The End of Treaty Nostalgia: Arms Control After New START

(Frank A. Rose – Just Security) With the expiration of New START, a familiar refrain has returned to the arms control debate: that this is the first time in 50 years that the major nuclear powers have been without a strategic nuclear arms control agreement. It is a powerful talking point. It is also historically inaccurate — and that matters, because misreading the past leads to poor policy prescriptions for the future. The reality is that nuclear arms control has never been continuous or linear, and it certainly hasn’t been independent of geopolitics. Even the first major strategic arms control agreement, the 1972 SALT I Interim Agreement, underscored the contingent nature of Cold War arms control. Explicitly temporary (five years) and limited in scope, it reflected the balance of power and political circumstances of the moment rather than a durable or comprehensive framework for strategic restraint. Long stretches of the Cold War passed without ratified strategic arms treaties in force. SALT II, signed in 1979, was never ratified and never entered into legal force. Although both sides largely observed its limits until 1986, there was no binding, verifiable treaty governing strategic nuclear forces until START I entered into force in 1994. That gap alone — stretching from the late 1970s into the early 1990s –undermines claims of an unbroken half-century of formal strategic arms control. Nor was that period an aberration. Arms control during the Cold War was episodic and constrained, shaped by rivalry rather than cooperation. Agreements like the Anti-Ballistic Missile Systems Treaty (the ABM Treaty, part of the SALT talks and also signed in 1972) and, later, the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty , signed in 1987, addressed specific categories of systems or stability concerns. They were important, but they did not represent a steady march toward disarmament. They were narrow bargains struck under particular political conditions. – The End of Treaty Nostalgia: Arms Control After New START