Is Nuclear Arms Control Dead?

Is Nuclear Arms Control Dead?

08/19/14

Will Hobart

Nonproliferation, Nuclear Weapons, Diplomacy, Security, Russia, United States

"If the arms-control mechanisms between America and Russia collapse, then the world loses its ability—and crucially, the example—to properly interpret and recognize nuclear intentions."

Amid the wider sense of a global crisis in security, from Iraq to Ukraine to the South China Sea, there is a deeper long-term threat: the risk to nuclear arms control.

In this worsening climate of great-power tension and mistrust, the nuclear arms-control regime long in place between the United States and Russia is in danger. And without it, efforts to stop the spread of nuclear weapons, or at least limit their role in international affairs, are also in trouble. For instance, the prospect of heading off a destabilizing nuclear-arms competition in Asia, including between China and the United States, will further recede, as will the appeal of the U.S.-Russian precedent of restraint for India and Pakistan. America and Russia remain overwhelmingly the world’s strongest nuclear-armed powers, and their example is crucial for the future of nonproliferation, disarmament and the global nuclear peace.

A key mechanism here is the historic 1987 intermediate range nuclear forces (INF) treaty, under which Moscow and Washington banned the deployment of a whole destabilizing class of nuclear-armed missiles. Despite signs that Russia had violated this agreement as far back as 2010, and concerns voiced by Putin in 2007 that China also ought to be included, only now have things come to a head. U.S. president Barack Obama recently took the extraordinary step of sending a letter to Vladimir Putin, levelling the accusation that Russia is in breach of its solemn treaty commitments by testing cruise missiles with a range between 500 and 5,500km since 2008.

Read full articlehttp://nationalinterest.org/feature/nuclear-arms-control-dead-11097