The last few years have not been good ones for arms control.  Russian arms control violations, for instance, led to the collapse of both the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty and the Open Skies Treaty (OST), and multiple instances have also surfaced of Russian violations of the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention (BTWC), and even some provisions of New START, the last remaining strategic arms control treaty between Washington and Moscow. 

Notwithstanding their ostensible policy moratoria on nuclear weapons testing, moreover, both Russia and Chinahave been revealed to have been conducting secret small-scale nuclear explosive tests notwithstanding their ostensible support of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, while Russia is developing a space-based nuclear weapons systemprohibited by the Outer Space Treaty.  With New START’s expiration in February of 2026, moreover, not a single strategic arms agreement remains in force, and despite U.S. efforts dating back at least to 2019 to get Russia and China to the table to develop a trilateral “next-generation” new arms control framework, there seems little prospect of a new agreement being negotiated any time soon. 

To the contrary, China still shows no interest in any form of arms control at all, and is engaged in a massive nuclear build-up that involves not only the construction of hundreds of new Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) silos, but also an expansion of its nuclear weapons “pit” production facilities.  China, in fact, is building at a pace that will give Beijing strategic parity in operationally-deployed nuclear weapons at around New START treaty levels by 2035.  Meanwhile, Russia continues to expand the arsenal of theater-range nuclear systems it amassed in part by refusing to honor its arms reduction promises under the Presidential Nuclear Initiatives (PNIs) of 1991-92 and by violating the INF Treaty.  In response, the Washington expert policy community has now long since come to coalesce around the idea that our current deterrent force is inadequate, and that as a result of our current “two-peer” nuclear deterrence problem, the United States now needs – at the very least – to upload additional nuclear weapons onto its existing strategic deliver systems. 

Nevertheless, hope in the arms control and disarmament community seems to spring eternal, and even the Second Trump Administration has said that it would like to negotiate a new arms control accord.  As strategists and leaders consider what arms control arrangements (if any) might serve the interests of strategic stability without undermining or precluding what Western nations now clearly need to do in order to augment deterrence in the face of growing Russian and Chinese threats, this paper hopes to serve as a reference guide to the conceptual terrain.  For present purposes, I offer no specific recommendations about which of the measures discussed herein, if any, can or should be pursued today.  Nevertheless, I hope this paper will be useful in helping the reader understand the range of what has been attempted in the past and is theoretically possible.

I.              Purposes of Arms Control

Arms control agreements do not always do so, unfortunately, but they are at least capable of serving a variety of valuable functions in the international security environment.  A key point always to keep in mind in assessing this value, however, is that arms control is not an end in itself, but rather a tool by means of which to protect and advance security interests and those of international peace and security more broadly.  Arms control agreements arms control diplomacy, in other words – and arms control diplomats themselves, for that matter – must therefore always be understood to be the servants of national security and be employed in its pursuit. 

Arms control being thus an instrument of national policy rather than an intrinsic objective thereof, leaders reverse this connection at their strategic peril.  Sometimes arms control is indeed exactly what one needs, but at other times it must be refused, or perhaps – if it is in place – even abandoned.  Western leaders have invariably professed this commonsensical view, but it is not always clear that they have genuinely believed it.  The point is hence worth stressing here, for clarity. 

Nonetheless, when things are properly understood, it is clear that arms control agreements can, under the right circumstances, do valuable things.  It can, for instance, serve at least 10 potential purposes:

• Prevent actual or potential strategic competitors from acquiring weapons or other military capabilities – either in terms of types of systems or of the level of armament (i.e., numbers) – that would be undermine deterrence, tempt belligerent powers to aggression, or otherwise undermine strategic stability;

• Facilitate or require transparency and the exchange of information in ways that help prevent or reduce the risk of dangerous misunderstandings, errors, accidents, or strategic miscalculations that could lead to (or exacerbate) conflict;[1]

• Create or preserve technical or institutional communications channels between adversarial parties in crisis or conflict, thereby providing means through which relevant decisionmakers can communicate with each other to help manage escalation risks, discuss possible ways to avoid, limit, or resolve a conflict that is already in progress, or otherwise to conduct the sort of information exchanges described in point (2) above;

• Provide verification procedures for reassuring each party to an arms control agreement that its counterparties are in fact complying with the deal, or at the very least for ensuring that any violations come to light as quickly as possible;

• Set forth and provide for the implementation of agreed-upon reductions in armaments, allowing parties to an agreement to reduce the arsenals with which its parties threaten each other;

• Prohibit or otherwise regulate – and hence potentially reduce the incidence of – behaviors by parties that might otherwise increase the risk of escalation and conflict, or perhaps (as does the Law of Armed Conflict in aspiring to regulate the barbarity of warfare more generally) shape or channel behavior in a conflict into forms that are less likely to lead to catastrophe;

• Help parties to an agreement limit their respective expenditures on armaments or other military systems, thereby allowing leaders to devote more money to other national policy priorities;

• Demarcate a limited group of countries that must unavoidably be indefinitely or temporarily “permitted” to possess certain types of military capability, while prohibiting others from acquiring such dangerous tools;

• Help national leaders preserve forms of armament that they deem essential to deterrence or otherwise necessary for national security, by clearly delineating permissible systems from problematic ones, and by providing a formal means (e.g., in treaty text) of articulating or illustrating agreed-upon concepts for what types of system or armament levels are more (or less) destabilizing than others; or

• Set in place agreed-upon frameworks for permitting and/or placing limits upon particular countries’ military capabilities in ways that accommodate the otherwise-destabilizing rise of “challenger powers” while yet reducing the risk that untrammeled strategic competition will lead to conflict, or in some other way set in place procedures or formalize understandings intended to reduce tensions and minimize the degree to which countries are likely to wish to acquire additional armaments or to war against each other.

II.            Arms Control Typologies

Beyond simply these ten ways to think about the purposes of arms control, one could also categorize arms control agreements in various ways.  I can imagine several possible relevant typologies, for instance, as follows below.

Bilateral vs. Multilateral

Agreements, for instance, could be distinguished on the basis of whether they are bilateral or multilateral (or perhaps “plurilateral”).  New START, for instance, was a bilateral agreement between the United States and the Russian Federation, whereas the Chemical Weapons Convention is multilateral on a very large scale.  The START agreement of 1991 between the United States and the Soviet Union began as a bilateral treaty, but was subsequently multilateralized after the breakup of the USSR created a number of new states that each succeeded to the limits articulated therein. 

Symmetric vs. Asymmetric 

Arms control restrictions can also be distinguished on the basis of whether they impose rules or restrictions symmetrically upon parties to the agreement or have different limits or rules for different parties.  Strategic arms treaties between Washington and Moscow have tended to be symmetric in terms of their basic rules, though they often nonetheless allowed the parties some flexibility in fine-tuning their specific force mix within specified overall numerical limits.  Nevertheless, the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922 – which set different naval tonnage limits for capital ships and aircraft carriers for the United States, Britain, France, Italy, and Japan – shows that it is also quite possible to have a treaty that imposes limits asymmetrically.

Legally Binding vs. “Politically” Binding

Treaties that are negotiated and signed by officials enjoying what are called “full powers” on behalf of their national governments, and which are thereafter formally ratified by the governments in question, become legally binding agreements under international law and are generally applied and interpreted pursuant to the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties.  This is the stereotypical “heart” of the arms control business.  It is also possible, however, to have meaningful agreements that don’t rise to this legal standard, and that are thus merely “morally” or “politically” binding.  Most well-known arms control agreements – and, by definition, all arms control treaties – are the former, but examples of the latter have also occurred.  Neither the old Russo-American PNIs nor the more recent “Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action” (JCPOA) Iranian nuclear deal of 2015 were legally binding, for example, nor even were actual signed agreementsin the formal sense at all.

Reciprocal vs. Unilateral

Arms control measures are commonly adopted on the basis of actual or applied reciprocity – that is, each side undertakes to adopt and comply with them on the understanding that the other side will too – and this is indeed the general rule.  This common practice, however, does not necessarily preclude arms control occurring merely through the articulation of unilateral measures by the parties that are, in principle, adopted entirely independently of each other.  With the PNIs and then later the strategic arms reductions subsequently codified in the Moscow Treaty of 2002, for instance, both sides theoretically intended to comply irrespective of whether the other side did. 

(It might not even be too much to call it “arms control” even where a country adopts a framework of restraint both unilaterally and alone.  In 1984, after all, William van Cleave pointed out that in the Western democracies “arms are always controlled.  They are controlled and limited by traditional values, by political and budgeting processes, and by the influences of the media and public opinion.”[2])

            A Functional Typology

Perhaps more interestingly, however, one can categorize types of arms control agreement from a functional perspective.  In this regard, and drawing in part upon my abovementioned list of potential arms control purposes, I would suggest at least five basic categories, as follows below.  (As will be seen, these categories are not mutually exclusive, and some agreements contain elements serving fitting into more than one of them.)

• Capability-limitation agreements that impose arms caps or reductions, or that prohibit certain types of weaponry.  This is the most stereotypically “arms control-y” type of agreement, and includes treaties such as the Strategic Arms limitation Treaty (SALT I, a.k.a. the “Interim Agreement”) and Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty of 1972, the INF Treaty, START, the Moscow Treaty, New START, the CWC, the BTWC, and the contemporary, highly aspirational Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW).  The Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) can also be deemed a capability-limitation agreement to the extent that its Article II prohibits defined “non-nuclear-weapons states” from manufacturing or otherwise acquiring a nuclear explosive device. 

• Behavioral limitation agreements that require or prohibit certain types of action – as opposed to certain weapons systems – that are deemed to be unduly dangerous because they increase escalation risks, impose problematic externalities upon third parties, or are otherwise destabilizing.  Historically, this category includes measures as diverse as the Incidents at Sea (INCSEA) agreement of 1972, the Hague Code of Conduct Against Ballistic Missile Proliferation (HCOC), the CTBT, and the Limited Test Ban Treaty.  The NPT is also a behavioral limitation treaty to the extent that its Article I prohibits defined “nuclear weapon states” from providing nuclear weaponry to a non-nuclear weapon state or otherwise helping them to acquire it.  Also into this category would fall the Four-Power Treaty of 1922 – in which the United States, Britain, France, and Japan agreed to consult with each other before taking action in a future crisis in East Asia – as well as the 2015 effort by a group of national experts convened by the United Nations to articulate “norms of behaviour” in cyberspacesuch as the need to avoid cyberattack upon civilian critical infrastructure during peacetime.  (A number of countries have also been talking for years about the possibility of a code of conduct for operations in outer space.)

• Communication agreements that institutionalize channels of crisis communication, provide for data exchanges, or impose other dialogue and transparency measures intended to reduce the risk of dangerous misunderstanding or miscalculation.  Examples of such agreements include the original U.S.-Soviet “hotline” accord of 1962, the Open Skies Treaty, the establishment of the Nuclear Risk Reduction Center (NRRC) network, the Vienna Document, and arguably also the specific data-exchange provisions of START and New START. 

• Exclusion agreements that bound the specific geographic or other physical locations or battlespace domains in which armed forces or particular weapons systems are permitted to be, or from which they are banned.  Historical examples include the Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty, the Outer Space Treaty prohibiting the placement of nuclear weapons in space or on the Moon, the Antarctic Treaty barring all military forces from that continent, regional nuclear weapon prohibition treaties such as the Treaty of Tlatelolco, the Montreux Convention of 1936 setting certain limits on what naval forces can pass through the Dardanelles and the Bosphorus and when they can do so, and the range of geographic demilitarization accords various countries have signed over the years.

• What scholars such as Emily Goldman[3] have called “political arms control” agreements that are – as I phrased it in an article several years ago – aimed “not so much … at regulating armaments per se, but … [rather at] mitigat[ing] the conflicts and tensions that might encourage nations to want more such armaments.”  Into this category might fall, for instance, the Nine-Power Treaty of 1922, in which the signatories pledged to respect China’s territorial integrity but also to recognize Japanese dominance in Manchuria.  Indeed, the entire package of treaties reached at the Washington Naval Conference that year could be seen, together, as a “political arms control” framework that – for some years, at least – successfully reduced the prospect of war arising from a “Thucydides Trap” of confrontation between rising and status quo powers.  Specifically, that 1922 naval package both: (i) accommodated but limited the growing might of U.S. naval power by recognizing American naval co-equality with Britain’s Royal Navy but at the same time capping the naval tonnage of both powers to prevent a further arms race between them; and (ii) accommodated but limited the rising naval might of Japan by imposing island “non-fortification” requirements upon other powers so as to grant Tokyo effective supremacy in its home waters of the Western Pacific, while yet restricting Japan’s naval strength to levels significantly less than the overall forces of the globally-deployed U.S. and British navies.

III.          The Historical Progression of Arms Control

At least in U.S.-Soviet and U.S.-Russian practice, moreover, it might also be possible to view arms control as having a step-by-step conceptual sequence reflecting both the parties’ institutional and psychological “learning curves” and the complexities of what actually feels possible to the parties in a changing geopolitical environment.  This logical sequence might be summarized as: (a) risk reduction communications; (b) constraints upon dangerous externalities; (c) limitations on competitive behaviors and military capabilities; (d) prohibitions of specific weapon types; and (e) elimination of entire types of weapon and/or agreed reductions in arsenal size.

Risk Reduction 

This Russo-American sequence began, historically, with the abovementioned “hotline” accord, which tried to institutionalize an improved crisis communication mechanism in the wake of the terrifying nuclear escalation “near-miss” of the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.  This first foray into nuclear risk reduction represented a fairly simple and comfortable first step, not only because it responded to a clear need for better crisis communications between national leaders during that crisis, but also because the agreement did not actually require the Cold War superpowers to limit the nuclear forces they were then working furiously to build against each other. 

Constrain Externalities

Actually taking steps to constrain competitive behavior between the two strategic rivals took a bit longer, and arrived first in a form – the Limited Test Ban Treaty – that also did not actually constrain what arms either side could possess or what they could do with them.  Instead, it merely took measures to eliminate the dangerous externality of worldwide radioactive fallout that was being produced in those years from aboveground nuclear weapons tests.  The competitive development and deployment of nuclear weapons thus continued apace, but nuclear testing thereafter could occur only underground. 

Limit Behaviors

The third step in the sequence saw the United States and the Soviet Union actually begin to limit their directly competitive behavior, at least in terms of the hijinks permitted as forces confronted each other at sea.  As noted earlier, the INCSEA agreement of 1972 was designed to help prevent such problems by setting out reasonably clear standards of good conduct, such as steps to avoid collisions, maintaining safe standoff distances for surveillance ships, and “not simulating attacks at” or “launching objects toward” the other side’s vessels.[4]

Limit Military Capabilities

Around the same time, the superpowers also set about taking the next logical step: starting to limit the number and type of systems they could possess.  Specifically, SALT I capped how many strategic delivery systems each side could possess, while the ABM Treaty barred the superpowers from deploying anything other than a very thin missile defense system.  The second Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT II), moreover – had it actually ever come into force – would have capped the two sides’ possession of strategic delivery systems topped with Multiple Independently-targeted Re-entry Vehicles (MIRVs).

Prohibit or Eliminate Weapon Types

The fourth step in this sequence was to start actually prohibiting certain types of weapon, which became more possible after the United States and the USSR had moved into the period of somewhat less heated competitive rivalry in the early 1970s remembered as the era of “détente.”  In fact, preparations for this phase arguably began with the negotiations over the ill-fated SALT II agreement, during which the Americans briefly considered pursuing a ban on placing MIRVs on heavy ICBMs.  (President Richard Nixon, however, opted simply to seek an ICBM MIRV “freeze,” and SALT II ended up containing provisions that would have placed limits on the number of launchers that could be “MIRVed.”) 

Soviet nuclear deployments in the mid- and late-1970s and Moscow’s geopolitical adventurism in the invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 thereafter led to a period of increased tensions, and also to a strong U.S. response that began late in the administration of President Jimmy Carter and picked up further steam under President Ronald Reagan.   Nevertheless, the range of arms control possibilities expanded again after U.S. deployments had checked previous Soviet advantages gained during the 1970s, and as Cold War tensions thereafter began to wane as the relationship warmed between U.S. Reagan and Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev. 

At their famous Reykjavik Summit in 1986, in fact, the two leaders actually discussed the possibility of actually eliminating all their nuclear weapons.  They failed to close the gaps between them on that momentous point, of course, but in 1987 Reagan and Gorbachev did agree upon the INF Treaty, which ended the theater arms race between Soviet SS-20s and the American Pershing II and Tomahawk “Euromissiles” by banning the category of intermediate-range delivery systems entirely.  (That treaty also provided for the dismantlement of the parties’ existing arsenals of INF-class systems, which occurred as planned.)

Arms Reductions

Though the elimination provisions of the INF Treaty already represented a step along this road, the fifth step in this historical sequence was for the two nuclear superpowers to move into overall arms reductions once Cold War tensions had all but evaporated as a result of structural change in the Soviet system and then the collapse of the USSR.  Proving the wisdom of that phrasing in the Preamble of the NPT that makes clear that “the easing of international tension and the strengthening of trust between States” would be necessary “in order to facilitate the cessation of the manufacture of nuclear weapons” and “the liquidation of … existing stockpiles,” the end of the Cold War indeed made possible huge reductions in the two former rivals’ nuclear arsenals.  Beginning with START in 1991, continuing with the Moscow Treaty of 2002, and then proceeding through New START in 2010, Washington and Moscow were able to reduce inventories to a fraction of their respective Cold War peaks. 

A Logical Sequence 

Looking back across this sweep of events, it is not hard to see how these steps followed a logical sequence that flowed loosely from the strategically “easier” to the strategically “harder” depending upon the degree of flexibility that leaders in Washington and Moscow felt themselves to in light of on the perceived intensity of their strategic competition at the time.  The wise observer should thus carefully note the directionality of the causal arrow that this sequence suggests: arms control movement has historically depended upon progress in easing strategic tensions, rather than things being the other way around. 

As Winston Churchill made clear in 1934, peace creates disarmament, not the converse: “When you have peace you will have disarmament.”  And U.S. officials have recognized this for a long time, as can be seen as in Reagan’s famous aphorism that “[w]e don’t mistrust each other because we’re armed; we’re armed because we mistrust each other.”  (More personally and more recently, I myself made this insight the cornerstone of the “Creating the Environment for Nuclear Disarmament” [CEND] diplomatic initiative.)  Arms control enthusiasts do not always keep the arms control cart and the geopolitical horse in their proper order, however, and even the Second Trump Administration has now dismantled the State Department office that ran CEND.  As we think about the possible future for arms control, therefore, it is worth stressing that arms controllers should give at least as much attention to addressing and easing the tensions and circumstances of competitive rivalry as they do to devising clever ways to articulate, implement, and verify arms limitations in a treaty instrument. 

IV.          A Comment on Verification

One important topic that has historically often been the subject of intense study and debate is the verifiability of arms control agreements.  For the most part, a discussion of verification is beyond the scope of this paper, but for present purposes it is worth remembering that verifiability is a relative concept rather than an absolute one.  The quality of verification matters, of course, and a verifiable agreement is certainly generally better than an unverifiable one, but perfection is both unrealizable and (fortunately) generally not required.

Arms control experts have debated for years how to conceptualize these challenges.  By the 1980s, for instance, an important strain of such thinking came to focus upon the idea of “effective verification.”  As Amy Woolfe has summarized, this concept holds that 

“the United States should be able to detect not only militarily significant violations in time to respond and counter any potential threat, but also other types of violations or discrepancies where it might need to employ a political response.”

A closely related concept is the idea of “timely warning” in connection with nuclear energy safeguards, which can be traced back as far as the Acheson-Lilienthal Report of 1946, which noted the importance of ensuring that “danger signals must flash early enough to leave time adequate to permit other nations – alone or in concert – to take appropriate action.”  As I put it myself in an article about nuclear safeguards in 2010, 

“... [t]imeliness [of warning] … has long been understood with an eye not simply to the specific … time required for a particular [violation to manifest], but also to the time it would take … to respond to the violation detected.”

This point has also long been made explicit in the arms control context, including by then-Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Fred Iklé, who emphasized in 1961 that

“... [i]n entering into an arms control agreement, we must know not only that we are technically capable of detecting a violation but also that we or the rest of the world will be politically, legally, and militarily in a position to react effectively if a violation is discovered.”

But it is also the case that not all violations, as it were, are created equal.  A strong case can be made that it is important to detect and respond in some fashion to every violation of an arms control agreement – if nothing else, for fear that even small-scale cheating, if unaddressed, will contribute to a climate of lawlessness in which larger violations are more likely, much as in James Q. Wilson and George Kelling’s “broken windows theory.”  Yet it is also the case that some violations are clearly more significant than others.  Some, for instance, might consist merely of minor or merely “technical” faults that do not really touch on the core security issues and concerns addressed by the agreement.  In other cases, however – as also signaled by the concept of “material breach” set forth in Article 60 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, under which a violation of sufficient seriousness by one party can absolve the other party of its own obligation to comply – cheating can have very significant consequences. 

Verification procedures should alert the other side to any violation, and presumably must alert it to the big ones, but just what it takes to constitute a structurally significant breach will depend a good deal on the context.  What military advantage, for instance, would that violation give to the party who is cheating?  How easily could it be detected?  And how easy and rapidly could the aggrieved party respond to it in a way that addresses the threat created by the violation?  All of this makes assessing the adequacy of any given set of verification procedures a complex and context-dependent calculation. 

The logic of effective verification, for example, is one of the reasons why actual nuclear weapons experts find it so difficult to imagine full nuclear weapons abolition.  In the hypothetical context of an arms treaty that capped nuclear arsenals at 5,000 weapons for each party, it might perhaps be considered acceptable to have a verification protocol with an “error margin” of 50 weapons – that is, for the mechanisms established by that treaty to be unable to ensure that a party did not secretly possess 50 weapons more than the treaty allowed.  For an abolition treaty that set nuclear arsenals at zero, however, just such a 50-weapon error would be catastrophic, for cheating of that magnitude could give the violator a huge and potentially war-winning advantage.  (An advantage of 50 might make little difference against an adversary still possessing 5,000, but it would be immeasurably important when nobody else has any.)  Verification of complete disarmament, therefore, would have to be something very near perfect – which seems rather unlikely.

By the same token, however, some real-world arms reductions have occurred entirely without specific formal verification measures at all.  SALT and SALT II, for instance, relied heavily upon verification measures that were exogenous to the treaty itself – specifically, in the form of the “national technical means” of each party’s independent intelligence gathering apparatus (e.g., spy satellites).  The Moscow Treaty of 2002, moreover, lacked verification provisions simply because the United States and the Russian Federation already understood and expected each other, for their own independent strategic and financial reasons, to bring arsenals down to the levels specified; no desire to cheat being expected in the first place, no particular need was thus felt for verification procedures to detect it.

That said, verification issues do crop up with great intensity – and become quite challenging – when competitive rivalry is hot and all other signs point to national leaders’ desire to maximize strategic and operational advantages in the arraying of arms against each other.  Under such conditions, the advantage to be gained from clandestine cheating tends to be high, and hence also the incentive (or at least the perceived incentive, as seen by the other party) to cheat.  Looking at the potential future of arms control in today’s context, in other words, verification is likely to be a significant challenge.

V.            Arms Control Diplomacy in Strategic Competition 

As a final note, it should also be noted that like arms control agreements, arms control diplomacy is itself a tool with instrumental rather than intrinsic value, and one that should be – and, in practice, often is – employed not merely to reach arms control agreements, but also in other ways to pursue broader strategies of maneuvering for competitive advantage.  In this context, countries frequently pursue deliberately lopsided arms control proposals that are designed to leave one’s most cherished military capabilities untouched while harshly disadvantaging the other party, or they make unserious and disingenuous offers for purposes of political rather than substantive gain.

And, in truth, there can be many possible reasons to engage in arms control diplomacy even beyond the actual desire to sign a treaty that contributes to the cause of international peace and security.  Even if “Plan A” for a given country is indeed to get a stereotypically “good” arms control agreement, in other words, the process of arms control negotiating might be felt to have value for various “Plan B” reasons, including:

• Ideally, to hoodwink the adversary into accepting subtly mischievous terms that will actually disadvantage him;

• Failing that, to force the adversary to reject seemingly reasonable proposals and thereby (i) permit one’s own diplomats to shame and embarrass him for “not taking diplomacy seriously” or “being a warmonger,” and/or (ii) gain political advantage with third party observers (or domestic audiences) who want arms control;

• To distract the adversary and lead him to delay doing things you do not wish him to do, but that he might opt to do if diplomacy were not “underway”;

• To use stalling at the negotiating table to buy time in which to prepare for a new strategic move or other wise to change “facts on the ground” to the adversary’s disadvantage;

• To keep allies, partners, and domestic stakeholders “on side” while preparing bellicose actions against one’s adversary by “proving” to the world that one has “exhausted all other remedies” and “given diplomacy every chance” (after which one can announce – more in sorrow than in anger, of course – that  “diplomacy has failed” and it’s time for tougher measures). 

I do not necessarily advocate all (or even any) of these “Plan B” approaches, but the serious observer of arms control history cannot fail to have noticed that they occur with some frequency in the real world.  And if indeed arms control is a servant of national security interest rather than the other way around, the wise statesman should probably rule out none of them.

VI.          Adaptations and Combinations

My hope is that this paper can help make policymakers a bit more conceptually agile as they struggle with the challenges of finding an arms control framework – or perhaps arms control frameworks, in the plural – both diplomatically feasible and substantively useful in today’s (and tomorrow’s) strategic environment.  Perhaps awareness of the possible repertoire of arms control alternatives or elements, in other words, can open the door to creative adaptation of one or more elements of the elements discussed here in order to meet the needs of the day.

As we contemplate how to approach the possibility of involving a hitherto unwilling China in “trilateral” arms control with the United States and the Russian Federation, for instance, it might be helpful to recall that the Washington Naval Treaties of 1922 did indeed manage to support strategic stability for a decade or so, accommodating rising powers and yet checking uncontrolled competition by simultaneously setting unequal limits for key aspects of naval tonnage while nonetheless effectively acknowledging certain prerogatives – in terms of regional force postures – for some parties in ways that did much to meet what were then their strategic ambitions.  It is not impossible to imagine some modern nuclear variation on this theme in which all arsenals would be capped, with China at a level of strategic capability higher than it possesses today but yet lower than the other two, while yet also being accommodated by some kind of understood framework of regional balances favoring each power in “its” area of the globe.  Conversely, it might even be conceivable for the United States to agree to cap its theater-range capabilities at a level lower than that possessed by China and Russia – but yet higher than today – in similar accommodative conjunction with some kind of three-way understanding about what regional posture or behaviors would be off limits in return.

I take no position here on whether we should establish such a variegated trilateral framework, whether it would indeed be saleable to China, or whether it would in fact represent a good solution to today’s “three-body problem” of tripolar nuclear rivalry.  But an awareness of arms control history and typological analysis of elements that have been employed in the past can at least help identify possibilities that have not heretofore been explored.

Even in terms of bilateral agreements, moreover, were Russia and the United States to pursue some sort of follow-on two-party strategic treaty – “Re-START,” anyone? – it is similarly not beyond imagining that they might be able to agree to terms that address their shared strategic concerns about China’s growing nuclear weapons capabilities through what might be called an “escalation clause.”  Under such a provision, for instance, the two powers might agree to cap their arsenals at “X” operationally-deployed strategic weapons, but only under the condition that if a third power built up its capabilities to a level equal to or greater than “X minus N,” either Washington or Moscow would have the option of increasing its own forces by whatever increment it felt necessary to address this third-party challenge, provided that the other signatory would thereupon also acquire the right to increase its own forces by the same increment.  (That way the Russians and the Americans could remain at parity with each other, while retaining the lawful option to fend off the arrival of Chinese parity by deploying more forces to the degree that they are willing to devote resources to this task.)

Such complicated mechanisms for coping with third-party challenges would be less necessary for Transparency and Confidence-Building Measures (TCBMs) between nuclear weapons possessors, however, for less strategic disadvantage would accrue from an additional power being left out of a risk-reduction framework than would be the case if its actual nuclear capabilities were unconstrained while others faced treaty limits.  Bilateral TCBM frameworks related to things such as data exchange, transparency visits, crisis communications, and missile launch notification, for instance, could be negotiated in order to be expandable to include new signatories over time not unlike how new signatories were welcomed into the NPT itself after it was opened for signature in 1970, how new adherents have periodically joined the Hague Code of Conduct on Missile Proliferation (HCOC), and how new participants have from time to time been welcomed into the NRRC network. 

Indeed, such a TCBM treaty could perhaps be drafted to be fully “modular” even on a participant-by-participant basis, allowing new signatories either to accept its terms in full or to accede to some of them, with the option of acceding to additional elements of the framework over time.  Such a structure would maximize diplomats’ ability to bring in additional states in on terms palatable to those not hitherto accustomed to such engagement, allowing newcomers to be progressively “acculturated” or “socialized” to more TCBMs over time.   In fact, if one drafted it carefully without making acknowledged or “legitimized” nuclear weapons possession a requirement, such a modular TCBM framework might also be able to accommodate powers outside the nuclear weapons mainstream – such as those which openly possess weapons but have shunned the NPT (e.g., India and Pakistan), those widely believed to possess such weapons but who have never admitted it (e.g., Israel), or even a nuclear weapons pariah state (e.g., North Korea).  When it comes to risk reduction measures, after all, it’s presumably generally the case that more risk reduction is better than less risk reduction, so why not be flexible and accommodating in the interest of involving as many nuclear weapons-relevant states as possible?

VII.       Conclusion

Any strategy for approaching arms control negotiating in today’s context of multipolar strategic competition and nuclear rivalry will face formidable, and in some ways quite unprecedented, challenges.  As officials and scholars struggle with these challenges, I hope that this paper will have helped shed some light upon the complex repertoire of concepts and precedents that has emerged from the last several generations of arms control debate and practice. 

-- Christopher Ford

Notes

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[1]     I do not mean to suggest that all transparency and mutual understanding conduces to peace, of course.  It is possible that improved mutual understanding can heighten tensions, such as by making one side’s aggressive intentions more clear than before.  Nevertheless, accurate understandings – however grim and alarming they may turn out to be – are presumably generally to be preferred to misapprehensions, and arms control can contribute to correcting false assumptions.

[2]     Quoted by J.D. Crouch II, “Transcending the Academic Haze, or How I Learned to Learn about the Bomb,” Defense & Strategic Studies Online, vol. 2, no. 1 (Autumn 2025), 41. 

[3]     See E. O. Goldman, Sunken treaties: naval arms control between the Wars (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994), 5-7 & 244-47.

[4]     More contemporary incidents involving Russian pilots engaging in provocative ways with NATO aircraft and a 2001 incident in which a hotdogging Chinese fighter pilot crashed into an American EP-3 surveillance aircraft over international waters show that such problems have by no means gone away.