meeting the challenges ahead. Jeffrey A. Larsen is research professor of national security affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School and president of the Larsen Consulting Group. Shane Smith is associate professor of political science and director of the Institute for National Security Studies at the US Air Force Academy.

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