arms-control historiography

Negotiations and interpretive frames

The SALT negotiations that opened in Helsinki in November 1969 are the starting point of this scholarship; in 1972, during détente, the United States and the USSR signed a series of treaties limiting their nuclear arsenals. Thomas C. Schelling and Morton H. Halperin's 1961 book Strategy and Arms Control is commonly cited as a foundational text that articulated strategic stability as a fundamental objective for arms control. The framework rests on mutual vulnerability and has two components: crisis stability (few incentives to strike first under tension) and arms-race stability (few incentives for competitive armaments programs). Mutual vulnerability was later popularized and criticized as mutually assured destruction, an acronym coined by Donald Brennan in 1962.

Competing conceptions of strategic stability

During the SALT II talks (1972-1979) and after, the US conception of strategic stability shifted to focus almost exclusively on the Soviet threat to the relatively minor US land-based Minuteman force while downplaying the destabilizing characteristics of US forces; Paul Nitze's article solidified this framing. The Strategic Arms Reduction Talks proposed by Reagan in 1982 defined strategic stability as reducing the vulnerability of US strategic forces through significant constraints on the most threatening Soviet systems, ICBMs. Moscow, for its part, used strategic stability language mainly in its anti-SDI campaign from 1983, framing its proposals as preserving stability through mutual vulnerability and limits on missile defenses; in January 1985 the two sides agreed to include the term in a joint statement on resumption of negotiations.

Examples

SALT I, signed on 26 May 1972, froze the number of strategic ballistic missile launchers at existing levels and limited ABM deployment sites to one each. The US built only one ABM site, Safeguard in North Dakota, while the USSR had deployed a Moscow system in 1966. In the 1972 ABM Treaty the USSR accepted that missile defenses were technically infeasible and agreed to constrain their deployment, following the October 1967 Soviet decision that the Avrora national missile-defense project was infeasible.

MIRV technology is central to the debate: arming ballistic missiles with more than one warhead made a counterforce strike on land-based strategic forces more feasible, and the Interim Agreement's launcher cap further exacerbated the unstable situation. The US led in MIRV deployment in 1970 and 1971, while the USSR deployed its first MIRVed ICBM in 1974. By 1980 the US estimated that the USSR carried 75 percent of its strategic nuclear warheads on ICBMs and 20 percent on SLBMs, almost the reverse of US figures. Soviet negotiators countered that MX, Trident and cruise missile programs were as destabilizing as the SS-18; a breakthrough came at Reykjavik in October 1986, when Gorbachev agreed to cut Soviet SS-18s by 50 percent, from 308 to 154.

Distinctions

The strategic-stability reading emphasizes intent and crisis and arms-race stability, whereas the competitive-advantage reading emphasizes outcomes. The two are not mutually exclusive period labels: they read intention, institutional rules and material outcomes at different analytical levels of the same negotiations. START I, signed on 31 July 1991 and in force from 5 December 1994, barred signatories from deploying more than 6,000 nuclear warheads and 1,600 ICBMs and bombers. Final START caps cut Soviet heavy ICBMs by 50 percent and limited its land-based ballistic missile forces significantly, while leaving the US room to increase warheads on its more secure but increasingly counterforce-capable SLBM forces. The START I preamble cited the strengthening of strategic stability as in the interests of both sides, but on the revisionist account the two sides did not reach a genuine common understanding of the concept during START.

Context

The Reagan-era nuclear freeze and European antinuclear campaigns pressured the administration to change its tone on nuclear modernization and arms control, leading it to adopt stability rhetoric it had initially avoided. Reagan's SDI announcement of 23 March 1983 contrasted stability based on mutual vulnerability with a 'truly lasting stability' based on defensive systems, but mainstream arms control theorists argued that missile defenses would increase first-strike incentives and were highly destabilizing. SALT II was signed in 1979 but never ratified. The article argues that the US conception of strategic stability ultimately triumphed over the Soviet one in START, laying the basis for post-Cold War US-Russia arms control. By the late 1970s the strategic balance bore only a tangential relation to Schelling-Halperin prescriptions.