Arms Control

IV

Control of the Means for Mass Destruction

After World War II ended in 1945, considerable support again developed for arms control and for alternatives to military conflict in international relations. The United Nations (UN) Charter was designed to permit a supranational agency to enforce peace, avoiding many of the weaknesses of the League of Nations covenant. Thus, Article 11 of the charter stated that the General Assembly could consider the general principle of disarmament and the regulation of armaments. Article 26 required the Security Council to submit plans for a system of armament regulation. Article 47 established a military staff committee to assist the Security Council in this task.

A

Atomic Arms Race

The development of the atomic bomb by the United States toward the end of World War II brought with it the capability of devastating whole civilizations (see Nuclear Weapons). While the United States still maintained a monopoly on nuclear weapons, it made overtures in the UN for the control and elimination of atomic energy for military purposes. In June 1946, American representative Bernard Baruch presented a plan to the UN Atomic Energy Commission, calling for the abolition of nuclear weapons, international control over the processing of nuclear materials, full sharing of all scientific and technological information concerning atomic energy, and safeguards to ensure that atomic energy would be used only for civilian purposes. The government of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) vetoed the Baruch Plan in the Security Council, objecting to the UN’s authority over disarmament and citing the domination of that body by the United States and Western Europe.

In 1949 the USSR exploded an atomic weapon of its own, ending the U.S. monopoly. The possibility of a nuclear war was now present, because relations between the USSR and the West were tense (see Cold War). Both the United States and the USSR were engaged in a race to develop thermonuclear (hydrogen) devices, which have many times the destructive power of atomic bombs. These weapons raised the possibility of ending all life on Earth in all-out war. After 1954, when the USSR exploded its first hydrogen bomb, the primary concern of arms control was to reduce nuclear arsenals and prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons technology. See also Nuclear Weapons Proliferation.

B

Agreements Limiting Nuclear Weapons

In 1957 the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) was established to oversee the development and spread of nuclear technology and materials. Two years later a treaty was negotiated to demilitarize the Antarctic and to prohibit the detonation or storage of nuclear weapons there. Both the United States and the USSR were among the signatories.

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In 1961 the UN General Assembly passed the Joint Statement of Agreed Principles for Disarmament Negotiations. It was followed in 1963 by a treaty that bound the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union not to test nuclear weapons in space, in the atmosphere, or under water. In 1967 another treaty between the same nations limited the military use of outer space to reconnaissance only. The deployment of nuclear weapons in orbit was expressly prohibited. A second treaty in 1967 banned nuclear weapons from Latin America.

One of the most important agreements on arms control was the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty of 1968. Signatories pledged to restrict the development, deployment, and testing of nuclear weapons to ensure that weapons, materials, or technology would not be transferred outside the five countries that then had nuclear weapons (Great Britain, France, China, the United States, and the USSR). In 1995 more than 170 countries agreed to permanently extend the treaty.

In the late 1960s the United States and the USSR initiated negotiations to regulate strategic weapon arsenals. These negotiations became known as the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks. The SALT I negotiations produced two important agreements in 1972: the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM Treaty), which drastically limited the establishment of defensive installations designed to shoot down ballistic missiles, and the Interim Agreement on the Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms. That same year the two superpowers also signed a treaty barring the testing of nuclear weapons on the ocean floor. The SALT II negotiations, which began in 1972, produced another treaty in 1979 that would limit the total number of U.S. and USSR missile launchers. After the USSR invaded Afghanistan in 1979, relations between the United States and the USSR rapidly deteriorated, and the U.S. Senate never ratified the treaty.

During the early 1980s controversy surrounded the placement by the United States of ballistic missiles on the territory of some of its Western European allies. Opposition to this within West Germany (which became part of the united Federal Republic of Germany in 1990) played a part in unseating Chancellor Helmut Schmidt in 1982. In 1983 U.S. antinuclear groups rallied to support a bilateral arms freeze, and U.S. Roman Catholic bishops approved a pastoral letter with a similar aim.

Controversy also surrounded the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) introduced by President Ronald Reagan in 1983. This research program for developing a defense against ballistic missiles appeared likely to undermine the ABM Treaty and challenged the assumptions of nuclear strategy since the beginning of the arms race. Since the late 1940s both deployment of nuclear arms by the superpowers and restrictions upon their use had been founded upon a theory of deterrence. According to this theory, the mutual likelihood of destruction in the event of a nuclear confrontation between the United States and the USSR preserved a delicate balance between the two superpowers. Stable relations between the nations required that they possess a roughly equal capacity to harm each other. Critics of SDI believed that efforts to construct a defense against nuclear weapons would destroy that balance and remove the conditions that prevented nuclear weapons from being used.

Despite these concerns, U.S.-Soviet arms negotiations resumed in 1985. At a summit meeting in Washington, D.C., in December 1987, President Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev signed the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF), which eliminated many nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles that had been deployed throughout Europe and the western Soviet Union. The treaty called for the destruction of all U.S. and Soviet missiles with ranges of about 500 to 5,500 km (about 300 to 3,400 mi) and established a 13-year program to verify compliance. The INF treaty was ratified by the U.S. Senate and the Soviet Presidium in May 1988.

C

Nonnuclear Weapons Agreements

Agreements to restrict or eliminate the production and use of biological and chemical weapons date back to the Geneva Convention of 1925. In 1972 the United States, the USSR, and most other nations signed a convention prohibiting development, production, and stockpiling of biological and chemical weapons. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Iraq’s use of chemical weapons against Iran during the Iran-Iraq War, and in subsequent attacks on its own Kurdish population, prompted renewed international efforts to ban the use of such weapons. In 1993 representatives from 160 nations approved the Chemical Weapons Convention. This agreement banned production, use, sale, and storage of all chemical weapons. It also mandated destruction of existing stocks of weapons by the year 2005. The United States ratified this convention in 1997, despite concerns about the proliferation of chemical weapons among nations such as Libya, Syria, Iraq, and North Korea that were not signatories to the agreement.

Conventional weapons such as booby traps and land mines also possess enormous destructive capacity. Land mines are especially troubling because they retain their destructive power for indefinite periods of time. The International Committee of the Red Cross estimates that nearly 2 million land mines around the world kill or maim nearly 15,000 civilians every year. Global sentiment against land mines led more than 120 countries to sign a treaty in 1997 banning the use, production, transfer, and stockpiling of the weapons. The effectiveness of the ban was called into question, however, by the refusal of major powers such as the United States, Russia, Turkey, and China to sign the agreement.

V

Cold War Aftermath

As the 1990s began, the United States and the USSR continued to negotiate arms-control accords. In May 1990 Gorbachev and U.S. president George H. W. Bush approved a treaty to end production and reduce stockpiles of chemical weapons. In 1991 the United States and the USSR signed the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START I), requiring both nations to reduce their strategic nuclear arsenals by about 25 percent. Both sides also moved to reduce conventional weapons and to continue phased withdrawal of their forces from Europe.

The collapse of the USSR in late 1991 raised complex new problems. The location of strategic nuclear weapons at multiple sites in Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Belarus raised concerns about the safety and security of these weapons. The U.S. Congress appropriated $1.5 billion to help these former Soviet states dismantle nuclear weapons and develop safe storage of weapons-grade nuclear materials. In 1992 these countries and the United States agreed to abide by the terms of the 1991 START I agreement.

In 1993 President Bush and Russian president Boris Yeltsin signed the START II treaty. This treaty called for the elimination of almost two-thirds of the nuclear warheads and all the multiple-warhead land-based missiles held by the United States and the former Soviet republics. In January 1996 the U.S. Senate ratified the START II treaty, but the Russian parliament never approved the accord. The START II treaty never went into effect, and in 2002 it was replaced by a new strategic arms reduction agreement known as the Treaty of Moscow.

In September 1996 leaders of the five major nuclear powers—the United States, Russia, China, France, and Britain—and dozens of other countries signed the landmark Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which banned most types of nuclear weapons testing. In order to take effect, however, the treaty must be formally approved, or ratified, by all nations believed to be capable of producing nuclear arms. In 1999 the U.S. Senate rejected the treaty by a vote of 51 to 48. China, Israel, Pakistan, and India are among other known nuclear powers that have not ratified the treaty.

The Senate vote against the treaty drew criticism from many U.S. allies, including Britain, Germany, and France. Senate opponents of the treaty argued that it was unenforceable, and they raised concerns that the treaty left open the possibility that rogue powers, such as Iraq or North Korea, could stockpile nuclear weapons, while at the same time it blocked the United States from upgrading its nuclear arsenal.

The Senate’s refusal to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty came on the heels of another setback. In mid-1998 India conducted a series of underground tests of nuclear weapons. About two weeks later, India’s archrival, Pakistan, detonated its own nuclear devices to demonstrate that it also possessed the powerful weapons. Both nations were internationally condemned for the tests. The United States, the International Monetary Fund, the European Union, and individual nations imposed economic sanctions on India and Pakistan in retaliation. Roughly a year later India tested a ballistic missile capable of delivering a nuclear warhead to any target within Pakistan, and days later Pakistan responded by testing a missile with similar capabilities. In 2002 tensions between the two nations over the disputed territory of Kashmīr raised fears of a nuclear war.

Meanwhile, the United States under the administration of President Bill Clinton reached an important arms control arrangement with North Korea in 1994. Although relations between the United States and North Korea remained tense, under the arrangement North Korea agreed to freeze all work on the infrastructure of reactors and reprocessing plants needed to produce plutonium for nuclear weapons. In exchange, Japan, South Korea, and the United States agreed to provide fuel oil and other economic aid to North Korea.

In 2002, however, this arrangement began to unravel. United States intelligence agencies reported that while being paid not to produce plutonium, there was evidence that North Korea might be at work to enrich uranium or to create the facilities needed to enrich uranium, the other way of obtaining nuclear weapons. That triggered North Korea’s inclusion in the “axis of evil” cited by U.S. president George W. Bush in his State of the Union speech in January 2002. The United States also responded to this intelligence report by halting supplies of fuel oil to North Korea. In October 2002 a U.S. official reported that a North Korean official had admitted that North Korea had a uranium enrichment program. North Korean officials, however, subsequently denied that North Korea had a covert program to develop nuclear weapons with enriched uranium. In January 2003 North Korea expelled United Nations (UN) monitors with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and withdrew from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. See also Nuclear Weapons Proliferation.

In April 2003 North Korea told U.S. officials that it possessed nuclear weapons, and in October 2003 North Korean officials said they were extracting plutonium from spent nuclear fuel rods to produce nuclear weapons. In November 2003 the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency repeated its belief that North Korea possessed at least one and possibly two nuclear bombs. However, other former and current U.S. intelligence officials said they were skeptical that North Korea had the technological know-how to produce nuclear weapons. In February 2004 North Korea entered talks with China, Japan, Russia, South Korea, and the United States to discuss an agreement that would end North Korea’s nuclear weapons program. In October 2006 North Korea tested a nuclear weapon. In February 2007 the six-nation talks resulted in an agreement in which North Korea pledged to shut down its main nuclear reactor at Yongbyon, which produces plutonium as a byproduct, in exchange for aid.

That agreement led to a subsequent North Korean pledge in October 2007 to disable its Yongbyon reactor by the end of the year in exchange for 950,000 metric tons of fuel oil or its equivalent in economic aid. North Korea also agreed to disclose all of its nuclear programs and promised not to transfer its “nuclear materials, technology, or know-how beyond its borders.”