In one strictly limited sense, modern man has become as God; he has acquired the ability to destroy the world. After the invention of the atomic bomb in 1945, the United States and the Soviet Union acquired massive reserves of the devices. While many in both nations would like to decrease the megatonnage they aim at each other, the prospect of disarming is a classic example of what international relations theorists call a “security dilemma”; neither side can trust the other enough to stand down. For this reason, an examination of the past four decades of disarmament talks shows that disarmament has been either remarkably successful—or a complete failure—depending on one’s point of view. A few loudly-trumpeted agreements have cut deeply into nuclear stockpiles, but neither the Americans nor the Soviets have shown any willingness to reduce their arsenals below the number needed to destroy civilization.
The nuclear age truly began on November 1st, 1952, when the United States tested the hydrogen bomb. Americans had set off the world’s first atomic explosion seven years earlier in the Nevada desert, and the second and third over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but before the development of vastly more powerful thermonuclear weapons, the Bomb was just that: a bomb. It was a simple weapon of war, and meant to be used as such. The American and Soviet militaries saw no reason it couldn’t be deployed, odd as it sounds now, in limited nuclear warfare within the context of a wider conventional war; similarly to the way it was used in World War II.
The detonation of the hydrogen bomb changed all that quite suddenly: the first primitive device, nicknamed “Ivy Mike,” was 450 times more powerful than the device that had destroyed Nagasaki. Both sides immediately realized that they had acquired the potential not to simply cripple an enemy, but to wipe it off the map.
History’s greatest arms race followed. Both the Russians and Americans were in total ignorance of the size of each others’ arsenal, and each vastly overestimated the number of weapons aimed in their direction, leading them to continually ratchet up production. Kennedy’s fear-mongering in the 1960 Presidential campaign over a non-existent “missile gap” perfectly captured the paranoia gripping the U.S. and Soviet defense establishments. Regardless, the threat of missiles was real: the development of the intercontinental ballistic missile in the late 50s meant that by 1960, both the US and USSR had realized the hydrogen bomb’s potential for eradication.
Meanwhile, the contemporaneous introduction of stealthy nuclear submarines led to the development of a parallel arsenal that could survive any conceivable “first strike.” The logic of strike and counterstrike drove arsenals inexorably upwards: by the Cold War’s height in the eighties, the Soviets and Americans each had roughly 10,000 missiles aimed at each other around the clock, with perhaps three times that number in reserve, an entirely gratuitous concentration of firepower.
The resulting equilibrium was known formally as Mutually Assured Destruction, and more colloquially as “the balance of terror”; it was far from anyone’s ideal. The Cuban Missile Crisis demonstrated to the world the dangers of attempting to leverage one’s nuclear arsenal, and how quickly a standoff could escalate beyond anyone’s control. And with thousands of missiles constantly primed, it was just as easy to imagine an accidental launch or an overly eager air-defense colonel igniting global thermonuclear war. Soviet and American representatives met in Helsinki in 1969 to begin discussing how to slowly step back from the brink.
Forty Years, in Slow Steps
Somewhat paradoxically, those first Strategic Arms Limitation Talks were meant to encourage peace by stepping deeper into the shadow of MAD. They were oriented primarily around banning the development of missile defense systems, and eventually produced the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty of 1972, which limited both parties to an anti-missile system covering a single site. The Soviets chose Moscow, an ancient seat of culture and government predating both the Soviets and the Tsars; the United States chose Grand Forks Air Force Base, North Dakota. The Moscow system remains operational to this day, while the American “Safeguard” system was shut down in 1976 due to its incredible cost and widely-questioned effectiveness, traits it shares with the current US missile defense system. The ABM Treaty passed with a surprisingly small amount of resistance from the US Congress and Soviet hardliners, both of whom were growing concerned with the extreme expense of even questionably-effective countermeasures.
Despite both legal and practical prohibitions on anti-missile technology, there were good reasons for both powers to continue pursuing it. Both sides were interested in continuing to preserve some sort of protection against an accidental launch, and against new marginal nuclear powers: Russea feared Britain and France, the US feared North Korea, and neither was comfortable with China’s rising nuclear strength. Ultimately, the central aim of the ABM Treaty was to bar both sides from developing any sort of countermeasure against a decisive launch by the other; despite President George W. Bush’s withdrawal from the ABM Treaty in 2002, it is still the case that no such comprehensive countermeasure exists, and MAD remains in place.
The next SALT round aimed to actually limit the number of weapons each side pointed at each other, and proved rather problematic. The goal was to limit the number of deliverable strategic warheads for both sides to a mere 2,250, barely a few multiples of the number required to render a continent uninhabitable. Brezhnev and Carter signed it in 1979, but neither the Soviet establishment nor the US Congress was satisfied that they had gotten a fair deal—or, rather, a deal sufficiently unfair to the other side. Several key concessions were acquired from Soviet Foreign Minister Gromyko by none other than the young Senator Joseph Biden of Delaware—yet Congress declined to ratify, and freshly-elected President Reagan had little interest in scaling down America’s nuclear arsenal.
The next major round of talks were not to come until the imminent breakup of the Soviet Union, and the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, or START. Aimed at cutting down the deployed megatonnage which had dramatically escalated over the waning days of the Soviet empire, the treaty limited each side to 6,000 deployed warheads. Needless to say, the goalposts had shifted considerably since Carter and Brezhnev, as had the numbers; this cutback to 6,000 apiece, finished in 2001, eliminated 80% of the active nuclear weapons on the planet. The verification method for missiles and bombers was admirably simple: the US and Russians began taking delivery vehicles, destroying them in a very final way, and leaving their wreckage on flat plains for the others’ satellites to photograph. The verification mechanism for the actual warheads was rather more complex and entirely less interesting, but it worked.
START II, meant to impose a real constraint on the potential for total destruction, died again before a legislature—the Russian one this time—but it was eventually fulfilled in spirit by none other than George W. Bush. START II was to limit each side to no more than 3,000 warheads and eliminate multiple-reentry vehicles (MIRVs) that could each destroy as many as ten cities. Russia dragged its feet on ratification until 2000, when they did so contingent on new president George W. Bush not pursuing the national missile defense system to which he was quite clearly committed.
Bush and the new Russian President Vladimir Putin eventually did come to an agreement, the Moscow Treaty, which would limit the Russians and Americans to no more than 2000 deployed warheads. Interestingly, it has no verification mechanisms, and is scheduled to expire on December 31st, 2012, the deadline for reductions to be completed. It was not the most ambitious of agreements, but certainly fits the history of arms control—a story of limited success and ambitious failure.
The Future, or Lack Thereof
The unfortunate fact remains that humanity is no safer than at the height of the Cold War. It’s not generally recognized how close we have come to an apocalyptic exchange, but the last publicly acknowledged incident was in 1995, when a satellite launch went unreported and the Russians believed they had only five minutes to retaliate. They reasoned that the US would never launch only one missile, and made the seat-of-the-pants decision to wait it out. It seems only reasonable to guess that there would have been close calls since. The ways that an accidental nuclear exchange could happen are myriad and terrifying.
The crucial step in arms reduction is the one that has never even been proposed, the mutual US-Russia step back from MAD to mere deterrence. A deterrence posture could be accomplished with a mere few dozen warheads, and a meaningful commitment to a no-first-use policy, which the US consistently refuses to do. This would demote the US and Russia to the ranks of the minor nuclear powers—a France or China with more expensive toys. But it would make a certain sense for the major powers to limit themselves to stealthy and durable submarine-launched missiles, and to draw down to enough warheads to cripple an aggressor rather than eliminate every last one of their citizens.
Moreover, it’s unclear that current massive arsenals serve any meaningful deterrent purpose over and above a more limited nuclear force. Not only are ICBMs are expensive and vulnerable, it remains unclear whether they would survive full atmospheric reentry, since they have never been tested. A more limited force could serve a deterrent purpose without the expense and risk associated with current arsenals.
A more interesting world to imagine is one entirely without nuclear weapons. The international sphere would exchange existential threat for a whole range of lesser evils. Nuclear weapons are cheaper than a modern army or air force, and in a nuclear-free world the military supremacy of the United States would be even greater than it is today. But in order to prevent rogue actors from acquiring weapons, the current nuclear powers would require an extremely aggressive anti-proliferation regime. The unfortunate reality is that the nuclear-free world that Obama envisions would demand an open-ended commitment to intervention anywhere around the world at short notice. A world without nuclear weapons would be far from a peaceful paradise—it would merely no longer be poised on the brink of Armageddon.