Negotiating to Reduce — How to Let Go of Seventy Thousand Warheads

In the story so far, humanity has done nothing but keep increasing the power of the nuclear. Weapons that were stronger, more numerous, reaching farther. The United States and the Soviet Union each held enough nuclear arms to destroy the other, and built a precarious peace upon that balance.

Yet from a certain point, the two superpowers began to confront a question they had never once tackled seriously: ‘How can we reduce these nuclear weapons?’ When it came to the technology of building more, humanity knew it well. But pulling out one’s own fangs while trusting a hostile counterpart, that is an incomparably more difficult task. In this installment, we trace the long road of disarmament negotiations that the United States and the Soviet Union (and later the United States and Russia) accumulated, from both sides of its achievements and its limits.

First, ‘Stop Increasing’ — SALT

The first step was not to reduce, but to set a ceiling on the limitless increase.

The U.S.-Soviet negotiations that began in 1969 bore fruit in their first agreement in 1972. It was the framework known by its initials, SALT, for the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks. What was concluded at this time was an interim agreement setting a temporary ceiling on the number of strategic nuclear delivery vehicles, and one more, a treaty limiting the defensive systems that intercept ballistic missiles.

Why limit even the weapons of the intercepting side? Behind this lay the logic of mutual assured destruction, touched on in earlier installments. If the state in which each can reliably destroy the other were to collapse, the temptation of a preemptive strike might instead arise. If both competed to build defensive networks, it would invite a limitless arms race. Reasoning thus, the two countries deliberately placed a frame around defensive weapons.

The second stage of SALT that followed reached signature in 1979. It aimed at more far-reaching limits, including multi-warhead missiles, but the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan that same year rapidly chilled U.S.-Soviet relations, and the U.S. Congress did not ratify the treaty. The road to disarmament thus advanced while often being pushed back by the rough waves of international affairs.

Erasing an Entire Weapon — The INF Treaty

In the first half of the 1980s, U.S.-Soviet tensions had risen again. Intermediate-range missiles of both blocs were deployed in Europe, and wariness continued. But when Gorbachev appeared in the Soviet Union and a mood for dialogue arose, the situation began to move greatly.

And in December 1987, U.S. President Reagan and Soviet General Secretary Gorbachev signed a groundbreaking treaty. It was the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, the INF Treaty. Its content was that both countries would together completely abolish ground-launched missiles with ranges of roughly five hundred to five thousand five hundred kilometers.

What made this treaty historic was not simply that it reduced numbers, but that it erased one type of nuclear weapon entirely from the ground. Whereas the negotiations until then had set ceilings, the INF was the first promise to bring an entire category of nuclear forces all the way to zero. A mechanism for mutually accepting on-site inspections was also built in, realizing a discipline of trust once unthinkable: enemies entering each other’s bases to verify one another.

From Peak to Decline — The Era of START

Around the time of the INF Treaty, the Cold War itself was drawing near its end. This great turning point at last gave momentum to negotiations that would reduce the very number of nuclear warheads.

The number of nuclear warheads in the world is said to have reached a peak of roughly seventy thousand around 1986. It is a figure that tells how the phrase ‘enough to destroy humanity many times over’ was by no means a mere metaphor. The attempt to chip away at that vast mountain was START, the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty.

Signed in 1991, START stipulated that both countries would greatly reduce their deployed strategic nuclear arms. It was, at last, the shift from ‘do not increase’ to ‘reduce.’ Through the upheaval of the Cold War’s end and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the negotiating counterpart was handed from the Soviet Union to Russia, and the framework of disarmament, too, was updated into new treaties to match the relationship of each era. In New START, signed in 2010, the number of strategic nuclear warheads each country could deploy was held down to the range of about one thousand five hundred. Compared with the peak, the total amount of nuclear weapons in the entire world had been greatly reduced.

What the Negotiations Teach Us

The history of disarmament negotiations between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, and the U.S. and Russia, teaches us several important things.

One is that even with a hostile counterpart, if only a mechanism of promise and verification can be built, reducing weapons is not impossible. The patient discipline of accepting inspections and counting each other’s numbers was the very backbone supporting reduction. The other is how fragile that current is. When international affairs deteriorate, negotiations stop; when trust collapses, treaties are left hanging. Disarmament was not completed in the moment it was concluded, but maintained only by being concluded again and again.

From the standpoint that deterrence protects peace, holding a certain amount of nuclear weapons is said to lead to stability. From the standpoint demanding abolition, on the other hand, one should advance the steps of reduction further and someday aim for zero. These two ways of thinking have constantly intersected and contended at the scene of disarmament negotiations. Taking neither side, what can be said simply as fact is that humanity has chosen, by its own hand, both to increase nuclear weapons and to reduce them.

From seventy thousand to a little over ten thousand. This road is also a record of a humanity drunk on power slowly pulling out its own fangs by its own reason. Yet it was still too early to feel relieved. Even after the great structure of confrontation called the Cold War vanished, the nuclear itself did not disappear from the world. On the contrary, a threat wearing a face unlike any before was about to raise its head anew. Even after the Cold War ended, the nuclear weapons did not vanish. Rather, threats wearing new faces began to appear in the world.