Arms Control

Types of Agreements

Arms control may encompass both formal and informal means of agreement. Formal arms control agreements consist of signed documents, which are considered legally binding. They are normally subject to ratification by their parties' respective national legislatures before they enter into force. Formal arms control agreements seek to achieve their goals through [Page 94]restricting or reducing the numbers of military weapons or by placing limits on their operation and can include a variety of verification and transparency measures, such as on-site inspections, reciprocal exhibitions of military hardware, notifications, joint exercises, and data exchanges.

Informal approaches may be either written or simply announced and can include reciprocal unilateral declarations (of arms reductions or force realignments), working group consultations, unilateral initiatives taken with the expectation of contributing to resolving political or military tensions, and participation in multinational groups aimed at combating the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.

Developments after World War II

The modern concept of arms control arose in the late 1950s and early 1960s as a means of moderating U.S.-Soviet arms race behavior. Arms control theorists of that era postulated that given the means to independently verify military capabilities through newly developed satellite technology, the superpowers, through the implementation of incrementally more encompassing and intrusive arms control and inspection arrangements, starting with very modest initiatives, should be able to surmount the distrust that had given rise to the Cold War.

Since the rise of modern arms control theory, an intense debate has arisen over the prospects and necessary conditions for arms control's success or failure. On the one hand, the community favoring arms control has largely focused on the intangible benefits allegedly accruing from the process of negotiation, which include greater mutual understanding, deliberate focusing of national energies on more-stable avenues of competition, and lessening of political tension. This school of thought has generally assumed that arms control could transcend political tensions among prospective arms control partners. Scholars take the negotiation and signing of increasingly ambitious arms control arrangements by more and more states on both a bilateral and a multilateral basis as evidence of the success of this approach.

On the other hand, those skeptical of arms control have focused on the allegedly poor track record of tangible arms control results, noting that arms control has seemed most feasible where it is least needed. They have also taken issue with the very assumptions of arms control theory, arguing that arms control has emphasized the inherently futile task of finding technical solutions to essentially political problems. Skeptics of arms control have also emphasized problems of verification and compliance. The essential verification problem has been the limited ability of surveillance technology fully and adequately to monitor the activities of a treaty party who was determined to find ways to cheat on its obligations. The compliance problem revolves around the reluctance of some states to act on unavoidably ambiguous evidence of cheating, where standards of evidence are set unrealistically high, out of concern that raising such issues would itself complicate the prospects for further progress in the arms control process. These two problems are, according to the critics of arms control, compounded by the asymmetries between an open and law-abiding Western culture, and those closed, controlled, and distrusting governments bent on exploiting advantages gained by cheating on assumed international obligations.

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