Arms Control

Arms control is a means of addressing a major and enduring global social problem: arms proliferation. This entails the production and spread of weapons, ranging from small arms and light weapons, through missiles and military aircraft, up to weapons of mass destruction. Arms control involves a variety of efforts to restrict or ban the development, stockpiling, proliferation, and use of these weapons. While much of the literature on arms control focuses on formal negotiations and treaties, this should neither refute the importance of claims making by peace and disarmament organizations nor obscure the importance of informal controls and, at the extreme, the use of force to prevent proliferation.

States arm themselves because of what is called the “security dilemma.” States exist in an anarchical international system where there is no central authority capable of providing them with security. Hence they must try to protect themselves against external foes as well as the threat of civil violence (by guerrillas, warlords, etc.). Security measures can take many forms, but typically they involve maintaining armed forces and forging alliances. Other states may see arms and alliances as a threat, and they in turn normally seek their own arms and alliances to protect themselves. The upshot is to augment general mistrust and insecurity and to foster arms races.

Arms are easily available, as about 100 countries manufacture small arms. Virtually every industrialized country manufactures an array of weapons to supply its own military; most of these countries also sell arms internationally, with the United States in particular, followed by European nations, Russia, and China, as the major world suppliers of armaments. The global arms trade—legal and illegal—is, by some estimates, approaching a trillion dollars annually, and arms industries are clearly of major economic and often strategic importance to supplying countries.

Here we see a further manifestation of the security dilemma. While selling arms potentially serves the national interest of seller states—beyond profit, there is the hope of strengthening allies—this is not the case when opposing states buy arms or contribute to regional or national instability. Hence arms-supplying nations often try to curb the sales of specific weapons to particular countries by a mixture of collaboration and the exertion of pressure. Such informal arms controls work reasonably well with advanced computers and sensitive electronic components but have minimal impact on small arms and light weapons. Selective sales, which can be considered a primitive form of arms control, sometimes backfire. Following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, the United States supplied the latter with anti-aircraft missiles and other sophisticated weapons that subsequently became part of the arsenal of groups that the United States came to regard as enemies.

At the other extreme is the use of force to impose arms controls. Perhaps the outstanding example is the 1981 Israeli bombing of the Osirak nuclear reactor in Iraq. Saddam Hussein started a clandestine nuclear [Page 55]program in the 1970s and likely would have acquired nuclear weapons if the reactor had not been destroyed. The U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 was supposedly motivated by the fear that Saddam had developed weapons of mass destruction after having expelled UN weapons inspectors in 1998. The inspections, however, proved to have been effective. The possibility that Iran might be developing nuclear weapons has generated pressure from the United Nations as well as implied threats of military action by the United States and Israel.

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