Nuclear Obstacles to Renewed Arms Control Negotiations

Alex Weisiger is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania.

With the collapse of the Cold War arms control regime, a natural question is what would be necessary to bring about a resumption of serious arms control efforts. This article considers this question from the perspective of political science scholarship on the reasons why adversaries do or do not negotiate. Much of the arms control discussion focuses quite appropriately on the technical challenges that arms control agreements must overcome: how can adversaries credibly share the information that proves that they are complying with an agreement without rendering themselves more vulnerable to espionage? Before we can seriously consider how to make a given agreement enforceable, however, we first need for the two sides to be seriously open, at least in principle, to striking a deal, a condition that does not seem to be the case today.

When it comes to openness to negotiation, there is a basic tradeoff—identified by Thomas Schelling and built upon by subsequent scholars of international conflict—between the shared benefits of cooperation and each party’s desire to achieve the best possible deal on the issues that divide them. The benefits of cooperation are largely, but not entirely, the opportunity to avoid the costs of competition, which include the immediate costs of military investment that might otherwise have been unnecessary and, more significantly, the potential costs should the absence of an arms control agreement lead to otherwise avoidable major crisis or war. These gains are set against potential concessions that need to be made to reach an agreement, which could include both the reduction in the strength of one’s military forces (potentially exacerbated by concerns about the other side cheating on the agreement) and broader political concessions that need to be made as part of an agreement.

From this perspective, there are a couple of fairly obvious reasons why contemporary great powers have evinced comparatively little interest in arms control. Most obviously, leaders in the key powers have not seen the costs of the failure to reach an agreement as sufficiently significant to be concerning. It took the Cuban Missile Crisis to drive home the threat of nuclear conflict during the Cold War; in the contemporary era, and despite the serious deterioration in Sino-American and Russo-American relations, nothing remotely comparable has occurred to suggest that failure to agree on arms limitations might have catastrophic consequences. Indeed, the longer that we live with multiple states having nuclear weapons yet none using them, the harder it likely will be to generate the kind of concern that motivated Cold War arms control negotiators. Just as North Korean nuclear threats no longer command the attention of Western publics, so Russian President Vladimir Putin’s nuclear threats in Ukraine, despite increasing concerns in the short run, may exacerbate this problem should—as we all sincerely hope— Russian nukes remain unused.

This situation is complicated by the distributional temptation to try to trade arms control agreement for an adversary’s political concessions, and to ensure that any agreement leaves one’s own country in the strongest possible position. In the same way that wartime adversaries worry that expressing willingness to negotiate might be seen as conveying one’s willingness to make painful concessions, advocates of arms control in Washington, Beijing, and Moscow must worry that being seen as too eager to negotiate will convince the other side that they can trade concessions on arms control for gains in political disputes. US officials would not, for example, want the price of arms control being something that significantly improves Russia’s ability to triumph in Ukraine, while a Russian official interested in resurrecting arms control must overcome opposition from others who would like to keep the reestablishment of nuclear arms control as a bargaining chip for Ukraine negotiations down the line. Indeed, were an American president to reach an arms control agreement, it is honestly hard to imagine a significant faction within Congress not opposing it on the basis that any concessions are not worth the arms control gains. China’s apparent willingness to use the hotline with Washington for signaling has a similar logic: the more that Americans emphasize the importance of a hotline, the more that refusing to respond might be seen as a useful signal of Chinese resolution in disagreements. Political pressure from other states, international organizations (IOs), and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) can potentially help to address this concern by reducing the need for any one primary party to an eventual agreement to take the lead in promoting negotiations, but there are limits to the effectiveness of such pressure.

What might change this situation? A nuclear crisis is an obvious answer, though it is not necessarily obvious what form that crisis would have to take to produce the desired result. A serious nuclear crisis in Ukraine would generate significant concern, but might also convince Russian policymakers that nuclear brinkmanship is a strategy that is worth hanging onto and that American uncertainty about the exact nature and deployment of the Russian nuclear arsenal is strategically beneficial. In Sino-American relations, China’s no-first-use policy limits the likelihood of leaders adopting policies that they know run the risk of triggering a nuclear crisis. The more likely scenario would be an incident akin to the 1983 Able Archer crisis, in which regular military exercises by one side are misinterpreted by the other as indicators of imminent attack. It is not obvious, however, that this incident, or other Cold War cases in which technical failures or human errors generated fears of imminent nuclear attack, substantially influenced governments’ openness to arms control. A nuclear crisis in South Asia or significant nuclear proliferation in the Middle East would admittedly create incentives for arms control, but here the technical challenges of combining monitoring with security in relatively small forces would be more significant. In short, even before we consider the technical challenges that would confront arms control negotiators who need to balance inspection with security, it is not obvious how significant momentum toward arms control negotiations might be generated.