The Arms Control Extinction

Treaties, restraints and the groups that championed them are dying off.

Part II of my new analysis published in the International Policy Journal of the Center for International Policy.

The die-off of nuclear arms control agreements began in December 2001. That is when President George W. Bush listened to long-time nuclear hawks, particularly John Bolton, and abandoned President Richard Nixon’s 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty. Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger had negotiated this accord with the Soviet Union as part of the SALT treaty, the first agreement that limited nuclear arms. They understood that limiting so-called “offensive weapons” required limiting defensive weapons, since the easiest and most obvious way to overcome an opponent’s defense is to overwhelm it with offense. 

Bolton and Bush rejected this logic. Bush withdrew the country from the ABM treaty, using the 9/11 attack as justification for a crash program to build a national missile defense system. 

Russian President Vladimir Putin acquiesced but opposed the withdrawal, arguing that it would compel Russia to develop new weapons. Even if the defenses didn’t work, Russia would have to assume they might work and build weapons to overcome them. 

The promised defenses did not work, do not work, and are unlikely to work in the future. Twenty-three years later, there is still no effective national missile defense nor any prospect of one in the foreseeable future, despite annual budgets of almost  $30 billion for missile defense and defeat programs. 

The weapons triggered by the killing of the treaty, however, do work. New Russian weapons are now coming on line, including powerful new missiles that can carry multiple warheads to overcome defenses, as well as exotic long-range cruise missiles, hypervelocity missiles and even nuclear-armed underwater drones that could theoretically evade any conceivable defense. Net result: no defense; greater offense.

The ABM Treaty was just the first to die. Bolton also convinced Bush in 2003 to leave the Agreed Framework with North Korea that had frozen that country’s nuclear program. He promised that pressure, not agreements, would bring North Korea to its knees. That, too, backfired. North Korea tested a nuclear weapon in 2006 and now has a small arsenal that it could launch against America on a growing fleet of long-range, highly-capable ballistic missiles. There is no defense that can stop them.

Over the past few years, Putin warmed to the idea of killing arms control. During the Trump administration, Putin and Trump withdrew from Reagan’s Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, the Open Skies Treaty (allowing each side to fly aircraft over the other’s territory to confirm compliance with military force reductions), treaties limiting conventional forces (the Conventional Forces in Europe treaty and the Vienna Documents), and, most recently, Putin has suspended Russia’s compliance with the New START treaty, negotiated by President Barack Obama as the successor to Ronald Reagan’s START treaties that began the sharp reductions in U.S. and Russian arsenals.

Destroying agreements that limit or eliminate weapons has consequences. The mutual withdrawals from the INF treaty allowed first the United States and now Russia to field new medium and intermediate-range missile systems. Russia in late November attacked Ukraine using a conventionally armed version of an intermediate-range ballistic missile that would have been prohibited by the treaty. Both countries plan to deploy such dual-capable systems in Europe in a revival of the Euro-missile crisis of the 1980s.

“There is no question that we are in a situation where the security system that was so laboriously built up in the Cold War years is being shredded,” says Rose Gottemoeller, who was the lead U.S. negotiator for New START.  

This security system is an interlocking network of treaties, export restrictions and security guarantees. This gives it great strength and global resiliency. It is also a weakness. 

Proliferation abhors a vacuum

As treaties are discarded and commitments withdrawn like pieces of a Jenga tower, the structure wobbles. The removal of just one critical accord could bring the entire regime crashing down. 

That piece could be the New START treaty. It is the last remaining treaty limiting the long-range nuclear weapons of Russia and the US, the two largest nuclear-armed states by far. The accord will expire in 2026. There are no talks between the two countries to replace the treaty. When it dies, the era of limiting and reducing strategic nuclear weapons that began in 1972 will come to an end.

The death of New Start could accelerate the destruction of the entire regime, including barriers to new nuclear-armed nations. 

The centerpiece of the regime is the 1968 nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, signed by all but four nations in the world.  At its core is the pledge by the nuclear-armed states “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.” Non-nuclear nations, in turn, promise not to develop nuclear weapons while those with the weapons move steadily to eliminate their stockpiles. 

Break that deal, and the treaty could collapse. First slowly, and then in a cascade of new programs in many nations. 

Swept away, too, would be the nuclear test ban treaty, which since 1994 has largely blocked the testing of new weapons. (The only nation to test a nuclear weapon in this century is North Korea.) Former Trump officials have already proposed in their Project 2025 manifesto that the nation must formally reject the test ban treaty and prepare to resume nuclear testing. China, having conducted only 50 nuclear tests compared to the over 1,000 conducted by the U.S., would relish the opportunity to test new designs. With renewed testing, the new arms race would explode, figuratively and literally.

The race has already begun. The United States leads the way with a sweeping replacement of all its weapons constructed during the 1980s. Over the next decade, America will spend over $750 billion on brand new nuclear-armed submarines, bombers, missiles and warheads. That is just a down payment on programs that will cost trillions of dollars over the next thirty years. 

Russia and China are racing to keep up. Each nation sees the others as the problem. U.S. security leaders, for example, refer to China as “the pacing threat” as they urge the production of more nuclear weapons. China sees it as the other way around. Three nuclear armed states border in South Asia, where India and Pakistan have their own regional arms race. Each of the nine nuclear-armed states is building more and newer nuclear weapons.

Trump’s Project 2025 recommendations would substantially increase these risks and costs. Unlike other generalized calls for more weapons, this is a detailed plan for how to implement an apocalyptic vision and minimize any opposition. It is a far more specific design than any before it. If these recommendations are implemented they will result in a sharp decline in American security and a dramatic increase in the risk of regional and global conflict.

End of Part II

Next: The Collapse of the Arms Control Movement.

For Part I, please click here

For the complete article, please visit the International Policy Journal at the Center for International Policy.

Bonus: A new article in Gizmodo by Matthew Gault features extensive comments from me and the great Sharon Squassoni on all these themes.