No Losers: Making Arms Control Work

Introduction

Nuclear arms control was in a precarious position before Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022 and then, one year later, when Russia suspended participation in the New START Treaty’s transparency process. That treaty, like the previously abandoned Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, Open Skies Treaty, and Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty, stabilized East-West competition and fostered predictability about the security environment. As for nuclear disarmament—the elimination of specified weapons—the United Sates and the former Soviet Union reduced their nuclear warhead stockpiles from about 31,000 and 40,000, respectively, to roughly 4,000 strategic warheads each today.7 But no reductions in deployed weapons have occurred since 2018, when the United States and Russia completed the mandate of New START.8 Indeed, of the nine countries that possess nuclear weapons, only the United States and Russia have ever negotiated reductions or limitations on their arsenals. Other nuclear-armed states appear unlikely to join them in the foreseeable future.

The ruinous state of nuclear arms control reflects the evolution of weapons-usable technology and deeper pathologies in international politics. I say “weapons-usable technology” instead of “weaponry” because many emerging technologies are multipurpose. Computer code can be used for intelligence gathering, political influence campaigns, or for attacking an adversary’s civilian infrastructure, conventional forces, or nuclear forces. Satellites and their related communication networks (which rely on code) are similarly quintuple-use. Boosters—be they ballistic, cruise, or maneuverable hypersonic—have mostly military applications and are better known as “missiles” except when used to launch civilian satellites. In regional conflicts, they can carry nuclear or conventional warheads and can be used for offensive strikes and defensive interceptions. The multiple entangled roles of strategic technologies complicate threat assessments in peacetime, in crises, and in war.9 All of this exacerbates security dilemmas and efforts to manage escalation or negotiate arms control.

Dialogue and agreements on norms of behavior in managing new weapons capabilities could foster stability, albeit less concretely than verifiable agreements to reduce types and numbers of weapons. But the reciprocal political confidence and will to engage in such cooperation are lacking today among all relevant competitors.
 

Endnotes

• 7Arms Control Association, “2023 Estimated Global Nuclear Warhead Inventories” .
• 8Arms Control Association, “U.S.-Russian Nuclear Arms Control Agreements at a Glance” (last updated October 2022).
• 9James M. Acton, “Escalation through Entanglement: How the Vulnerability of Command-and-Control Systems Raises the Risks of an Inadvertent Nuclear War,” International Security 43 (1) (2018): 56–99.

Disrepair and Resistance to Treatment

The developments listed below are among the signs of arms control’s degeneration and nuclear-armed states’ resistance to reviving it.
 

Cheating on Treaties
 

Russia’s record in fulfilling arms control obligations is problematic. The Soviet Union violated the 1972 ABM Treaty by building an improper radar facility at Krasnoyarsk (and then corrected the violation and complied with the treaty). Russia cheated on the 1987 INF Treaty by deploying an impermissible missile. Russia also did not comply fully with the Biological Weapons Convention and has used chemical weapons to assassinate individuals in violation of the Chemical Weapons Convention. Questions or problems remain about the fullness of Russia’s compliance with other treaties too.

Clandestinely breaking agreements is inherently illegitimate. Yet, cheating may indicate underlying problems that deserve redress by all parties. If, for example, the balance of military capabilities has changed significantly since an agreement was negotiated and now disproportionately favors one of the parties, maintaining fidelity to cooperative limitations may require adjusting the balance of forces. If sufficient balance is not maintained, the disadvantaged party will become interested in cheating or withdrawing to redress the situation.10 This may have been Russia’s perspective on the INF Treaty that was agreed to by Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan in 1987. States that do not have competing political parties, independent nongovernmental organizations, and/or free media may find cheating less risky than democracies do.
 

Withdrawing from Agreements
 

Whereas Russia has tended to cheat on agreements, the United States has withdrawn from them. The most dramatic and impactful withdrawals were from the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty in 2002 and the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) with Iran in 2017. In both cases the counterparts—Russia and Iran—were complying with the agreements. In leaving the ABM Treaty, American officials wanted to free the country from constraints on developing and deploying weapons that could potentially intercept ballistic missiles that Iran, North Korea, or other “rogue” states might launch against the United States.11 Withdrawing from the ABM Treaty also reflected fealty to visions of a defense-dominant world, notwithstanding the advantages that physics and economics give to offenses. President Donald Trump’s obsessive loathing of Barack Obama and the delusion that he could compel Iran to make a better deal drove him to renege on the JCPOA that constrained Iran’s nuclear activities.12 Iran is now much closer to possessing the capability to make nuclear weapons than if the JCPOA had remained operative.

To many international observers, the troubling conclusion is that the United States feels that its economic and military power permit it to withdraw from agreements without severe consequence. Many nations now question whether the United States is a trustworthy negotiating counterpart.13
 

Growing Instability
 

Nuclear arsenals are the ultimate deterrent on which nine countries and their allies rely. If adversaries fear that their own forces and command, control, and communication systems can be targeted with emerging kinetic or cyber capabilities, arms-racing and crisis instability could grow. Using nonnuclear weapons against nuclear forces could become more credible if it forces the burden of starting nuclear war onto the other side. This could strengthen deterrence, but it will also motivate adversaries to deploy countermeasures. China, for example, is dramatically expanding its strategic ballistic missile force for reasons that include increasing its survivability against preemptive attack by U.S. nuclear, conventional, and perhaps cyber forces.14 Devising equations of restraint to balance capabilities and stabilize deterrence relationships is inherently more difficult as the variety of entangled technologies grows. Arms control could be a physically and economically less risky alternative, but pursuing it in nationalist polities facing foreign adversaries is politically risky.
 

The Unfinished Business of Earlier Arms Control
 

Despite the success of many of the arms control agreements from 1970 to 2010, negotiating and ratifying treaties during the Cold War and in its immediate aftermath were never easy. Several negotiated treaties went unratified or unimplemented.15 Attempts to limit nuclear weapons systems with ranges of less than five hundred kilometers went nowhere, in part because of the challenges of verifiably distinguishing whether planes used for fighting at this range are carrying nuclear or conventional bombs or cruise missiles. Since 2010, numerical arms control has become less suitable to address new potentially destabilizing technologies.16 More missiles and gliders of longer range are designed to carry nuclear and conventional warheads. Cyber capabilities to attack command, control, and communication systems cannot be verifiably limited. The most that can be done is to agree not to target specific assets or to adhere to norms of responsible tradecraft that limit collateral damage and do not allow malware to proliferate.17
 

Costliness of Trade-Offs to “Buy” Support for Arms Control
 

In the United States (and perhaps in Russia and maybe elsewhere), endorsement by military leaders is necessary to win political support for arms control. In the United States, this usually requires payment in the form of funding for other weapons that the military or congressional leaders want.18 Stuart Symington, the first secretary of the Air Force (from 1947 to 1950) and later a hawkish Democratic Senator from Missouri, vividly captured this dynamic. “It seems to me,” Symington commented in early 1972 as the Nixon administration was negotiating with Moscow and seeking increased funds for nuclear weapons systems, “that these SALT talks are being used in an effort to sandbag the Congress into heavy additional arms expenditures when the hope of all of us . . . was that agreements . . . would make it possible for us to reduce armaments, certainly not to increase it.”19

If payoffs help motivate domestic competitors to go along, threats in the form of building new weaponry are a common way to motivate adversaries to stop foot-dragging and negotiate—“we will build more weapons you don’t like if you don’t agree on limits or reductions now.” However, if a deal is not reached, the result is a perhaps larger-than-necessary arms buildup.20 And if a deal is made, bureaucratic politics and congressional-industrial interests may protect at least some of the new bargaining chips from being traded away.21 Then, to get the Senate to consent to ratification by a vote of two-thirds, spending will be promised for new weapons capabilities that are not limited by the deal. The net result is that actual nuclear disarmament is rarely negotiated.22

A counterargument affirms the basic point: hawkish administrations sometimes must appear to pursue arms control to win congressional support for spending on new weapons systems.23 This was an impetus for Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Perle to persuade President Reagan to propose in November 1981 that an INF Treaty should reduce the number of covered weapons to zero. Six years later, Gorbachev’s Soviet government surprisingly consented. More often, as when recent U.S. administrations have urged China to join arms control negotiations, the proposed parameters of negotiation are known to be unacceptable to the adversary, but good enough to win spending on new weapons in Washington.24
 

Endnotes

• 10The Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty of 1990 (adapted in 1999) demonstrates both points. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact, the treaty’s terms were revised to reflect new realities. However, NATO refused to ratify the 1999 adaptation due to concerns about Russian behavior. Nonratification left Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Slovenia, as former Warsaw Pact states, not subject to its limitations, which alarmed Russia. The lesson seems to be that adaptation to reflect new realities is necessary, but new realities may be more difficult to manage through treaties. See Arms Control Association, “The Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE) Treaty and the Adapted CFE Treaty at a Glance” (last updated May 2023).
• 11 “Bush Shoots Down Missile Treaty,” CBS News, December 5, 2001.
• 12Author discussion with former Trump administration officials; and Peter Baker and Susan Glaser, The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017–2021 (New York: Random House, 2022).
• 13Few officials of foreign governments will say this publicly, but the author has heard many, including officials from allied countries, say so privately, especially since 2017.
• 14Henrik Stålhane Hiim, M. Taylor Fravel, and Magnus Langset Trøan, “The Dynamics of an Entangled Security Dilemma: China’s Changing Nuclear Posture,” International Security 47 (4) (2023): 147–187.
• 15For example, SALT II and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) were not ratified. START II was ratified by both the United States and Russia, but after the United States withdrew from the ABM Treaty, Russia withdrew from STARTII before it went into effect.
• 16James M. Acton, Thomas D. MacDonald, and Pranay Vaddi, Reimagining Nuclear Arms Control: A Comprehensive Approach (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2021).
• 17See George Perkovich, “Arms Control in Cyberspace and Outer Space,” in Arms Control at a Crossroads: Renewal or Demise? ed. Jeffrey A. Larsen and Shane Smith (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2023).
• 18As James Woolsey said of the Scowcroft Commission’s report in 1983, “arms control was the quid pro quo for congressional cooperation on the strategic buildup.” Quoted in Barrass, The Great Cold War, 292. See also the March 9, 1972, discussion between Nixon and Henry Kissinger of a crash program to develop new ballistic-missile submarines in order to motivate Soviet leaders to include submarine-launched ballistic missiles in the SALT negotiations. Douglas Brinkley and Luke A. Nichter, eds., The Nixon Tapes (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014), 413. Similarly, President Bill Clinton agreed to dramatically increase funding for U.S. nuclear weapons laboratories to persuade their directors to support his signing of the CTBT in September 1996. The Stockpile Stewardship Program then provided the labs $4.5 billion per year. But in an October 1999 Senate Armed Services Committee hearing to inform the Senate ratification process, the lab directors did not endorse the treaty, though they later issued lukewarm indications of support. The Senate testimony of Sandia Director Paul Robinson was especially revealing of this internal bargaining process, and it infuriated the White House. “Statement of C. Paul Robinson, Director, Sandia National Laboratories” (October 20, 1999), in “1999 Congressional Hearings,” FAS Intelligence Resource Program, Federation of American Scientists; Craig Cerniello, “Senate Rejects Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty; Clinton Vows to Continue Moratorium,” Arms Control Today 29 (September/October 1999); and author discussion with U.S. Department of Energy official, 1999.
• 19Quoted in Fred Kaplan, The Bomb (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2020), 133.
• 20The MX missile, for example, was a bargaining chip that was then deployed for twenty years.
• 21The Safeguard antiballistic missile system was an example of this phenomenon until it was finally deactivated in 1976. Graham Spinardi, “The Rise and Fall of Safeguard: Anti‐Ballistic Missile Technology and the Nixon Administration,” History and Technology 26 (4) (2010): 313–334.
• 22Negotiated reductions of nuclear forces began only in 1987 with the INF Treaty and, for strategic weapons, in 1991 with the START I Treaty. No countries other than the United States and the Soviet Union/Russia have negotiated the elimination of nuclear weapons, though South Africa did eliminate its arsenal of six-plus nuclear weapons in anticipation of joining the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
• 23Linton F. Brooks, “The End of Arms Control?” Dædalus 149 (2) (2020): 90.
• 24This phenomenon also appeared when the Trump administration proposed funding to build and deploy nuclear-armed sea-launched cruise missiles, reportedly so they could be used as a bargaining chip with Russia. The Biden administration decided not to build this weapon, but the House Armed Services Committee included funding for the program in the Defense Department budget anyway. Bryan Harris, “GOP Moves to Instate Sea-Launched Cruise Missile Nuclear Program,” Defense News, June 21, 2023. Russia, North Korea, and, lately, China do not more genuinely favor arms control or eschew the accrual of military power; the point here is that efforts to make arms control a more effective element of U.S. national security strategy and policy must take into account the possibility and consequences that Congress will turn bargaining chips into new weapons programs (or vice versa).

Triangular Competitions Create Unprecedented Challenges

Nuclear arms control was a way for the United States and the Soviet Union to restrain the risks and costs of their competition and build confidence that neither would initiate major warfare against the other. Yet, thirty years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the structure of security competition and nuclear risk has changed dramatically. Bipolarity has given way to multipolarity, with complex, interacting triangular competitions.25

The United States fears that Russia and China may attempt—singly or in collusion—to violently coerce U.S. allies or partners whom the United States would then have to defend. Leaders in Moscow and Beijing fear that the United States seeks to change their regimes or at least to mobilize international power to block them from pursuing their nations’ geopolitical interests. These Russian and Chinese interests include preventing American primacy.

“They have one goal,” Russian President Vladimir Putin said in a February 2023 interview: “to break up the former Soviet Union and its main part, the Russian Federation. . . . Were the West to succeed in ‘destroying’ Russia . . . then I don’t even know if the Russian people as an ethnic group can survive in the form in which they exist today.” Russia is contesting a world order, Putin concluded, “built around the interests of just one country, the United States.”26 Or, in the words of China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, “The United States has developed a hegemonic playbook to stage ‘color revolutions,’ instigate regional disputes, and even directly launch wars under the guise of promoting democracy, freedom and human rights.”27 The United States, of course, sees itself as merely defending its allies and partners from Russian or Chinese projections of force or coercive power.

Two types of major risk need to be redressed that are different from the bolt-from-the blue attacks that preoccupied early Cold Warriors. One is a crisis borne of an accidental collision of forces or a small incursion against a U.S. ally, either of which could readily escalate if not deftly managed. The second, as Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine shows, is the possibility that Chinese or North Korean leaders, like Putin, could decide that time is working against them and they must take bold military action now to deny freedom of action to Taiwan or South Korea. Because the United States is committed (in varying degrees) to defend its NATO allies, Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea, it is directly implicated in all these players’ calculations. The capabilities necessary to fulfill these extended U.S. commitments, when aggregated, will appear deeply threatening to Russia and China.

Each of the three powers is now modernizing its military capabilities of all types, ranging from nuclear weaponry to algorithms to enhanced systems for command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (C4ISR). Some of these capabilities conceivably could threaten the operation of each side’s nuclear forces, undermining confidence in their strategic deterrents. China is rapidly increasing the size of its nuclear arsenal after decades of self-restraint. The scope of China’s overall military buildup, beginning in the region and involving expansion of long-range forces, fits with a strategy of making the United States conclude that it cannot coerce China at an acceptable cost. In the absence of arms control or other mutual restraints, the United States, China, and Russia incline toward worst-case thinking and preparation for conflict. Arms racing and the risks of inadvertent escalation thus intensify.28

This triangular competition—or, optimistically, security dilemma—is much more difficult to manage than the Cold War was. U.S. officials feel pressure from strategic considerations and domestic competitors to build up nuclear capabilities to counter China, which is seeking military and political-economic power to counter the United States. A U.S. military buildup will prompt Russia to respond too (and vice versa).

And that is only half the story! The U.S.-Russia-China triangle intersects with the China-India-Pakistan nuclear competition, a triangle in which the United States bolsters India against China and China bolsters Pakistan against India. Military capabilities and know-how are transferred in each of these relationships. This complicates the threat calculations made by all the competitors. These dynamics involve the United States, China, India, Pakistan, and to a somewhat lesser extent Russia, Japan, and Australia. Meanwhile, France and the United Kingdom, nuclear-armed permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, watch warily.

North Korea presents a similarly complex intersection, as the interests and military requirements of the United States, South Korea, and Japan complicate China’s interests and vice versa. If Washington and China can improve their relations enough to address the direct competition between themselves, this should enable more cooperation vis-à-vis North Korea. The opposite is true too.

China, India, and Pakistan have never engaged in official bilateral or trilateral dialogue on nuclear arms control, let alone negotiations. (India and Pakistan have implemented an agreement negotiated in 1988 not to attack each other’s declared civilian nuclear facilities and to exchange lists of such facilities.) If this group did overcome its aversion to arms control dialogue, China would inevitably note that its growing capabilities are a response to U.S. threats (including U.S. missile defenses) to China’s nuclear deterrent. Therefore, Beijing would say, the problem cannot be addressed only by China, India, and Pakistan. Pakistan, with some sense of betrayal, would highlight U.S. eagerness to assist India militarily. India would cite China’s assistance to Pakistan (and decry any lingering U.S. military assistance to Pakistan). Thus, the main potential bilateral belligerents who most need arms restraint will not agree even to explore possibilities with each other if their most concerning “third party” will not join the discussion. But that adds up to at least five negotiants—the United States, China, Russia, India, and Pakistan—and a commensurately complicated math to balance their disparate forces and interests. (In the European context, especially, Russia wants French and UK nuclear forces to be included in future nuclear arms controls.)

Concerning the U.S.-China-Russia competition specifically, one of the biggest questions is whether Washington could persuade Russian and Chinese leaders to accept that the United States needs to deploy a more effective combination of offensive and defensive capabilities than either Russia or China should have. The United States feels it must be able to simulta­neously deter both nations and, if deterrence fails, defeat both of them in war. In contrast, Russia and China, in the U.S. view, need only deter the United States and its allies—a lesser challenge. But proponents of a U.S. force expansion offer no plausible way to deter or dissuade both Russia and China from countering any new U.S. buildup.29
 

Endnotes

• 25For a penetrating analysis of this triangular relationship, see Alexey Arbatov, “Trilateral Nuclear Arms Control—A Russian Assessment,” in Trilateral Arms Control? Perspectives from Washington, Moscow, and Beijing, Research Report no. 002, ed. Ulrich Kühn (Hamburg: Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy, University of Hamburg, March 2020).
• 26Matthew Mpoke Bigg and Anton Troianovski, “Deadly Russian Artillery Strikes Reported in Ukraine’s East and South,” The New York Times, February 26, 2023.
• 27“US Hegemony and Its Perils,” China Daily, February 20, 2023(last updated February 21, 2023). In March 2023, President Xi Jinping said the U.S. aim was “all-around containment, encirclement, and suppression of China.”
• 28Acton, “Escalation through Entanglement”; and Hiim, Fravel, and Trøan, “The Dynamics of an Entangled Security Dilemma.” In the lexicon of “instability,” a feedback loop operates among political instability, crisis instability, and arms race instability, with each type exacerbating and being exacerbated by the other.
• 29Franklin C. Miller, “Outdated Nuclear Treaties Heighten the Risk of Nuclear War,” The Wall Street Journal, April 21, 2022. Assuming that it is infeasible to negotiate a successor treaty to New START with Russia and China, Miller (who helped lead reductions in U.S. nuclear forces in the late 1980s and early 1990s) argues, “the Biden administration should exit New START after a year and begin building toward the 3,000 to 3,500 force levels to maintain a credible deterrent against Moscow and Beijing.” Ibid.

Conceptualizing Pathways to Political and Nuclear Stability

Rather than unbounded arms competition or the related hope of spending adversaries into “oblivion,” a better approach would be to seek military and arms restraint.30 Here the logic would follow that of President Lyndon Baines Johnson in a secret January 21, 1967, letter to Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin that started the arms control process that led to the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT) and ABM Treaty.31 “I face great pressures,” Johnson wrote,

from the Members of Congress and from public opinion not only to deploy defensive systems in this country, but also to increase greatly our capabilities to penetrate any defensive systems which you might establish. If we should feel compelled to make such major increases in our strategic weapons capabilities, I have no doubt that you would in turn feel under compulsion to do likewise. We would thus have incurred on both sides colossal costs without substantially enhancing the security of our own peoples or contributing to the prospects for a stable peace in the world.32

If U.S. leaders and their counterparts concluded it is safer and economically wiser to affirm mutual deterrence than to compete endlessly and ultimately futilely for the capacity to win escalation contests up to and through nuclear war, what sort of reciprocal restraints and behaviors would they seek?

The United States, China, and Russia (like India and Pakistan) are not planning to suddenly start a war with a nuclear-armed adversary or alliance. If conflict does occur, all want to avoid the use of nuclear weapons. But each will muster the resolve and capabilities needed not only to defend and pursue its core interests if adversaries act offensively but also to prevail at each level of potential conflict. Each tells itself that this combination of capabilities and resolve—including possible limited, regional use of nuclear weapons—will motivate adversaries to stay out of a fight or to take an off-ramp early in a developing conflict. The problem, of course, is that if each adversary seeks to prevail in this way, the result is a precarious and fearsome mix of arms racing, instability, and deterrence. The three declare at summits and other international meetings that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought,” but they do not say they will eschew using force in regional disputes in ways that could escalate to nuclear use according to their own national security policies.33 This is what security dilemmas look like. Less benignly, these competitive behaviors are also what states with offensive intentions do. Arms control processes, broadly defined, are a way to assess whether phenomena and intentions are benign or malign.

The most portentous example of uncertain intentions today has to do with Taiwan’s future and the role of China and the United States in affecting it. The Korean Peninsula is similarly challenging. Do the United States and the Republic of Korea know what North Korean leaders fear and want from them and whether these leaders are prepared to restrain their most alarming behaviors and capabilities in return for ameliorating those fears and meeting some of those wants?

Ultimately, stability requires that nuclear-armed states demonstrate that they are not advancing under the illusion that they can win wars against one another without triggering their own destruction. To avoid arms racing and armed conflict, they must base policy on mutual vulnerability and recognize that pursuing—or being perceived to pursue—regime change and military primacy will backfire. But the increasing variety of militarily usable capabilities makes it hard to judge what balance of forces will convince leaders they cannot win an escalating war against one another and instead should work mutually to stabilize their relationships. Mutual vulnerability may be a fact, but admitting it and negotiating a modus vivendi around it are not what militaries and “strong” political parties are paid and supported to do.

If leaders of competing states do show willingness to reassure one another and avoid zero-sum competition, then experts from these states need to explore new concepts and approaches to balancing hard-to-verify asymmetric capabilities. A priority should be to limit the capabilities that realistically threaten competitors’ second-strike nuclear options. If potential mutual limitations at this level are identified, analysts and officials could then work down the anticipated escalation ladder to identify what additional restraints could be pursued.

Given the difficulties of this approach today, a more realistic constructive effort could be to negotiate new norms of behavior. The unlikelihood of making restraints legally binding exacerbates competitors’ doubts that counterparts will uphold them in the gray zone between peace and war, let alone during armed conflict. But, as the widely respected U.S. negotiator and defense expert Ambassador (ret.) Linton Brooks describes, political-security agreements less formal than treaties may be better suited to redressing today’s sources and symptoms of instability among nuclear-armed states.34
 

Endnotes

• 30Under Secretary of State Marshall Billingslea: “We know how to spend the adversary into oblivion. If we have to, we will, but we sure would like to avoid it.” Tim Morrison, “Transcript: Special Presidential Envoy Marshall Billingslea on the Future of Nuclear Arms Control,” Hudson Institute, May 22, 2020.
• 31Bernard Gwertzman, “Five‐Year Effort for an Arms Curb Began with Secret Johnson Letter to Kosygin,” The New York Times, May 25, 1972.
• 32Lyndon Baines Johnson, The Vantage Point (New York: Holt Rinehart and Winston, 1971), 370.
• 33The White House, “Joint Statement of the Leaders of the Five Nuclear-Weapon States on Preventing Nuclear War and Avoiding Arms Races,” January 3, 2022.
• 34Brooks, “The End of Arms Control?”

Political Challenges

The easier half of the arms control challenge is to convince U.S. political leaders and voters that Russian, Chinese, and North Korean leaders will not cheat on any deals made with them. That will be extremely difficult to do.

It will be harder to convince Putin, Xi Jinping, and Kim Jong Un that the United States and its allies do not seek to constrain their military power in order to bring down their regimes.35 Most American and allied officials personally do wish to see these autocrats depart and their polities become freer and more respectful of human rights. The more internally repressive and externally coercive these governments are, the more intense this wish becomes. The challenge, then, is to convey that the United States will not act directly or clandestinely to cause regime change. Instead, the United States and allies—regardless of whoever wins our elections—will recognize the need for peaceful coexistence with these governments even if we wish they would disappear. One important way to demonstrate this benign intention materially is to be willing to negotiate limits on the offensive and missile-defensive capabilities that would most effectively threaten China’s, North Korea’s, or Russia’s second-strike nuclear deterrent.36

With Russia, much will depend on how the war in Ukraine ends. Since Nadezhda Arbatova’s paper in this publication explores this question, my analysis here will instead focus on the dynamics with China.

China has long resisted being drawn into even discussions about its nuclear forces, let alone negotiations to limit them. China’s leaders note fairly that its nuclear arsenal has been dwarfed by those of the United States and Russia and that China has adhered to a “no first use” doctrine unlike the larger, more bellicose nuclear powers. American deployment of precise conventional strike forces and missile defenses abetted by avant-gardecyber warfare capabilities has contributed to the Chinese view that the United States seeks to negate China’s second-strike nuclear deterrent, which would then allow it more freely to bully China and prevent it from achieving its rightful preeminence in Asia and the wider world.37 Common sense tells Chinese political and military leaders that transparency about their current and future nuclear forces would assist the United States and its allies in targeting China’s deterrent. Chinese officials and experts fear that, were Beijing to join negotiations to limit or reduce nuclear forces, the United States would not agree to meaningful parity or equitability. Moreover, Chinese officials would probably fear that a new administration in Washington would renege on any arrangement when it could gain an advantage by doing so.

Chinese Communist Party leaders may never relinquish their skepticism about U.S. intentions and the risks of arms control. Moreover, President Xi’s decision to dramatically expand China’s nuclear arsenal may reflect a general sense that the United States and others will not give him and China the proper respect due to a world power unless China’s nuclear arsenal is growing and, if necessary, still more growable. The only way to test China’s calculus and create a potential basis for arms restraint and confidence-building would be for the United States to eschew in word and deed efforts to develop and deploy offensive and defensive capabilities that could significantly limit the damage China’s second-strike force could inflict on the U.S. homeland. Given the physical limitations of current missile defenses, damage-limitation entails destroying Chinese nuclear weapons before they can be launched. This prospect is destabilizing and escalatory whatever the intentions of U.S. leaders.

Words can come first. As the exceptionally experienced Brad Roberts persuasively argues, “the United States is going to have a relationship of mutual vulnerability, whether or not it accepts it in a political sense.”38 But to develop sound policy and convey it to Chinese leaders and the rest of the world, Washington must explicitly, albeit reluctantly, embrace political coexistence and mutual vulnerability as its unavoidable basis.

Dynamics within Washington and Beijing and between them make this very difficult. As Zhao Tong writes, “It has become increasingly evident that achieving nuclear stability between Washington and Beijing is becoming more challenging, if not impossible, without a concerted effort to address the underlying political tensions between the two sides.” But, as Zhao also notes, Washington is reluctant to explicitly base policy on mutual vulnerability because this “would send an unwelcome signal of political reconciliation” with Beijing. This would be career-risky in Washington—in part because it would also alarm Japan, Taiwan, and other U.S. allies and partners.39 Meanwhile, “China has not recognized the negative impact of its current approach” toward the United States and “has not developed a realistic strategy to provide strategic reassurance to Washington.”40
 

Endnotes

• 35For an excellent exploration of Putinist perceptions, see Vladislav M. Zubok, “Myths and Realities of Putinism and NATO Expansion,” in Evaluating NATO Enlargement: From Cold War Victory to the Russia-Ukraine War, ed. James Goldgeier and Joshua R. Itzkowitz Shifrinson (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023), 145–159.
• 36In his deeply insightful book On Compromise, Avishai Margalit explains that “recognizing the other as a legitimate partner for negotiation means treating the other less as an enemy and more as a rival.” Furthermore, conferring “recognition on one’s rival” helps “to dispel [the claim that] domination” is one’s objective. “Acting in such a spirit of compromise is what the Talmud calls acting for the sake of peace.” Avishai Margalit, On Compromise and Rotten Compromises (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2010), 41, 43.
• 37Fiona S. Cunningham, “The Unknowns about China’s Nuclear Modernization Program,” Arms Control Today 53 (June 2023): 10.
• 38Brad Roberts, “Rethinking Mutual Vulnerability in an Era of US-China Strategic Competition,” in David Santoro, ed., “US-China Mutual Vulnerability: Perspectives on the Debate,” Issues and Insights 22 (2) (May 2022): 23.
• 39Author interviews with U.S. and Japanese officials in Tokyo and Nagasaki, December 7–8, 2023.
• 40Zhao Tong, “The Political Drivers of China’s Changing Nuclear Policy: Implications for U.S.-China Nuclear Relationship and International Security” (forthcoming).

Getting Our Own Heads and Houses in Order

The problem is not only that adversarial “strong men” will not believe that American intentions are benign. It is also that American politicians will be punished for compromising with adversaries. If similar dynamics operate around the Chinese leadership, notwithstanding its freedom from elections and much greater capacity to control media and other information flows, negotiated arms restraint will be even less likely.

In 1989, not long after the U.S. Senate ratified the INF Treaty, and not much before it would ratify the START I Treaty, the conservative columnist George Will wrote, “American politics is a profession for amiable people eager to please and dedicated to the proposition that man’s best friend is the compromise.”41 He was not being ironic. Much has changed in American politics since then. Polarization has replaced whatever amiable willingness to compromise existed previously. When American political actors are unwilling to compromise with one another at home they will generally be unable to compromise with adversaries abroad—because doing so will provide fuel for domestic opponents to burn them with.

Compromise is enabled by empathy. If I empathize with you, I am more likely to see and understand that you have core needs even if I do not like them. This understanding would inform my efforts to explain to my political competitors why our compromising with you is necessary for our relationship to remain stable. As Israeli philosopher Avishai Margalit notes, compromise signifies that the other side has legitimate standing and interests even though they are rivalrous with ours, and it reflects the understanding that peace and/or limitations on destructiveness require some mutual accommodation.42

Even when the United States was marginally more functional, Washington’s efforts to engage China in strategic dialogue and confidence-building measures were self-centered and therefore inept. Intentions may have been good and the people conducting the outreach may have been expert. Yet, as Brad Roberts notes, “U.S. experts have done a better job of explaining why Russian and Chinese restraint is in the U.S. interest than in setting out ideas about a deal that would be mutually beneficial for all.”43

An excerpt from the Nixon White House tapes reveals the empathy challenge in an unintentionally funny way. On March 9, 1972, President Nixon was talking with National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger about the negotiations with the Soviet Union over SALTI. Nixon aimed his ire at Secretary of State William Rogers: “Whenever I raise the question, ‘What do the Russians really want out of SALT?’ Roger replies, ‘It’s not important.’ He says, ‘The important thing is what can we get?’” Nixon then delivers the punch line: “Unless you know what the other guy wants, you just—you don’t know how to screw ’em.” “Exactly,” Kissinger replies obsequiously. Nixon then sums up: “This is the most important [thing] that we’ve got to do. What do the Russians want? We’ve got to look at the world from the way they look at it.”44

Taken alone, the latter sentence sounds like an effective guide to diplomatic resolution of competing interests. But in the context of Nixon’s other thought—that empathy helps you figure out how to screw the other side—the challenge of reaching durable accommodations of powerful states’ competing interests remains daunting. Complicating the issue further, Nixon likely added the line about screwing the other side to maintain his macho self-image with Kissinger and really did appreciate that successful negotiation with peer competitors requires empathy. But the perceived need to be macho also indicates the political psychology of national security policymaking. Even if we were able to interview Nixon, we would not know if he was revealing his true thinking or instead creating an impression.45 Imagine the challenge Soviet leaders faced in assessing U.S. aims.

An ironic moment in the Cuban Missile Crisis similarly reveals the difficulty that competing national leaders have in being self-aware and empathetic. President John F. Kennedy and other American officials could not comprehend that Soviet leaders viewed the positioning of nuclear-armed missiles in Cuba as a fair response to the U.S. military presence in Europe. At President Kennedy’s meeting with his advisors on October 16, 1962, he mused, “‘It’s just as if we suddenly began to put a major number of MRBMs [medium-range ballistic missiles] in Turkey. Now that’d be goddamn dangerous, I would think.’” As Richard Betts narrates, “At that point,” Kennedy’s National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy’s “jaw must have dropped at the absentmindedness of the president’s remark.” Bundy had to interject, “Well we did, Mr. President.”46 The United States had deployed Jupiter missiles in Turkey in 1961, soon after Kennedy had become president.

The irony and lack of self-awareness in these episodes show how deep the political-psychological challenges are. A less complicated president, Reagan learned after years in office that empathy and confidential communication with antagonists were necessary to negotiate arms control. “Because arms reduction was so important, I decided in this instance to switch to a more hands-on approach—without help from the bureaucrats,” as reported in Reagan’s memoir. Writing to Soviet General Secretary Konstantin Chernenko, Reagan said, “‘It would be advantageous for us to communicate directly and confidentially.’ . . . I tried to use the old actor’s technique of empathy: to imagine the world as seen through another’s eyes and try to help my audience see it through my eyes.”47

Reagan, with his conservative, Republican, peace-through-strength credentials, could give his empathy rein and compromise with Soviet or other competitors, knowing that his Democratic Party competitors would not meaningfully oppose him. Kennedy was more at risk politically and had to deal secretly with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev. In today’s extremely polarized politics, wherein compromise with domestic opponents is punishable, let alone with foreign enemies, the virtue of empathetic bargaining appears more like a vice. Negotiating an arms control deal to enhance international security may not appear as courageous leadership. Instead, it will be portrayed as giving evil opponents power to inflict damage on you—at home and in potential war. 

Yet, if powerful countries are not willing to negotiate arrangements that satisfy each other’s interests in some balanced or fair way, agreements will not be made, or they will be made and then cheated on. In the words of a Chinese correspondent, “arms control that aims at increasing one’s own security at the expense of the security of others is neither acceptable nor sustainable.”48

The recent tendency of Republican administrations to withdraw from prior agreements makes arms control that much more difficult to do.49 How can Russian and Chinese leaders have confidence that the United States will negotiate, ratify, and sustain any binding agreement unless it one-sidedly advantages the United States and disadvantages them? Indeed, almost all Republican senators today would reject any treaty that Russia, China, North Korea, or Iran would agree to.50

Meanwhile, China’s increasingly autocratic government makes the world depend on the perceptions and misperceptions, judgments and misjudgments of one man and a small coterie of colleagues who may or may not possess the knowledge and will to scrutinize and challenge nuclear policy decisions in peacetime, crisis, or escalating war. For the liabilities of Russian politics and decision-making, see Arbatova’s paper in this collection.
 

Endnotes

• 41George Will, “Abortion: There Are Splittable Differences” (February 13, 1989), in George Will, Suddenly: The American Idea Abroad and at Home (New York: Free Press, 1990), 313.
• 42Margalit, On Compromise and Rotten Compromises, 41.
• 43Brad Roberts, “Emerging Challenges to Strategic Stability” (informal remarks, Conference on Nuclear Deterrence and Strategic Stability: What Have We Learned, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Va., March 16–18, 2022).
• 44Brinkley and Nichter, The Nixon Tapes, 414.
• 45In 1985, Nixon claimed he had considered using nuclear weapons four times as president. “What the President Saw: A Nation Coming into Its Own,” TIME, July 29, 1985, 53. Weeks later, Kissinger said in an interview, “There was never a concrete occasion or crisis in which the use of nuclear weapons was considered by the government.” “An Interview with Henry Kissinger,” The Washington Post, August 11, 1985, L8.
• 46Richard K. Betts, Nuclear Blackmail and Nuclear Balance (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1987), 113.
• 47Ronald Reagan, An American Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990), 594–595.
• 48“Lichijiang” (unnamed Chinese nuclear policy expert), email to author, February 23, 2023, commenting on George Perkovich, Engaging China on Strategic Stability and Mutual Vulnerability (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2022). The Reagan administration’s effort to negotiate what became the INF and START Treaties was slowed by the Soviet leadership’s perception “that the United States would only agree with such a situation where it would be militarily ahead of the USSR.” Reagan, quoting from Chernenko letter, An American Life, 599. Meanwhile, Reagan believed that “when the Soviets refer to maintaining stability they mean superiority and they have it.” Ibid., 608.
• 49Mustering the two-thirds vote necessary in the Senate to approve ratification of treaties has long been difficult. The U.S. Constitution’s allocation of two Senate seats to each state regardless of population has allowed relatively unpopulated and isolated states to block the ratification of treaties that a large majority of the population would support. The Genocide Convention took forty years to ratify, and the 1994 Law of the Sea Treaty remains unratified, as does the 1996 CTBT—although the United States abides by both. New START was ratified in 2010 only because President Obama promised in return a massive infusion of funds to modernize the U.S. nuclear arsenal.
• 50Patricia Zengerle, “U.S. Republican Senators Say They Will Not Back New Iran Nuclear Deal,” Reuters, March 14, 2022.

Secrecy Could Help

One way around these American problems would be if nonviolent revolutions produced new leaders and institutional reform in Russia, China, and North Korea that demilitarized relations with neighboring states and societies, including Taiwan. Something like this happened as the Soviet Union collapsed from 1987 to 1994 and led to the only deep reductions in nuclear forces the world has seen. Yet, so long as these countries retain the ambitions and predilections of today’s leaders, they will suspect that proposed force reductions or other arms control schemes are meant ultimately to weaken their regimes.

A more plausible (though less comprehensive) solution than regime change could be secrecy. Presidential memoirs reveal how secret channels were vital to the negotiation of most major nuclear arms control treaties—SALT, ABM, START, INF, and the JCPOA with Iran.51

Perhaps the most telling example of secrecy’s value occurred in the peaceful resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis. President Kennedy’s key advisor, his brother Attorney General Robert Kennedy, later reflected that secrecy was “essential. If our deliberations had been publicized, if we had had to make a decision in twenty-four hours, I believe the course that we ultimately would have taken would have been quite different and filled with far greater risks.”52

To back away and withdraw missiles and nuclear warheads from Cuba, Khrushchev needed a concession from Kennedy. Kennedy duly agreed to withdraw nuclear-armed Jupiter missiles from NATO ally Turkey but insisted that this withdrawal be kept secret.53 Only eight U.S. officials besides the president knew of it, and the deal remained secret for years.54 This secrecy—two weeks before midterm elections in the United States—was intended to protect Kennedy from domestic attack for rewarding the perceived instigator of the crisis, Khrushchev. Could such secret diplomacy and accommodation be conducted today? If leaders are likely to be attacked by domestic opponents for showing willingness to compromise with adversaries, how can potential give-and-take deals even be explored except in secrecy?

One possible answer is that treaties cannot be negotiated in secret, but “military cooperation between potential enemies”—Schelling’s and Halperin’s definition of arms control—could focus on secretly negotiated (or even signaled) reciprocal changes of behavior. Iran, for example, could stop building new advanced centrifuges, and the United States could stop interdicting Iranian oil sales. China could announce a moratorium on production of fissile materials for military purposes, and the United States could around the same time declare it has no plans to deploy intermediate-range land-based missiles on Guam or anywhere else in East Asia. The point is that the United States and one or more of its major adversaries could secretly negotiate observable quid pro quos that would manifest these governments’ intentions to restrain and stabilize their competition. If and when such arrangements were revealed, the fact that restraints had already been agreed to by the other party (or parties) would make them more politically palatable than offering to negotiate restraints without knowing that the adversary would reciprocate. (Kennedy felt a need to keep secret the withdrawal of Jupiter missiles from Turkey even after Khrushchev withdrew the Soviet missiles from Cuba. Years later, when the compromise did become known, it was widely accepted.)

Ironically, the secrecy and political control that autocrats like Putin, Xi, and Kim Jong Un “enjoy” could improve the prospects of negotiations. If the United States and its allies were willing to accept roughly equitable outcomes rather than clearly one-sided advantage, autocrats could be politically freer to give as well as take in negotiations (i.e., compromise) than a U.S. administration would likely be.55 But, for this to happen, these autocrats would need to believe that the United States would accept more equitable balances of military capabilities than U.S. domestic politics tend to allow. They would also need to signal to their own governments that they value wide-ranging expertise on these issues, including arms control and related verification issues. They would need to seek briefings on possibilities not only from military leaders but also from experts with different perspectives and recommendations. Left to their own devices and the advice of senior military officers, autocrats like Putin, Xi, and Kim are unlikely to embrace the logic and practice of arms restraint.

To simply say that compromise, encouraged by appropriate secrecy, will be necessary to revive arms control is inadequate without also saying how the capacity for both can be created. Negotiating and ratifying legally binding arms control will be impossible until a sizable majority of Americans in swing states welcomes candidates and officeholders who acknowledge, like Reagan, the need to develop proposals that are “honest and just, aimed only at balance, not superiority,” and who recognize that “Since we [are] dealing to some extent with apples and oranges . . . reaching an equitable agreement would be hard but not impossible.”56 How to create that change is beyond this author. The alternative, particularly with an economically robust China, will be, as President Johnson warned, an unending and expensive competition in military capabilities that will leave neither side confident it can deter or win a war with the other. This amounts to an insecure form of mutual vulnerability and deterrence. But de facto mutual vulnerability is not as stable, secure, and economically sensible as a regime of negotiated, verified mutual restraint.
 

Endnotes

• 51Nixon recalled that the negotiations that led to the ABM Treaty “worked at two levels. In Helsinki, formal talks were conducted under the scrutiny of the world press. But in the White House Map Room, secret discussions between Kissinger and Soviet Ambassador Dobrynin took place. Not surprisingly, the major breakthroughs occurred in the latter. It was there that the two sides could exchange frank views, test possible compromise formulas, and overcome critical bottlenecks.” Reagan recalled conveying the value of secrecy in a handwritten note to Soviet General Secretary Yuri Andropov: “Historically, I wrote, ‘our predecessors have made better progress when they communicated privately and candidly.’ I wrote that if he wished to engage in such direct communication, ‘you will find me ready. I await your reply.’ Ronald Reagan.” Obama in his memoir reveals that, “Within weeks of taking office, I’d sent a secret letter to Ayatollah Khamenei” in Iran, “suggesting that we open a dialogue between our two countries on a range of issues, including Iran’s nuclear program.” Richard Nixon, In the Arena: A Memoir of Victory, Defeat, and Renewal (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990), 327; Reagan, An American Life, 576; and Barack Obama, A Promised Land (New York: Crown, 2020), 454. William J. Burns, who led the initial negotiation of what became the JCPOA with Iran, describes in his memoir the secrecy involved. William J. Burns, The Back Channel (New York: Random House, 2019).
• 52Robert Kennedy, Thirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis (1969; New York: W.W. Norton, 1999), 85.
• 53For an insightful, deeply researched discussion of this decision and its implementation—notwithstanding keen resistance from U.S. officials who did not know of the secret Kennedy-Khrushchev deal—see William Burr and Leopoldo Nuti, “The Jupiter Missiles and the Endgame of the Cuban Missile Crisis, 60 Years Ago,” NSArchive Briefing Book no. 821, National Security Archive, Washington, D.C., February 16, 2023.
• 54Ibid.
• 55For a discussion of this tendency, see George Perkovich, India’s Nuclear Bomb (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 459–464. “Enjoy” is in quotation marks because the three leaders do not appear remotely joyful.
• 56Reagan, An American Life, 576, 597.

Demystify “Emerging Technology” and Work Around It

The conceptual and verification challenges posed by emerging technology compound the political challenge of uncompromising polarization. In the nuclear weapons field, the United States, China, and Russia are competing to apply new or more advanced techniques to destroy or disable targets and their command, control, and communication systems with malware and/or kinetic or nuclear payloads. They are joining massive computing power and data collection capabilities with space-based sensor and communications technology to locate all types of targets and direct weapons to them. Champions (or potential targets) of these technologies assert that they enable preemptive operations to disable adversary nuclear weapons before they can be launched. Artificial intelligence (AI) could be used defensively to counter such offenses, but this raises concerns about automated launching of nuclear weapons. Most of these capabilities are multiple use: military and civilian; intelligence gathering and attacking; conventional war-fighting and nuclear. This multiplicity increases the risk that actions in conflict will be misinterpreted, leading to inadvertent escalation.57 Meanwhile, political decision-makers generally do not know how to evaluate the asserted effectiveness and implications of new capabilities.

Some experts argue that the disruptive implications of emerging technologies are overstated—that satellites, quantum computing, malware, drone swarms, and AI-enabled warning systems are or will be much less decisive in threatening nuclear deterrent forces than are kinetic weapons with nuclear or conventional payloads. Devising measures to stabilize competition involving kinetic weapons that target nuclear weapons is not technically too daunting; the main challenge would be doing so with more than two parties.58

Clarifying the implications of new technologies may be a classic chicken-and-egg problem. If the United States were better disposed to compromise—between its political parties and with China, Russia, and other adversaries—its officials, think tanks, and media might devote more effort to figuring out the new equations necessary to balance asymmetric capabilities, such as dual-use missiles, quintuple-use cyber capabilities, low-yield and high-yield nuclear warheads, and so on. Or, if influential American actors had clearly workable equations and arms-restraint proposals that would help reduce propensities to escalatory warfare, it might be easier to motivate some bipartisan accommodation to pursue them. (Even in less polarized times the United States did not ratify the SALT II and Comprehensive Test Ban Treaties, and START II never came into force, so the development of equations is probably less of a problem than the development of political willingness to accept rough equity with adversaries.)

AI is the most prominent example of the larger category of “emerging technology” that captures the imaginations and rhetoric of defense policymakers, contractors, and think tank analysts. Too often the expression “AI” elicits a sense of doom or world-changing opportunity, depending on the context. Too rarely are we told what specific capabilities new technological applications will have. What will their net effectiveness be against countermeasures by particular adversaries? How would they weaken or strengthen deterrence of escalation to and through nuclear war? For example, does a new capability that is being deployed or envisioned significantly improve the accuracy of attack on targets or otherwise enhance lethality (for example, by reaching movable targets more quickly)? Does it reduce collateral damage (and therefore reduce legal and other inhibitions on using it)? Is it more survivable than older systems? Is it significantly cheaper? Does the new capability face countermeasures or other vulnerabilities, and what are the implications if so?

New capabilities that could threaten a state’s nuclear deterrent—including its command, control, and communications systems—and could not be counted or monitored by that state (or others) would be unsuitable for arms control. Verification tends to be a necessary condition for reciprocal reductions or limits on forces. Unfortunately, the existence and location of cyber capabilities, including artificial intelligence, and related small weaponry such as drones, as well as some space-based capabilities, are extremely difficult, if not impossible, to verify by means that adversarial states would likely find tolerable. Fortunately, however, these emerging capabilities are not likely to diminish the priority of controlling the kinetic weapons that pose the greater threat to nuclear deterrents, and therefore to stability.

Given the buzz and concern around emerging weapons capabilities and their effects on the survivability of nuclear deterrents, these issues should be subjected to peer-reviewed technical studies and dialogue about them among influential Americans, U.S. allies, and Russians, Chinese, North Koreans, Indians, and Pakistanis. Of course, this brings us back to the chicken-and-egg problem of political willingness to engage in compromise with adversaries.
 

Endnotes

• 57For trenchant analysis of these challenges and constructive arms control approaches to redress them, see James Timbie, “A Way Forward,” Dædalus 149 (2) (2020): 190–203.
• 58Chyba, “New Technologies and Strategic Stability.”

Some Next Steps Worth Considering

So long as it is inconceivable to find sixty-seven senators who would consent to the ratification of any treaty that Russia, China, North Korea, or Iran would agree to, we must confine ourselves to imagining nonlegally binding agreements entered into by U.S. administrations. Subsequent administrations could then choose to withdraw from any such agreement—as counterparts in Russia, China, North Korea, and other states apprehend.

Nuclear “risk reduction” measures are appealing under today’s conditions, in part because they are simpler and most often follow the logic of reciprocal actions. Several multilateral groups have proposed such measures.
 

Table 1: A Catalog of Recent Proposals

Nonstrategic Weapons

Proposal: Zero-deployed Nonstrategic Nuclear Weapons in Europe 
Name: Pavel Podvig and Javier Serrat 
States Involved: Russia, United States 
# of Parties: Bilateral 
Summary: Russia and the United States agree to the transfer of nuclear warheads associated with nonstrategic delivery systems to storage facilities. Once the warheads are removed, the United States and Russia will develop verification procedures that would confirm the absence of deployed warheads.59  

Proposal: Remove nonstrategic weapons from co-located bases 
Name: Alexei Arbatov 
States Involved: Russia, United States 
# of Parties: Bilateral 
Summary: The United States and Russia agree to remove all nonstrategic weapons from forward bases co-located with conventional forces (including dual-purpose delivery systems) to centralized storage facilities in U.S. and Russian national territories.60  

Proposal: Consolidate nonstrategic warheads 
Name: James Timbie 
States Involved: Russia 
# of Parties: Unilateral 
Summary: Russia agrees to reduce the number of nonstrategic nuclear warheads and consolidate them in designated facilities away from Russian borders.61  

Proposal: Eliminate some nonstrategic weapons 
Name: James Timbie 
States Involved: Russia, United States 
# of Parties: Bilateral

Summary: The United States and Russia agree to eliminate certain classes of nonstrategic nuclear weapons, such as nuclear air and missile defenses, nuclear missiles and torpedoes on ships other than strategic ballistic missile submarines, and short-range ground-launched nuclear missiles.62  

Proposal: Nonstrategic weapons information exchange 
Name: James Timbie 
States Involved: Russia, United States 
# of Parties: Bilateral 
Summary: The United States and Russia exchange information on types and numbers of delivery systems for nonstrategic nuclear warheads, and on numbers of associated warheads. Visiting locations of delivery systems and warhead storage.63  

Proposal: De-mate nonstrategic weapons 
Name: James Timbie 
States Involved: Russia, United States 
# of Parties: Bilateral 
Summary: The United States and Russia commit not to mate nonstrategic nuclear warheads with delivery systems, which might indicate that nuclear conflict was imminent.64  

Proposal: Nonstrategic weapons limits 
Name: James Timbie 
States Involved: Russia, United States 
# of Parties: Bilateral 
Summary: The United States and Russia commit not to exceed a combined limit on nonstrategic and nondeployed strategic warheads.65

Space

Proposal: Trilateral treaty to prohibit space-based missile defenses 
Name: James Acton, Thomas MacDonald, and Pranay Vaddi 
States Involved: China, Russia, United States 
# of Parties: Trilateral 
Summary: China, Russia, and the United States agree to a trilateral treaty prohibiting the testing or deployment of space-based missile defense weapons for fifteen years, with the option of extending the agreement in five-year increments by mutual consent. Specifically, the treaty prohibits the testing of space-based missile defense weapons and the deployment of space-based missile defense weapons in orbit.66  

Proposal: Keep-out zones around high-altitude satellites 
Name: James Acton, Thomas MacDonald, and Pranay Vaddi 
States Involved: China, Russia, United States 
# of Parties: Trilateral 
Summary: China, Russia, and the United States make a joint political commitment that each will maintain a minimum separation between its satellites and the satellites in geostationary or Molniya orbits that belong to, and have been declared by, other participants of the agreement.67  

Proposal: Trilateral launch notification agreement 
Name: James Acton, Thomas MacDonald, and Pranay Vaddi 
States Involved: China, Russia, United States 
# of Parties: Trilateral  
Summary: China, Russia, and the United States should agree to provide pre- and post-launch notification of all space launches, and all test launches of ballistic or boost-glide missiles—whether conducted from air, land, or sea—that meet certain specific conditions.68  

Proposal: Ban on space-based missile defense 
Name: Laura Grego 
States Involved: United States 
# of Parties: Unilateral 
Summary: The United States commits to forgo building space-based and other global missile defense systems.69  

Proposal: Sharing lists of NC3 space assets 
Name: Linton Brooks 
States Involved: Russia, United States 
# of Parties: Bilateral 
Summary: The United States and Russia each prepare a list of space assets for which it would regard indications of a possible attack as potentially implying preparation for a first strike. These lists should be exchanged and discussed annually.70  

Proposal: Space Maneuvers Warning 
Name: John Borrie 
States Involved: Nuclear weapon states, nonnuclear-weapon states 
# of Parties: Multilateral 
Summary: States with co-orbital drones provide advance notice of their maneuvers close to others’ space objects to potentially affected actors.71  

Proposal: ASAT Test Ban Treaty 
Name: Thomas Cheney 
States Involved: China, Russia, United States 
# of Parties: Trilateral 
Summary: China, Russia, and the United States define and ban the testing of anti-satellite weapons.72  

Proposal: Agreement not to test space-to-surface weapons 
Name: Linton Brooks  
States Involved: Russia, United States 
# of Parties: Bilateral 
Summary: The United States and Russia agree to ban the testing of space-to-surface weapons.73  

Confidence Building Measures

Proposal: U.S.-Russian confidence building regime for European missile defense 
Name: James Acton, Thomas MacDonald, and Pranay Vaddi 
States Involved: Russia, United States 
# of Parties: Bilateral 
Summary: The United States and Russia commit to notifying each other in advance of the first European deployment of missile defense interceptors. The United States should also commit to inviting Russia to observe a flight test to measure the interceptor’s burnout speed, refraining from loading offensive missiles into European Aegis Ashore launchers, modifying launchers so they become capable of launching offensive missiles, and engaging in good-faith negotiations with Russia over practical transparency measures.74  

Proposal: U.S.-Russian transparency regime for empty warhead storage facility 
Name: James Acton, Thomas MacDonald, and Pranay Vaddi 
States Involved: Russia, United States 
# of Parties: Bilateral 
Summary: Russia and the United States agree to reciprocal inspections of warhead storage facilities to demonstrate that they do not contain nuclear warheads, using a negotiated verification protocol. After the first round of inspections, Russia and the United States should consult to discuss any problems and refine the generic verification protocol.75  

Proposal: Mutual Partial De-Alerting 
Name: David E. Mosher, Lowell H. Schwartz, David R. Howell, and Lynn E. Davis 
States Involved: Russia, United States  
# of Parties: Bilateral 
Summary: The United States and Russia agree to reduce the day-to-day launch readiness of 150 ICBMs.76  

Proposal: Statement repudiating escalate to de-escalate 
Name: Alexei Arbatov 
States Involved: Russia, United States 
# of Parties: Bilateral 
Summary: The United States and Russia issue a joint statement abandoning any limited use of nuclear weapons.77  

Proposal: Avoid NC3 Assets 
Name: RAND (Samuel Charap, John J. Drennan, Luke Griffith, Edward Geist, and Brian G. Carlson) 
States Involved: Russia, United States 
# of Parties: Bilateral 
Summary: The United States and Russia committ not to strike NC3 and early-warning assets in a conventional conflict.78

Proposal: Avoid Submarines near coasts 
Name: RAND (Samuel Charap, John J. Drennan, Luke Griffith, Edward Geist, and Brian G. Carlson) 
States Involved: Russia, United States 
# of Parties: Bilateral 
Summary: The United States and Russia commit not to operate attack submarines near Russian SSBN bastions or U.S. coasts. The United States could commit to keep U.S. attack submarines a certain distance away from Russian SSBN bastions in the Barents Sea and the Sea of Okhotsk. In return, Russia could commit to keep its attack submarines away from the U.S. coasts, where U.S. SSBNs are more easily tracked.79   

Proposal: U.S. Declaratory Policy Change 
Name: Ulrich Kühn  
States Involved: United States 
# of Parties: Unilateral 
Summary: The United States changes its nuclear doctrine by ruling out nuclear use in disarming first strikes, in response to cyber-attacks, to achieve regime change, and in all circumstances other than the most extreme.80  

Proposal: U.S.-DPRK Summit 
Name: Ulrich Kühn  
States Involved: United States, Democratic People’s Republic of Korea 
# of Parties: Bilateral 
Summary: The United States and DPRK meet for a summit that would include the development of a roadmap setting out specific risk reduction measures across nuclear and non-nuclear realms in Northeast Asia, including launching an expanded, regionally inclusive dialogue process focusing on cross-domain risk reduction. Practical risk reduction measures include formally ending the Korean War, resuspending joint U.S.-ROK military exercises (or circumscribing the exercises so that they are not perceived as involving preparations for the “decapitation” of the Kim Jong Un regime), and addressing evolving nuclear risks as they relate to new technology and cross-domain challenges, particularly in space and cyberspace.81

Proposal: ASAT Guidelines 
Name: John Borrie 
States Involved: Nuclear weapon states, nonnuclear-weapon states 
# of Parties: Multilateral 
Summary: States, including the nuclear-armed states possessing ASAT capabilities, adopt test guidelines for no debris (if an actor wishes to test ASAT capabilities, they should not create debris); low debris (if they must create debris during an ASAT test, the test should be carried out at an altitude sufficiently low that the debris will not be long lived), and notification (those testing ASATs should notify others of their activities even if they are not completely transparent on the motivation behind the test, in order to avoid strategic misperceptions).82  

Proposal: Narrow Doctrinal Nuclear Use in East Asia 
Name: Ulrich Kühn  
States Involved: United States, non­nuclear-weapon states 
# of Parties: Multilateral 
Summary: States that rely on U.S. nuclear weapons for their security (Australia, Japan, and the Republic of Korea) restrict the role of nuclear weapons in their defense doctrines by issuing joint statements that stigmatize the use of nuclear weapons except as weapons of last resort, and by pledging that they would not welcome the introduction/reintroduction of U.S. tactical nuclear weapons on their territory.83  

Proposal: Conventional-Nuclear Organizational Reform 
Name: Ulrich Kühn  
States Involved: United States 
# of Parties: Unilateral 
Summary: The United States implements organizational reform to address the disconnect between conventional and nuclear war procurement and planning. Encouraging joint consideration of escalation risks by military commands (and among other key military and civilian organizations in the United States) would improve awareness of escalation dangers and encourage a joined-up response. It could also function as an oversight mechanism that could advise the White House and president on the consequences of nuclear use.84  

Proposal: Low Alert Level Formalization 
Name: Manpreet Sethi 
States Involved: Many 
# of Parties: Bilateral 
Summary: States make an agreement (or even joint or unilateral coordinated statements) that formalizes low alert levels.85

Proposal: Safety/Security best practices 
Name: Manpreet Sethi 
States Involved: Nuclear weapon states 
# of Parties: Multilateral 
Summary: States share best practices on nuclear safety and security (for example, through collaboration between nuclear Centers of Excellence, joint ventures on manufacture of radiation portals, detection equipment, etc.).86

Proposal: India/China renounce nuclear warfighting 
Name: Manpreet Sethi 
States Involved: China, India 
# of Parties: Bilateral 
Summary: China and India make a statement of the kind made by Presidents Reagan and Gorbachev renouncing nuclear war.87  

Proposal: India/China no first use agreement 
Name: Manpreet Sethi 
States Involved: China, India 
# of Parties: Bilateral 
Summary: India and China formalize a bilateral no first use treaty between India and China.88

Information Sharing

Proposal: U.S.-Russia data exchange for nonaccountable missiles 
Name: James Acton, Thomas MacDonald, and Pranay Vaddi 
States Involved: Russia, United States 
# of Parties: Bilateral  
Summary: Twice a year, Russia and the United States exchange confidential declarations of the number of long-range nuclear-armed SLCMs, long-range nonnuclear SLCMs, long-range nonnuclear SLBGMs, nuclear-armed SLCMs with ranges between 300 and 600 kilometers, nonnuclear SLCMs with ranges between 300 and 600 kilometers, and nonnuclear SLBGMs with ranges between 300 and 600 kilometers. Once a year, the declaration should also cover deployments and include the maximum number of missiles in each category that are anticipated to be deployed for the following five years, as well as all types of currently deployed surface ships and submarines that have ever been equipped with at least one SLCM or SLBGM launcher.89  

Proposal: Informal Biannual Inspections 
Name: Vince Manzo 
States Involved: Russia, United States 
# of Parties: Bilateral 
Summary: The United States and Russia continue to provide biannual exchanges of aggregate numbers of deployed strategic delivery vehicles, nuclear warheads, and deployed and non-deployed launchers; the total number of each type of deployed strategic delivery vehicle and the total number of warheads deployed across it; and the number of deployed strategic delivery vehicles, warheads, and launchers at each declared base. A modified version of New START’s notification regime could underpin the biannual data exchanges.90

Proposal: Doctrine Working Group 
Name: Vince Manzo 
States Involved: Russia, United States 
# of Parties: Bilateral 
Summary: The United States and Russia establish an expert-level working group to improve understanding of their respective strategies and concepts. This forum would not be limited to strategic nuclear forces; it could also include discussion of theater-range nuclear weapons, missile defenses, and a host of other types of systems.91  

Proposal: Brief on new delivery vehicles 
Name: Vince Manzo 
States Involved: Russia, United States 
# of Parties: Bilateral 
Summary: The United States and Russia hold confidential briefings on new strategic systems that each country introduces into its arsenal. The briefings include the type of technical information that each shares under New START and perhaps even an exchange of photographs. Neither country would have the independent verification that comes through the onsite exhibitions. However, they would have a body of data to compare with information collected through NTM.92  

Proposal: American force transparency 
Name: Vince Manzo 
States Involved: United States 
# of Parties: Unilateral 
Summary: The United States continues publicly to declare its aggregate strategic deployed warhead, delivery vehicle, and launcher levels, as well as the distribution of total deployed warheads across types of delivery vehicles. The United States also publicly announces the retirement of strategic nuclear systems and provides some form of confirmation that it has pulled these systems from its deployed force and disabled them.93

Proposal: SSBN Maintenance Schedule Exchange 
Name: RAND (Samuel Charap, John J. Drennan, Luke Griffith, Edward Geist, and Brian G. Carlson) 
States Involved: Russia, United States 
# of Parties: Bilateral 
Summary: The United States and Russia commit to a regular exchange of planned maintenance schedules for SSBNs over a fixed future period and commit not to conduct SSBN operations within a fixed distance of the Russian coast.94  

Proposal: Notify bomber alert status 
Name: RAND (Samuel Charap, John J. Drennan, Luke Griffith, Edward Geist, and Brian G. Carlson) 
States Involved: Russia, United States 
# of Parties: Bilateral 
Summary: The United States and Russia agree to provide advance notification of increased bomber alert status.95  

Proposal: RS-28 Sarmat transparency 
Name: James Timbie  
States Involved: Russia 
# of Parties: Unilateral 
Summary: Russia commits for ten years to exhibit RS-28 Sarmat, provide information required by New START, and count its warheads and launchers against New START limits.96  

Proposal: Share list of NC3 space assets 
Name: Linton Brooks  
States Involved: Russia, United States 
# of Parties: Bilateral 
Summary: The United States and Russia each prepare a list of space assets for which it would regard indications of a possible attack as potentially implying preparation for a first strike. These lists should be exchanged and discussed annually.97  

Proposal: U.S.-Russia discussion on strategic stability concepts 
Name: Ankit Panda 
States Involved: Russia, United States 
# of Parties: Bilateral 
Summary: The United States and Russia hold dialogue to discuss nonstrategic nuclear weapons, the escalate to de-escalate strategy, and the realities and constraints around U.S. missile defense programs.98

Proposal: Building on the P5 Process 
Name: Ankit Panda 
States Involved: China, Russia, United States 
# of Parties: Multilateral 
Summary: China, Russia, and the United States should provide clarity on their respective nuclear modernization plans, and the P5 should explore direct engagement on risk reduction matters with non-NPT nuclear-armed states, and use the P5 process at the NPT review conference to develop shared understandings on doctrine and especially the peaceful uses of nuclear technology.99

Proposal: Strategic Dialogue 
Name: Manpreet Sethi 
States Involved: Nuclear weapon states 
# of Parties: Multilateral 
Summary: States initiate strategic dialogues (bilaterally or multilaterally) to better understand each other’s threat perceptions and nuclear doctrine.100  

Proposal: Hotlines 
Name: Manpreet Sethi 
States Involved: China, Russia, United States, Pakistan, India, France, United Kingdom 
# of Parties: Bilateral 
Summary: Nuclear powers create or improve utilization of political and military hotlines or some predesignated channels for crisis management.101  

New New START Proposals 

Proposal: New START Follow-On 
Name: ACA 
States Involved: Russia, United States 
# of Parties: Bilateral 
Summary: The United States and Russia agree to lower strategic nuclear warheads from 1,550 to 1,000, prohibit the development or limit the deployment of at least some types of missiles formerly banned by the INF Treaty, address nonstrategic nuclear weapons, and institute numerical limits on missile defense interceptors and launchers.102  

Proposal: U.S.-Russian Warhead Limitation Treaty 
Name: James Acton, Thomas MacDonald, and Pranay Vaddi 
States Involved: Russia, United States 
# of Parties: Bilateral 
Summary: Russia and the United States agree that each party will make modest reductions to and limit nuclear warheads, irrespective of their type, location, deployment status, and whether or not they are awaiting dismantlement. The treaty should remain in force for fifteen years.103  

Proposal: All START
Name: Amy Nelson and Michael O’Hanlon 
States Involved: Russia, United States, China, France, United Kingdom 
# of Parties: Trilateral 
Summary: Russia and the United States agree to maintain New START limits on nuclear warheads and delivery devices. The remaining P5 countries would submit information on their plans for nuclear arsenal modernization and nuclear force deployments and defend their modernization plans.104  

Proposal: All Warhead Bilateral Treaty 
Name: Steven Pifer 
States Involved: Russia, United States 
# of Parties: Bilateral 
Summary: The United States and Russia agree to a bilateral treaty covering all nuclear warheads, with no more than 2,500 for each side. The treaty would have a sublimit of 1,000 each on warheads on deployed ICBMs, SLBMs, and new strategic delivery systems. All other weapons, including bombs and air-launched cruise missiles for nuclear-capable bombers, would be nondeployed.105  

Proposal: Bilateral New START Follow-On 
Name: Alexei Arbatov 
States Involved: Russia, United States 
# of Parties: Bilateral 
Summary: The United States and Russia agree to include Avangard boost-glide system, Tu-22M3M (Backfire) bomber, and Sarmat heavy ICBMs under the new treaty. All deployed long-range conventional and nuclear air-launched missiles, and nuclear gravity bombs on deployed heavy bombers, should count against the overall warhead ceiling. Limits on strategic delivery vehicles and warheads should also cap the innovative weapons systems: ground-based intercontinental cruise missiles and long-range autonomous underwater drones, as well as land- and sea-based boost-glide hypersonic systems with ranges similar to those specified in the SALT and START Treaties.106  

Proposal: Bilateral New START Follow-On 
Name: Steven Pifer 
States Involved: Russia, United States 
# of Parties: Bilateral 
Summary: The United States and Russia agree to limit nuclear weapons, strategic or nonstrategic, deployed or in reserve, to between 2,000 and 2,500 for each side, with a sublimit (1,000 each) on the number of strategic warheads on deployed ICBMs, SLBMs, and like systems that could be quickly launched. The agreement should have a separate limit on strategic delivery systems, and the Biden administration thus should be prepared to put missile defense on the table if Moscow agrees to negotiate limits on all nuclear weapons.107  

Proposal: Steps for a New START Lapse 
Name: Linton Brooks 
States Involved: Russia, United States 
# of Parties: Bilateral 
Summary: The United States and Russia continue exchanging periodic data and de facto inspections on strategic forces as a confidence-building measure and expand such exchanges to include modernization plans. Informally, Russia and the United States agree to exchange modernization plans routinely and not to expand nuclear arsenals above New START levels.They might also intensify cooperation under the Global Initiative to Counter Nuclear Terrorism, consider a joint initiative to help states comply with UN Security Council Resolution 1540, sponsor a parallel initiative to revitalize discussions on controlling fissile material, or cochair a series of meetings among the five nuclear-weapon states under the Nonproliferation Treaty plus India and Pakistan to discuss physical security standards for weapons protection.108  

Proposal: Mutual Restraint Pledge 
Name: Vince Manzo 
States Involved: Russia, United States 
# of Parties: Bilateral 
Summary: The United States and Russia pledge to remain at or below New START’s limits, contingent upon the other’s reciprocation. Each country’s pledge could apply to intercontinental-range delivery vehicles and their associated warheads but would not include nuclear SLCMs and other nonstrategic nuclear weapons.109

System-Specific Restrictions

Proposal: Ban depressed trajectory SLBM 
Name: RAND (Samuel Charap, John J. Drennan, Luke Griffith, Edward Geist, and Brian G. Carlson) 
States Involved: Russia, United States  
# of Parties: Bilateral 
Summary: The United States and Russia agree to ban depressed trajectory flight tests of SLBMs.110  

Proposal: Ban on space-to-earth weapons 
Name: RAND (Samuel Charap, John J. Drennan, Luke Griffith, Edward Geist, and Brian G. Carlson) 
States Involved: Russia, United States  
# of Parties: Bilateral 
Summary: The United States and Russia agree to a ban on deployment of space-to-earth weapons. Both sides could commit not to deploy such space-to-earth weapons despite their differences on other space weapons, such as anti-satellite weapons.111  

Proposal: Ban prompt conventional strike 
Name: RAND (Samuel Charap, John J. Drennan, Luke Griffith, Edward Geist, and Brian G. Carlson) 
States Involved: Russia, United States  
# of Parties: Bilateral 
Summary: The United States and Russia agree to ban or limit ground-based and/or air-based deployments of prompt conventional strike options in proximity to borders.112  

Proposal: Restrictions on Poseidon 
Name: James Timbie  
States Involved: Russia 
# of Parties: Unilateral 
Summary: Russia could agree to forgo testing and deployment of the Poseidon system for ten years in the context of ten-year restraints on missile defense and on nuclear weapons on ships other than strategic ballistic missile submarines.113

Proposal: Limits on boost-glide systems 
Name: James Timbie  
States Involved: Russia, United States  
# of Parties: Bilateral 
Summary: Russia and the United States commit for ten years to test and deploy boost-glide vehicles for delivery of nuclear weapons only on ICBMs, and to count them and their launchers against New START warhead and launcher limits.114  

Proposal: Kinzhal Restrictions 
Name: James Timbie  
States Involved: Russia 
# of Parties: Unilateral 
Summary: Russia commits not to test or deploy the Kinzhal for delivery of nuclear weapons (consistent with commitments on other hypersonic systems) for ten years.115  

Proposal: Restrict INF systems near borders 
Name: James Timbie  
States Involved: Russia 
# of Parties: Unilateral 
Summary: Russia commits for ten years to limit nuclear systems to a small number (fewer than one hundred) deployed a specified distance from its borders.116  

Proposal: American INF Limits 
Name: James Timbie  
States Involved: United States 
# of Parties: Unilateral  
Summary: The United States commits for ten years to limit nuclear systems (for which it has no current plans) to the same number deployed in the continental United States.117  

Proposal: Chinese INF Limits  
Name: James Timbie  
States Involved: China 
# of Parties: Unilateral 
Summary: China commits for ten years to limit nuclear systems (including nuclear variants of the df-21 and df-26) to the same number deployed a specified distance from its borders.118

Proposal: Restrictions on nuclear-powered conventional systems 
Name: James Timbie  
States Involved: Russia, United States 
# of Parties: Bilateral  
Summary: Russia and the United States commit for ten years not to test or deploy nuclear-powered aircraft or cruise missiles.119  

Proposal: A trilateral treaty to limit missile launchers and bombers  
Name: James Acton, Thomas MacDonald, and Pranay Vaddi 
States Involved: China, Russia, United States 
# of Parties: Trilateral 
Summary: China, Russia, and the United States limit themselves to an equal number of accountable launchers and accountable bombers, with the exception of any launchers for SLBMs that were converted into launchers for SLCMs prior to entry into force. The limit chosen should allow each state to make modest increases in launchers and bombers after the treaty’s entry into force.120  

Proposal: BMD Commitments 
Name: RAND (Samuel Charap, John J. Drennan, Luke Griffith, Edward Geist, and Brian G. Carlson) 
States Involved: United States 
# of Parties: Unilateral 
Summary: U.S. policymakers consider self-restraint commitments on BMD deployment plans as a way to reduce Moscow’s concerns about preemption. For example, the United States could provide Russia with annual accounts of its inventory of BMD interceptors, launchers, and associated radars; its ten-year plan for any increases in that inventory; and a commitment to advance notification of any change in those plans.121  

Other

Proposal: Cyber Convention 
Name: Jakob Hake 
States Involved: Nonnuclear-weapon states, nuclear weapon states 
# of Parties: Trilateral 
Summary: States make a political commitment not to use their cyber capabilities against civilian critical infrastructure and nuclear command and control.122  

Proposal: U.S.-Chinese fissile material management regime 
Name: James Acton, Thomas MacDonald, and Pranay Vaddi 
States Involved: China, United States 
# of Parties: Bilateral  
Summary: China and the United States declare a joint politically binding cutoff in the production of weapon-usable fissile material for any purpose and commit to talks about mutual confidence building.If China is still producing, or plans to produce, fissile material for civilian purposes, it should agree to a cutoff in production for military purposes and to place all newly produced HEU and separated plutonium under IAEA safeguards.After agreeing to a cutoff, China and the United States should exchange confidential declarations about their stockpiles of weapon-usable fissile material.123  

Proposal: Forgo Denial Operations 
Name: Vince Manzo 
States Involved: Russia, United States 
# of Parties: Bilateral 
Summary: The United States and Russia agree to forgo sophisticated denial operations. This pledge would not preclude the standard concealment measures at ICBM bases permitted under New START. The pledge would codify mutual restraint in operations intended to challenge each side’s ability to accurately monitor and assess the other’s strategic nuclear forces.124  

Proposal: Public Nuclear Education 
Name: Manpreet Sethi 
States Involved: Nuclear weapon states, nonnuclear-weapon states  
# of Parties: Unilateral 
Summary: Experts produce individual or joint studies and movies on the effects of deterrence breakdown to help build constituencies that support nuclear risk reduction and push political leaders into action.125

Note: Lisa Michelini at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace assisted in the compilation of the data in this table. The proposals described in this table are our summaries, which have been significantly condensed to fit in the table.

Regarding Russia, we cannot predict a future arms control course until the Ukraine war ends or is cooled to a frozen conflict unlikely to re-erupt into an escalatory war. The most that arms control advocates can do is to conduct unofficial discussions with Russian experts who are willing to speculate jointly on possible equations of forces that could help stabilize postwar relations between Russia and NATO states. For this to happen, the Russian government would need to reassure participants that they would not be harmed for being involved in such meetings.

Assuming nuclear war can be averted with Russia, China is the more complex challenge. Earlier sections of this paper suggest the need to explicitly convey that the United States seeks political-economic coexistence and recognizes that military policy toward China (and Russia) must be based on mutual vulnerability. President Xi and his designees need to clarify under what conditions, if any, they would pursue negotiated risk reduction or arms control and what central objectives and concepts would inform their approach. To determine this, Xi—like Putin—would need to widen the circle of experts who advise him (i.e., increase the diversity of perspectives he is presented) and perhaps override resistance of the sort that military establishments often naturally pose to arms control. The mission of military leaders is to find ways to deter or defeat adversaries, not to be deterred by them; arms control is premised on mutual deterrence as a less dangerous and costly strategy than nuclear warfighting. Leaders will need to clarify to their own security establishments that, in the words of President Reagan, they want “equitable agreement” based on acceptance of mutual nuclear deterrence and clarify to their adversaries “all the things we could do for them if they’d quit their bad acting.”126 Leaders must then commit to sustained dialogue on these matters.127

Reagan’s admonition to clarify what gains the United States would provide in return has largely been missing in American approaches to China and vice versa. For better or worse, the rapid buildup and improved survivability of China’s nuclear arsenal should alleviate Beijing’s worries about preemptive U.S. conventional or nuclear attacks on China’s deterrent. This could create a better basis for dialogue on both sides’ plans for future offensive and defensive strategic forces (including all types of nuclear weapons). But, without some sort of diplomatic signal from President Xi, Washington is more likely to enhance its own (and allied) military power in ways that will put the onus back on Beijing to redouble its own buildup. American leaders, for the most part, understand at least to some degree that arms control and confidence-building measures can encourage political accommodation. Whether President Xi shares either this understanding or inclination is unclear.

A U.S. administration’s willingness to consider and discuss possible restraints on missile defenses would provide a major test of Chinese (and Russian) intentions. If Beijing and Moscow declined to send senior people to meet their American counterparts and negotiate an agenda for a more detailed expert dialogue on possible packages of restraint in offensive and defensive capabilities and activities, they would be exposed as the main impediments to nuclear risk reduction. The world would have evidence to conclude that Russia and China prefer nuclear arms-building to strategic stability and nuclear restraint. And, by expressing a willingness to explore possible offense-defense trade-offs, the United States would have risked nothing material.

Explorations of missile defense limits would logically lead to explorations of controls on missiles—be they nuclear or conventionally armed. Such explorations would need to precede actual negotiations, which would take years if they were to lead to agreement. The near-term purpose would be to clarify whether and under what conditions Chinese and American leaders are willing to reciprocally restrain capabilities that affect nuclear stability.

Missiles with ranges greater than five hundred kilometers deserve priority because they would figure in nearly all scenarios of war that escalate to nuclear use—purposefully or inadvertently. The United States in Iraq and elsewhere deployed and used ballistic and cruise missiles with conventional warheads to precisely destroy valuable adversary targets and reduce the political-legal risks of collateral casualties that would have self-deterred the use of nuclear weapons. Now Russia, China, and others are similarly expanding their arsenals of conventionally armed missiles and missile defense interceptors. But for purposes of verifiable restraint, the use of remote national technical means to determine whether a given missile is carrying a nuclear or a conventional warhead is nearly impossible. If two or more countries wanted to put an overall cap on the number of missiles above a certain range that they possess or deploy, how would they value conventionally armed versus nuclear-armed variants? A highly accurate conventionally armed missile may hold a valuable military target sufficiently at risk and then be judged more useful than a nuclear-armed missile because it would be less likely to produce (possibly illegal) collateral damage. This would place the burden of risking initiation of nuclear use onto the adversary. All of this makes such conventional systems more credible and effective deterrents in some ways.

One solution is to eliminate all variants—nuclear or conventional—of missiles with a specified range, as the INF Treaty did. An alternative—depending on Russia’s political and strategic condition after the Ukraine war—is to negotiate a U.S.-Russia-China cap on the total number of launchers and/or countable weapons with ranges above five hundred kilometers and leave it to each government to determine what mix of nuclear, conventional, and missile defense capabilities they want these weapons to have.128

Trade-offs between competitors’ offensive missiles with ranges greater than five hundred kilometers—whatever their payload—or between such missiles and defensive interceptors are among the only remaining plausible applications of old-school, Cold War–style arms control. A basis for balancing equations can be found. Otherwise the increased variation in delivery systems, payloads (nuclear, conventional, malware), targeting, and command and control capabilities, along with the move beyond bipolar competition, will overwhelm negotiators searching for equitable and verifiable balances.

These latter difficulties are why future forms of arms restraint will need to focus ever more on states’ behaviors and the targets and effects of operations rather than on hardware or software. Restrictions on targets should already be informed by the Laws of Armed Conflict. However, as Russia’s operations in the Ukraine war indicate, restrictions on targeting in urban environments need further clarification and must be joined with a greater will to mobilize international punishment of violators.

Restraints on effects of operations could include the production of debris in outer space (since space debris threatens the future operation of all nations’ civilian space assets) or the engineering of cyber-intrusion malware and payloads to be highly discriminating and not widely propagable.129 Targeting nuclear power reactors with any weapon that could cause a release of radiation could be prohibited. Nuclear-armed states and their allies could be urged to debate the desirability and feasibility of foreswearing the use of nuclear weapons in urban areas to cause fires that could plausibly lead to nuclear winter.130 Restraints necessary to fulfill such a commitment would be impossible to verify. Their value would instead be in the public and leadership education that would occur through debating the matter and the political costs of appearing unlikely to uphold a proffered restraint.

The logic of behavioral or effects-focused restraint can be seen through consideration of an assertion that it is impossible to define and therefore prohibit space capabilities as “weapons.” Former U.S. Under Secretary of State Christopher Ford likened space weapons to the human hand, which “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?”131

The constructive arms control rejoinder is that 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 then 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 anti-satellite 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 earth. That is, as the United Kingdom noted in 2020, to ban or control specific technologies beyond weapons of mass destruction in space is not currently feasible, but global interests could be served by restraining actors’ behaviors and their effects.132
 

Endnotes

• 59Pavel Podvig and Javier Serrat, “Lock Them Up: Zero-Deployed Non-Strategic Nuclear Weapons in Europe,” UNIDIR, October 2, 2023.
• 60Alexey Arbatov, “Saving Strategic Arms Control,” Survival 62 (5) (2020): 79–104.
• 61Timbie, “A Way Forward.”
• 62Ibid.
• 63Ibid.
• 64Ibid.
• 65Ibid.
• 66Acton, MacDonald, and Vaddi, Reimagining Nuclear Arms Control: A Comprehensive Approach.
• 67Ibid.
• 68Ibid.
• 69Laura Grego, “A Better Missile Defense Strategy,” Arms Control Association, 2021.
• 70Brooks, “The End of Arms Control?”
• 71John Borrie, “Nuclear Risk and the Technological Domain: A Three-Step Approach,” in Nuclear Risk Reduction: Closing Pathways to Use, ed. Wilfred Wan (Geneva, Switzerland: UNIDIR, 2020).
• 72Thomas Cheney, Jakob Hake, Haneen Khalid, et al., Arms Control Idol: Ideas for the Future of Strategic Cooperation and Community (London: Kings College London, 2021).
• 73Brooks, “The End of Arms Control?”
• 74Acton, MacDonald, and Vaddi, Reimagining Nuclear Arms Control: A Comprehensive Approach.
• 75Ibid.
• 76Cited in Samuel Charap, John J. Drennen, Luke Griffith, Ed Geist, and Brian G. Carlson, Mitigating Challenges to U.S.-Russia Strategic Stability (Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND Corporation, 2022).
• 77Arbatov, “Saving Strategic Arms Control.”
• 78Charap, Drennen, Griffith, Geist, and Carlson, Mitigating Challenges to U.S.-Russia Strategic Stability.
• 79Cited in ibid.
• 80Ulrich Künh, “Nuclear Risk in the Euro-Atlantic,” in Nuclear Risk Reduction: Closing Pathways to Use, ed. Wilfred Wan (Geneva, Switzerland: UNIDIR, 2020).
• 81Ibid.
• 82Borrie, “Nuclear Risk and the Technological Domain.”
• 83Künh, “Nuclear Risk in the Euro-Atlantic.”
• 84Ibid.
• 85Manpreet Sethi, “Nuclear Risks in Southern Asia: The Chain Conundrum,” in Nuclear Risk Reduction: Closing Pathways to Use, ed. Wilfred Wan (Geneva, Switzerland: UNIDIR, 2020).
• 86Ibid.
• 87Ibid.
• 88Ibid.
• 89Acton, MacDonald, and Vaddi, Reimagining Nuclear Arms Control: A Comprehensive Approach.
• 90Vince Manzo, Nuclear Arms Control Without a Treaty: Risks and Options after New START (Arlington, Va.: CNA, 2019).
• 91Ibid.
• 92Ibid.
• 93Ibid.
• 94Charap, Drennen, Griffith, Geist, and Carlson, Mitigating Challenges to U.S.-Russia Strategic Stability.
• 95Ibid.
• 96Timbie, “A Way Forward.”
• 97Brooks, “The End of Arms Control?”
• 98Ankit Panda, “Multipolarity, Great Power Competition, and Nuclear Risk Reduction,” in Nuclear Risk Reduction: Closing Pathways to Use, ed. Wilfred Wan (Geneva, Switzerland: UNIDIR, 2020).
• 99Ibid.
• 100Sethi, “Nuclear Risks in Southern Asia: The Chain Conundrum.”
• 101Ibid.
• 102Arms Control Association, “Toward a New Nuclear Arms Control Framework Arrangement,” Issue Brief 14 (7) (October 26, 2022).
• 103Acton, MacDonald, and Vaddi, Reimagining Nuclear Arms Control: A Comprehensive Approach.
• 104Amy J. Nelson and Michael O’Hanlon, “All START: A Proposal for Moving beyond US-Russia Arms Control,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, March 20, 2023.
• 105Steven Pifer, “Enhancing Strategic Stability: New START and Beyond,” Arms Control Today (2021).
• 106Arbatov, “Saving Strategic Arms Control.”
• 107Pifer, “Enhancing Strategic Stability: New START and Beyond.”
• 108Brooks, “The End of Arms Control?”
• 109Manzo, Nuclear Arms Control Without a Treaty: Risks and Options after New START.
• 110Charap, Drennen, Griffith, Geist, and Carlson, Mitigating Challenges to U.S.-Russia Strategic Stability.
• 111Ibid.
• 112Ibid.
• 113Timbie, “A Way Forward.”
• 114Ibid.
• 115Ibid.
• 116Ibid.
• 117Ibid.
• 118Ibid.
• 119Ibid.
• 120Acton, MacDonald, and Vaddi, Reimagining Nuclear Arms Control: A Comprehensive Approach.
• 121Charap, Drennen, Griffith, Geist, and Carlson, Mitigating Challenges to U.S.-Russia Strategic Stability.
• 122Cheney, Hake, Khalid, et al., Arms Control Idol: Ideas for the Future of Strategic Cooperation and Community.
• 123Acton, MacDonald, and Vaddi, Reimagining Nuclear Arms Control: A Comprehensive Approach.
• 124Manzo, Nuclear Arms Control Without a Treaty: Risks and Options after New START.
• 125Sethi, “Nuclear Risks in Southern Asia: The Chain Conundrum.”
• 126Reagan, An American Life, 552, 597.
• 127The need for such dialogue is reflected in this insightful comment from Robert Jervis: “Actors often misunderstand how others will interpret their behavior not only because they fail to grasp others’ theories and images of them, but because they view their own behavior in a biased way. Individuals and states generally think well of themselves, believe that they have benevolent motives, and see their actions as reasonable and legitimate.” Robert Jervis, “Signaling and Perception: Drawing Inferences and Projecting Images,” in Political Psychology, ed. K.R. Monroe (Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Publishers, 2002), 308. The time required for such dialogue to work was illustrated by President Reagan. Years of often secret correspondence and one-on-one discussions were needed before the Reagan administration (and then its successor) could communicate its desire for “equitable” terms and then find an agreeable formula that would “take account of the interrelationship between the offense and the defense,” as Reagan wrote to Gorbachev in an October 31, 1985, letter. Reagan, An American Life, 630–631.
• 128The erstwhile progressive Russian military expert Alexei Arbatov proposed in a 2020 publication that Russian and Chinese needs for relatively equitable terms with the United States in any negotiated treaty could be addressed by establishing a common ceiling on each side’s total number of “strategic land- and sea-based ballistic missiles, gravity bombs and air-launched cruise missiles, as well as land-based intermediate and short-range ballistic and cruise missiles. It could also include present and future boost-glide intercontinental and medium-range systems, intercontinental cruise missiles and long-range underwater autonomous vehicles.” Arbatov, “Trilateral Nuclear Arms Control,” 58. Chinese nuclear policy expert Tong Zhao makes a similar proposal: “set an equal ceiling for the total number of deployed ground-launched INF- and intercontinental-range ballistic missile (ICBM) launchers, submarine-launched ballistic missile launchers, and heavy bombers.” Tong Zhao, “The Case for China’s Participation in Trilateral Arms Control,” in Kühn, Trilateral Arms Control? 79.
• 129Perri Adams, Dave Aitel, George Perkovich, and J.D. Work, “Responsible Cyber Offense,” Lawfare, August 2, 2021.
• 130George Perkovich, Toward Accountable Nuclear Deterrents: How Much Is Too Much? (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2020).
• 131Christopher A. Ford, “Arms Control in Outer Space: History and Prospects,” Arms Control and International Security Papers 1 (12) (2020): 2.
• 132UN General Assembly, “Reducing Space Threats through Norms, Rules, and Principles of Responsible Behaviours,” A/Res/75/36, December 16, 2020.

Conclusion

Although the nuclear arms control measures deployed by U.S. and Russian leaders from 1970 through 2010 may now be ill-suited to the multipolar politics and multiuse technologies of the 2020s and 2030s, the human interests in restraining the propensity to war and its destructiveness and costs remain. Since 1945, these interests have prevailed—however unevenly and imperfectly—in limiting the competition and occasional conflicts between nuclear-armed competitors. All nine nuclear-armed states could have built more nuclear weapons of greater destructiveness. In the few times they clashed, they could have killed more of each other’s personnel than they did. The value of negotiated restraints as distinct from de facto deterrence is that they communicate interests in avoiding or reducing the destructiveness and cost of war. They convey each other’s intentions in word and deed. Agreement or nonagreement on mutual restraints can alleviate or confirm concerns that security is decreasing. Conversely, failure to negotiate earnestly or to uphold agreements later can rally global opposition against the bellicose party.

True, restraints in developing, deploying, and using weapons are easier to negotiate when relations among neighbors are settled and the likelihood of conflict is low. Negotiating such restraints when you most need them—when relations are hostile and fear of aggression is growing—is another matter. But that truism should be complemented by two others.133 First, the political and diplomatic work necessary to conceptualize and then negotiate arms control measures can encourage and facilitate political warming among competitors. This happened between the United States and the Soviet Union at times during the Cold War. And, although the multipolarity of today’s main competitions—the United States, Russia, and China; India, Pakistan, China, and the United States—makes political cooperation much more difficult, the alternative of unrestrained arms-building and competition is more harmful.

Second, trying to negotiate restraints presents little material danger. No evidence suggests that the United States or Russia has agreed to an arms control limitation that then caused or was even a significant contributing factor to victimhood in an adversary’s aggression. The perceived harms of exploring negotiations (as distinct from agreeing to disadvantageous terms) are in the minds of leaders and political factions, not in new threats that would somehow arise from an attempted negotiation. Politicians understandably worry that opponents might whip up ignorant outrage at those who would negotiate with national enemies. The dilemma here—between risking personal political loss for the sake of reducing national physical danger—is less portentous than the security dilemmas between nations that do not even attempt arms control. Americans and their allies—as well as Chinese, Indians, Pakistanis, North Koreans, and others—need to know whether their competitors are acting defensively and are misperceived as being offensive, or whether they truly are inclined to use force to change the status quo. Negotiated arms restraint is the safest, most cost-effective way to resolve this dilemma.

Endnotes

• 133For a thoughtful discussion of the value of revising assumptions about arms control, see Naomi Egel and Jane Vaynman, “Reconsidering Arms Control Orthodoxy,” War on the Rocks [blog], March 26, 2021.