Arms Control, Disarmament and Non-Proliferation: Lessons of the Last Forty Years

Speaking Notes for Alyson J.K.Bailes, Director,

Stockholm International Peace Research Institute

At the China Arms Control and Disarmament Association, Beijing, 8 May 2007

If ideas also have destinies of their own, it is hard to ignore the fact that the ideas of arms control and disarmament have been going through a difficult time in recent years. They are actually quite old ideas: back in the Middle Ages the Church tried to stop methods of warfare that it considered especially cruel, and attempts to limit arms races between nations have been made ever since the nineteenth century. However, in retrospect it is clear that the real Golden Age of arms control was the Cold War in the second half of the twentieth century, plus the first few years after the fall of the Soviet Union. There are two rather obvious reasons why countries were willing to accept, or even actively to seek, limits on their choice of weapons during this period, both within specific regions and at world level. The massive and tense military confrontation between the Western and Eastern blocs in Europe gave both sides a strong interest in avoiding war and therefore, in controlling possible factors of instability and reducing the risks of surprise attack. Setting limits on the type and number of weapons held by each superpower or each alliance helped to build stability and at the same time to save resources; while the risk of attacks, accidents and misunderstandings could be reduced by the softer methods of restraint, transparency, and learning about each other that became known as confidence-building measures. At global level, meanwhile, there was a general reaction after the Second World War against the use of mass destruction weapons which led to the negotiating of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and also treaties on stopping the spread of such weapons to outer space, on limiting and then stopping nuclear testing, and on banning all chemical and biological weapons. Thanks to the global nature of these last measures but also to the creation of local nuclear weapon free zones and confidence-building communities, there was no country by the end of the twentieth century that was not bound by at least one and more usually, by many different sets of obligations that limited its choices both in weaponry and methods of war.

Last year, 2006, was the fortieth anniversary of the creation of the Stockholm International Peace Institute, and we took the opportunity in our yearbook for 2006-the yearbook that we are launching in its Chinese language version today-to take a new look backwards at developments in the world since 1966. When you look at the story of forty years of arms control in that way, it becomes necessary to admit that actually the achievements of the cold war in this field were neither complete nor perfect. One point is that specific limits on nuclear weapons only ever applied to the United States and Soviet Union, not to the other three recognized nuclear powers. Secondly, despite the best aims of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, three more states acquired nuclear weapons by the year 2000 and one more has tested on weapon since, while several other countries came very close to a nuclear weapon capacity before deciding to go further. A third more general point is that all the strongest measures adopted over this period, especially at global level, referred either to weapons of mass destruction or to low-technology items that were been banned for humanitarian reasons, such as landmines. Only in Europe were binding limits negotiated on the larger conventional weapons of war like tanks and artillery; and the UN had limited success even in trying to achieve an accurate record of conventional arms stocks and sales for the entire world. While smaller arms like guns may cause most of the deaths in conflicts and certainly deserve more serious efforts to control them, it is medium and large conventional armaments that usually decide the actual winning and losing of wars.

For those of us who believe in arms control, recognizing such gaps and weaknesses should just be the first step to finding new ways to overcome them. However, the world in general has not devoted much energy and political priority to improving or even to maintaining the achievements of arms control since around 1995. As we know, the changes in strategic realities and in security attitudes and practices since the end of the Cold War have been profound, and they have been tending to turn attention away from the traditional goals of arms control for at least three reasons.

First, relations between Moscow and Washington but also between both these capitals and Beijing have relaxed to the point where no superpower sees it as its main task to control the arms of another great power or, at least, feels ready to accept new limits on its own forces for that purpose. Russia instead focuses on controlling its own territory and as much as it can of conditions in the former Soviet Union, while the USA is giving top priority to ending the threat from a number of smaller states who have acquired or might acquire WMD. This shift of strategy also shifts the focus from mutual defence limitations to non-proliferation which means essentially that one side can keep its advanced capacities while denying them to the other. Meanwhile, the geographical shift in threat means that the US is paying less attention overall to security conditions in Europe and does not seem to have paid much attention recently to preserving the achievements of Cold War-period arms control there.

The second point is that many other countries around the world including all members of the EU and NATO, but also African nations and the members of ASEAN and China itself, are directing their military strategy increasingly to peace missions and other applications of their defence resources abroad. The tough demands of such tasks, which include the need to keep a secure technological edge over local opponents, have rapidly created an assumption that any achieve and responsible modern state should be increasing and polishing its force capabilities just now rather than reducing them. Arms control and disarmament in this connection becomes something that is imposed on the people defeated in a conflict, or on a state that has had too many armed factions competing before.

The third problem is that many of the threats that worry people most today, in the developing world as well as the leading powers, came from non-state actors such as terrorists, criminals and smugglers, and the unofficial combatants in civil wars. Traditional methods of arms control such as treaties and official inspections simply do not work against such targets, and the creation of disarmament and confidence building regimes for specific territories has little effect against enemies who exploit the full transnational mobility of a globalized system. Terrorists and smugglers can also help to spread WMD and in the worst case, terrorists might try to use mass destruction techniques with greater impact than they have managed in the past.

In the USA, the Administration of George W. Bush has sometimes argued that the combination of these problems makes treaties no longer a suitable or efficient way to control the challenges of arms and destructive technology in the wrong hands. If bad states and terrorists can escape the rules, why should good states obey them? There are of course some good answers to that which I will come back to later, but for the moment what I'd like to point out is that these attitudes - and the objective difficulties of pursuing arms control in a post-cold war world - have not actually had the effect of stopping efforts for the control of weaponry. They have simply pushed them in different directions and towards the use of less traditional instruments. For instance, if you take the three trends that I just mentioned, the USA itself has tried to handle the problems of WMD programmes in what it calls 'rogue states' in three main ways: by defeating them militarily as in Iraq, by paying them to stop as in Libya, and by negotiated bargains containing both security and economic elements like the one that was reached this February with North Korea thanks to the Six-Party process presided over by China. We do not know yet whether Iran can also be dealt with by this last method as most people would prefer. What already seems clear is that military defeat is not a very good method of arms control, not just because of the huge costs and dangers involved, but because the invaded country may feel motivated to build up its strength again as soon as it can. Bargains including economic incentives may, however, work quite well so long as they can achieve a general stabilization in the relations between the country concerned and the outside world-something that is by no means clear, but which we must all hope for, in North Korea's case.

The new trend for more frequent intervention to prevent, control and end conflicts has also opened up new roads to arms control that are not limited to the so-called DDR-disarmament, de-mobilization and reintegration-programmes in post-conflict states. The settlement reached in the conflict between Serbia and its neighbours included a regional arms control regime that has actually worked very well, and similar approaches going at least as far as confidence building measures have been used in various parts of Latin America. The Western idea of Security Sector Reform that was developed in the context of democracy and good governance efforts as well as conflict handling can have an indirect effect of restraint on armaments, as well as on aggressive behaviour, because it guides states towards more rational methods of defence planning and towards military cooperation rather than competition with their neighbours. Indeed, one could make a general argument that the whole phenomenon of regional security cooperation that has created and strengthened so many multilateral groupings in the last fifty years is also a very good way of stopping arms races and allowing states to reduce their defence expenditure to a reasonable minimum. I personally consider it a very positive thing that the Shanghai process and its more formal successor, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, have created lasting military restraints and confidence building on China's borders with the Russian Federation and several Central Asian neighbours, and we will be making this point in a new independent study of the SCO that SIPRI is publishing this month.

Thirdly, the new focus on non-state actors has inspired a number of new approaches in recent years which have given the world a wider choice of methods of pursuing global arms control, even if they are not always described by that name. One well-known and perhaps still rather controversial example is the Proliferation Safety Initiative, whose 70 or so supporting states are committed to help each other inter alia with intercepting illegal transports of weapons and WMD equipment by sea. There has been a dramatic growth in the more traditional practice of export control on dangerous goods and technologies, with the well-established multilateral groups revising their rules and methods to focus more directly on non-state challenges. UN Security Council 1540 made it an obligation for all states to have, among other things, effective export controls against the risk of WMD proliferation, and more specific embargoes to be applied by all states have been introduced in more recent resolutions on North Korea and Iran. We have also seen new efforts to control types of conventional weapons that may be especially attractive to terrorists, such as man-portable air defence systems-MANPADS. The initiative currently being pushed by European and other states at the UN for a universal Arms Trade Treaty is motivated by concern about arms struggling and brokering to non-state as well as state customers, although not all great powers agree that it is wrong to supply arms to non-state partners as such. Last but not least, we have seen a multiplication of efforts for better physical safety and security for all kinds of WMD-related products and installations, as well as the destruction of outdated or surplus stocks. Since all these measures tend to reduce the number of dangerous objects in the world as well as the risks of them spreading, I myself think that it would be illogical to deny that they also represent a kind of progress in arms control. Indeed, compared with some other arms control methods they have the attractive features of being open to and applicable to all kinds of states, being easy to apply in a collaborative way, and also opening up very interesting new forms of collaboration between the state authorities and private industry. My own institute is working especially hard at the moment to develop new ways of cooperation in export and technology control, both with private producers and traders and with independent scientists.

One conclusion to draw from all this is that arms control today is not dying, it is merely dying down in some places and dimensions-including places where perhaps it is not needed any more because of improved security conditions-and growing up in other, newer places and ways. Personally I think that conclusion would be too complacent. You need only consider the recent crisis in Europe over the USA's proposals to place new bases close to Russia's frontiers, where Russia has caused anxiety to many Europeans by threatening to stop complying with the Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty (CFE Treaty), or possibly also the Treaty banning intermediate range nuclear weapons. These events have reminded many people, rather late in the day, that the formal treaties restraining Western and Russian armaments in Europe are still important for stabilizing conditions and avoiding possible military violence so long as Russia' relations with the West remain tense in various ways, as they certainly are today. I suspect many people would be equally sorry if they suddenly found that the Non-Proliferation Treaty had collapsed because too many states had been allowed to disobey it in various ways, or if the treaty banning biological weapons turned into an empty piece of paper because of the lack of machinery to enforce it. The fact is that successful arms control to deal with the great complexity of today's security conditions, and the whole range of different actors now involved, demands that we apply in mixture of all the different old and new techniques available to us; and within that mixture the clear standards and legal obligations of treaties (and similar international instruments) still have a vital role to play. Treaties do not enforce themselves and that is why all the other more practical methods are necessary, though preferably stopping short of the usually counter-productive use of military coercion. But without the treaties, what standards would there be to enforce? And what guarantee would there be that states were not choosing their targets for enforcement for selfish and biased reasons while perhaps failing to observe other important rules themselves? The USA has already exposed itself in recent years to the accusation of acting in precisely that way, and all of us who also consider ourselves 'the good guys' need to look quite carefully at our arms control policies from time to time to make sure we are not slipping into the same kind of 'double standards'. We need the treaties to measure our goodness and help ourselves and others to stay good, not just as a weapon for tackling the (actually not very numerous) cases today of major violations by those we think of as the bad guys.

Ladies and gentlemen, I have left it until the last minutes of my talk to introduce to you the other major translated work that CACDA is launching today; the Chinese version of the report of the WMD Commission chaired by Dr Hans Blix. But in a sense, everything that I have said up to now is also about that report; about the seriousness and complexity of the problems it had to address, and about the rationale for the answers it gave in its sixty different proposals. I had the honour to be a member of the Commission during its work in 2004-6, together with General Pan Zhengiang of China who I am happy to greet here today. I can assure you that the General and I, and indeed all of us on the Commission tried to be extremely practical throughout: trying not to underestimate the problems in the way of WMD control and nuclear disarmament, but also not to exclude any measure or indeed any motive that might lead humanity along a better road. Thus you will find the Report arguing that mass destruction weapons are still a problem when they belong to the big states and the 'good guys', and that all countries with nuclear weapons including India, Pakistan and Israel must play their part in reducing their reliance on these weapons, avoiding the development of new ones, and dropping doctrines and technical options that might lead to offensive first strikes. You will find the Report calling for peaceful political and economic bargains to solve the challenges of Iran and North Korea, and for further international efforts in all the practical fields of export, safety and security and safe destruction of old stocks that I was talking about before. But you will also find the members of the WMD Commission calling unanimously for greater respect for arms control, disarmament and non-proliferation treaties, including the need to bring the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty into force, and indeed the need to create some new treaty instruments such as an agreement to cut off the production of fissile materials (FMCT). The Commission's report is practical here too in arguing that treaties have to be supported by bigger expert staffs, especially at the disposal of the UN Secretary-General, and by better techniques of monitoring and verification and more efficient working methods in the world's various disarmament institutions. The report does allow itself just one conclusion that could be called idealistic, namely that the world would be a better place if we could get rid of all the weapons that have such terrible effects and therefore that we should be studying already now what kind of agreements and what practical first steps might lead us towards that ideal situation. Even if many governments have trouble accepting the idea of a nuclear-free world, I can assure you that it has been received with enthusiasm by non-governmental peace movements in many countries; and I personally think it is important for experts to communicate also with that audience because the final element needed for good and lasting arms control solutions is often the understanding and support of the people.

Mr Chairman, ladies and gentlemen, today is a special day for me because it is the last time I will speak to you or visit China as the Director of SIPRI. It has been a great pleasure for me to work together with all colleagues at the China Arms Control and Disarmament Association (CACDA) and with our publishing partners during my five years in this job; but the time has come for me to hand over to our new Director Dr Bates Gill, who is actually a specialist in questions concerning China and East Asia generally. I know that the work of SIPRI will flourish under him and I feel equally sure that the work of arms control and disarmament research here in Beijing will flourish under the new arrangements at the Chinese Institute of International Studies. My final hope is that the cooperation between the two Institutes will also flourish and that the excellent Chinese translation of the SIPRI Yearbook will be produced for many years yet. I hope that you will enjoy reading this latest Yearbook as well as the WMD Commission report-and thank you for listening to me!