Brief History: Arms-Control Agreements

On march 26, President Obama announced that the U.S. and Russia will cut their deployed long-range nuclear arsenals by 30% over seven years. The START Follow-On Treaty, as it is known, is the descendant of a series of Cold War arms-control agreements that had an unlikely progenitor: the spectacular failure of the most ambitious disarmament program ever conceived. The Versailles Treaty of 1919, which was designed to disarm Germany but which failed to prevent World War II, led to a more sober approach to arms control predicated on the belief that conflict is inevitable and a balance of power is the only way to deter aggression.

The Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty of 1972--one of the first major agreements of the Cold War--actually aimed to keep both the Soviet Union and the U.S. vulnerable to nuclear attack by forbidding the development of defensive systems. The Strategic Arms Limitation Talks of the same year, which capped the number of weapons allowed each side, set the balance of destructive power at a fixed level. In 1986, two great dreamers, Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, met in Iceland with the aim of total nuclear disarmament. The duo failed, but their talks set the stage for the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty--the only agreement ever to eliminate an entire class of nuclear weapons.

The 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START I) returned to realism, cutting excess nukes while ensuring that the specter of mutually assured destruction would linger long after the Cold War. Last month's modest accord leaves unanswered how arms control might transition into disarmament. No one knows how to get to zero. But any hope of that will depend on realism's giving way to optimism--and the belief that an abundance of thermonuclear weapons isn't the most effective way to stop people from slaughtering one another.