Has arms control succeeded in its mission

By Anak Agung Banyu Perwita

BANDUNG (JP): In recent months, the United States and Russia have agreed to begin the implementation of the first Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START I). This treaty, which entered into force in 1991, was the first treaty to actually reduce strategic nuclear weapons. It will reduce the strategic nuclear arsenals of both sides by 40 percent to 50 percent of their total amounts, or from 11,000 and 12,000 nuclear warheads to 6,000 and 7,000 for each side.

By reducing these nuclear forces, the world will see an obvious progress on strategic arms control concerns. But is it sufficient for world peace? The changing geopolitical and geostrategic conditions have not altered the substance of the arms control debate. This crucial issue has led the politics of arms control to fall into several broad agendas.

The first agenda concerns the effort to reduce the amount and the size of the superpowers' nuclear arsenals. The U.S. and Russia have discussed the abolition of nuclear weapons since 1987. They had completed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces treaty at the Reykjavik summit between Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan.

This treaty was the first arms control agreement to eliminate all types of nuclear weapons, which banned all intermediate and short range land-based nuclear missiles. In 1993, the U.S. and Russia had also reached an agreement on an additional 50 percent reduction in their strategic nuclear forces.

Even though START I did not fully contain the nuclear or destructive weapons race, the prospect for controlling arms proliferations, specifically nuclear weapons, appeared brighter in this post Cold War era than it had before. It remains far from certain that all the relevant actors and arms developments will be brought effectively into an international arms control regime.

In this context, the next item on the arms control agenda would be to complete the arms control regime by increasing the transparency of disarmament programs, verification and confidence-building measures as well as other cooperative measures.

These conditions have been pivotal of many of the arms control achievements of the past decade.

From what we know about arms control and the disarmament process, they are actually based on three major motivations: fear, trust and cooperation.

In his START negotiations with Gorbachev, Reagan once quoted an old Russian proverb: Trust but verify. In a sense, verification will depend on and allow trust, enabling states to be more willing to risk even unilateral arms restraint.

Arms control and verification initiatives, then, have both symbolic/political and military payoffs. Politically, such provisions, even if subject to some cheating and incomplete coverage, at least tend to define standards to which states can be held accountable. They also contribute to an overall sense of trust, de-escalating tensions and costs.

More stringent verification and compliance may be required for stricter military security.

Technical verifications alone may not be sufficient to assure the success of arms control initiatives if they are not seen to be in the parties political interests. For instance, seismographs are also able to detect nuclear test explosions at long distances.

Yet despite this capability, during the 1950s, the U.S. demanded on-site inspection of all Soviet nuclear test facilities, a condition Washington knew that Moscow would reject.

A combination of factors finally broke the negotiation stalemate. They included conclusion of the main series of U.S. nuclear tests and the mutual U.S.-Soviet fears brought on by the Cuban missile crisis confrontation of 1962.

The continued effectiveness of an arms control agreement also depends on all sides remaining satisfied with the political outcome and security guarantees of mutual compliance, confident of the inspection process and safeguards against unauthorized third parties stealing weapons or their components.

Therefore, international control agencies such as the United Nations and the International Atomic Energy Agency are necessary to oversee and verify compliance. Even then, some uncertainties and controversies are likely to remain. Yet these agencies could be more effective than the governments that create, fund and host them allow them to be.

The last approach to promoting trust is through what are termed confidence-building measures, which are procedures to reassure worried enemies that military preparations and maneuvers are not indications of an impending attack.

When invited to observe a rival's training exercise, or when offered opportunities to meet and discuss security concerns, states presumably become more willing to forego or lay down portions of their armaments.

Without all the above measures, it would have been impossible to finalize some of the most important recent accords. Nevertheless, a great deal remains undone on the arms control agenda. It remains to be seen whether the arms control regime can or should be combined to form a more binding and coherent UN regulated and restricted system.

The writer is a research staff at Parahyangan Center for International Studies, Department of International Relations, Parahyangan Catholic University, Bandung.

Window B: It remains to be seen whether the arms control regime can or should be combined to form a more binding and coherent UN regulated and restricted system.