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The Future of Strategic Arms Control

Daniel Saarinen

dsaarinen@charter.net

The bi-polar international system that gave rise to the strategic arms control

agreements no longer exists. At the very minimum, this means that any arms control

regime built around the bi-polar Cold War system of international relations is doomed to

failure. START and INF are such treaties, and have very limited usefulness in the multi-

polar nuclear armed world of today. In addition to this, the ongoing world wide

economic depression does not allow the resources for any party to conduct a robust

armaments building program. Leaders would have to justify imposing forms of

economic austerity on the populations of their countries in order to conduct nuclear arms

building programs.

Many of the arguments being made about the absolute necessity of arms control

assume that the natural state of things is some sort of arms race, and that all of the parties

involved have unlimited, unencumbered national resources to devote to such schemes.

No account is taken of the political and strategic objectives of the countries involved, in

other words it is pure determinism. Observers of political economy notice right away

that this is not the case in the real world. There are real limitations to what can and

cannot be accomplished by governments in the real world. It is not a simple matter of the

leadership decreeing that there will be 1,000 new heavy throw weight ICBM’s, carrying
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50 MARV’s each. The productive resources have to be present before it can be

contemplated, and the current world situation precludes this.

In the United States, there are millions of homeless people and a real

unemployment rate of over 22%. It is unthinkable for President Obama to suddenly

propose a gigantic nuclear weapons build up involving new SSBNs and ICBMs, costing

over $1 Trillion total. In Russia, Prime Minister Putin and President Medvedev are using

their foreign exchange reserves for the Central Bank of Russia to conduct support

operations for the Ruble to counter attacks from American and British hedge funds. In

addition to this, most of Russia looks like Detroit and has not recovered from the damage

inflicted by the IMF and the Oligarchs in the 1990’s. They have no unencumbered

resources to devote to ostentatious arms programs. It is all they can do to modernize and

service what they have. The development programs they are working on involve retiring

the older weapons, and do not involve a large numerical increase.

START Extension is Likely

START has additional political and psychological elements to it, and has the

greatest chance of all the arms control proposals of being relevant in the future.

START is going to benefit from bureaucratic inertia in the upcoming process, and looks

like it will be continued in some meaningful way, though the details are not clear at this

time. A generation of civil servants and politicians has operated in a strategic

environment dominated by START. The process of developing the protocols to the treaty

(the back matter) took many years of negotiations, and the institutional value of the
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verification methods is high. It acts as a security blanket for policy makers and

bureaucrats who do not spend a serious amount of time thinking about strategic issues. It

is only a tiny group of scholars and professionals that study strategic systems and thought

that can consider a world without arms control as a possibility. Without the panacea of

arms control, many elements in the United States immediately descend into

eschatological forms of thought.

Strategic arms control only became possible after confidence and security

building measures of the political and economic variety had reached a high level of

development. In short, arms control did not decrease tension between the Super Powers

during the Cold War. After the relationship between the United States and the USSR

became normalized, and the danger was already decreasing, it became possible to

conduct fruitful strategic arms control negotiations.

One practical reason that START will be kept is that the verification protocols

will be useful in the foundation of any future agreements that may or may not involve the

smaller powers. At this point in time it is only marginally useful for the Moscow Treaty,

and the Moscow Treaty should most likely be trashed and replaced anyway if any of the

parties are serious about arms control. The thing that makes the most sense for future

treaties is to use terminology that lends itself to the START verification protocols, and

not create new language that makes the START verification protocols not match up

properly.

One thing that cuts both ways is that if there were necessarily going to be an arms

race the moment START ends, it would make sense that both parties would be holding

their arsenals near the 6,000 limit. This is not the case, and both parties are under the
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treaty limit by a large margin at this time. This indicates that there is no desire to build

large numbers of new weapons, and if START ended nothing crazy would happen. On

the other hand, since both parties are so far under the limit they have nothing to lose from

continuing the stability that the treaty promises. These facts cause the author to believe

that only some extraordinary event could interrupt the inertia of START.

INF is Problematic

The Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty has a much more problematic

future than START does. Most of the nuclear powers in the world posses Intermediate-

Range delivery systems, with large numbers of long range systems concentrated in the

hands of the US and Russia. For the most part, these emerging nuclear powers are not

capable of striking the continental United States. Russia on the other hand has many

powers near it that possess weapons capable of striking important targets deep inside

Russia. Regardless of the intentions, capability is what matters because nations have no

permanent allies, only permanent interests.

This means that there are seriously diverging interests for Russia and the United

States on this issue. America would like the treaty to continue on as is, while Russia is

interested in dragging all of the other small nuclear powers into a future INF regime. The

smaller nuclear powers themselves have no motivation to be dragged into something that

will restrict their military activities, and even lock in disadvantages in certain cases. This

impasse means that INF will likely die at some opportune point when maximum political

impact can be made by abandoning it unless something very significant is given to

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Russia. Unless some way can be found to force other countries into INF, the security

situation of Russia will continue to degrade around their Southern perimeter.

Using the threat of NATO rapidly rebuilding the types of weapons

decommissioned by INF is not credible. Russia would easily call this bluff. It simply

isn’t serious to suggest that Germany and Italy would want to host new GLCM’s and

something like the Pershing II’s. The United States would have to dredge up a deranged

puppet like Saakashvili of Georgia in order to find someone willing to have the Russian

nuclear crosshairs pointing at them, and the mental instability of these types of puppets

precludes the dual-key arrangement system that was such a great tool of brinkmanship.

Conclusion

The key to strategic stability in the world is the same as it has always been, and

artificial treaties and formal mechanisms do not contribute to security in any significant

way. Confidence and security building measures actually are useful, but the real way to

progress lies in politics, diplomacy and trade. Clearly articulated logical strategies, and

respect for the borders and interests of other powers is a much better method of achieving

stability and prosperity in the world than lawyering in Vienna.

Strategic arms control will remain a force in international relations precisely

because it offers such tempting promises about peace and stability. Strategic arms

control will fail to deliver peace and stability to the world because war is not about the

weapons used, it is about advancing the political interests of those who start the wars.