A New Approach to Arms Control

With Russia’s war against Ukraine in its second year and tensions growing in the U.S.-Chinese relationship, nuclear weapons are back on the global political agenda. At a summit in Hiroshima on May 19, G-7 leaders committed to promoting “responsible nuclear behavior,” including risk reduction measures and greater transparency about states’ nuclear arsenals. Despite this renewed attention to the danger of nuclear weapons, traditional arms control—in which nuclear powers formally agree to take steps to reduce their arsenals—has broken down altogether.

There are a host of reasons for this failure. Washington and Moscow are again competing in the nuclear domain. China has meanwhile entered the arms race, making the competition tripolar. Novel technologies such as artificial intelligence provide militaries with new capabilities, often blurring the lines between conventional and nuclear domains. Additionally, deep-rooted partisanship in the U.S. Senate has severely hurt the United States’ ability to conclude legally binding arms agreements.

Everyone is pointing fingers. Russia and China blame Washington for the breakdown. In November 2022, Russia accused the United States of “toxic” behavior leading to the collapse of strategic stability talks, and in February, Moscow used a similar excuse to suspend its participation in the 2010 New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, known as New START. China has largely been silent on the fate of the treaty, and Washington has condemned Moscow’s decision to link implementation of New START to the U.S. stance on the war in Ukraine. Meanwhile, Beijing is refusing to engage in arms control until American and Russian arsenals come down in size.

Regardless of who is to blame, arms control as we know it has come to an end. This means that the United States must convert the G-7 pledge to induce “responsible’’ nuclear behavior into a new agenda. Instead of focusing on weapons numbers, the United States should try to encourage responsible behaviors and help stigmatize irresponsible ones. Responsible behaviors include transparency about nuclear arsenals, risk reduction efforts, crisis communication channels, and restraints on potentially escalatory activities. This new approach will allow Washington to provide practical principles for responsible nuclear behavior in an era of rising nuclear risks, and—perhaps most important—serve as an opportunity to further strengthen relationships with U.S. allies and partners, including in the global South, to involve a wider and more diverse group of states in promoting responsible nuclear behavior.

ARMS CONTROL IS DEAD

For years, if not decades, nuclear experts have issued warnings of the impending death of arms control. When the United States exited the U.S.-Russian Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2002, the nuclear analyst Pavel Podvig declared that “the end of strategic arms control” seemed nigh. In 2019, when Russia cheated on the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty by flight-testing a missile in the forbidden ranges, Washington responded by withdrawing from the pact, and arms control seemed to hit another “dead end,” according to the nuclear weapons researcher Andrey Baklitskiy. In 2020, after President Donald Trump withdrew the United States from the Open Skies Treaty, an agreement that had allowed the United States, Russia, and other signatories to carry out unarmed surveillance flights in one another’s airspace, the U.S. ambassador Bonnie Jenkins (who had helped negotiate the treaty) lamented that “Washington appears to have little vision or imagination for what could replace what we have damaged.”

At the time, such eulogies may have seemed premature. But when Russia suspended the bilateral New START agreement this year, those warnings were revealed as prescient. Bilateral, highly formalized nuclear treaties that include quantitative limits on the number and categories of nuclear weapons a country maintains are now a thing of the past. An entire network of agreements is gone. For example, New START limited the United States and Russia to deploying 1,550 strategic warheads, but reaching a similar legally binding agreement today is politically unfeasible.

As a result, the United States and its allies face numerous arms control challenges. To be clear, they should not pursue arms control for the sake of arms control. Any arms control agenda must be tied to tangible strategic objectives. The Biden administration’s 2022 Nuclear Posture Review identified such interests, including reducing the risks of a costly arms race, strengthening strategic stability, and lowering the odds of nuclear risks. The G-7 leaders’ statement also flagged the strategic importance of risk reduction, meaning cooperative measures aimed at containing military incidents before they escalate to a bigger crisis or war. Of course, achieving these objectives will be difficult, and any arms control agenda must account for geopolitical competition and rapidly evolving technology. It is tempting to abandon the arms control project altogether in this climate, but there are still benefits to be gained from arms control if it can evolve with the times.

LONG LIVE ARMS CONTROL

Since the early days of the Cold War, avoiding nuclear war has been the core objective of arms control. Although the agreements have fallen apart, the principle of avoiding nuclear war is alive and well. That is why U.S. President Joe Biden urged countries to avoid fighting “World War III” in confronting Russia’s aggression against Ukraine. Even the limited use of just a few nuclear weapons has become a taboo, as underlined again by leaders of the world’s most powerful states at the G-20 Summit in Bali in November 2022. This first principle of arms control—avoid nuclear war—can provide a touchstone for creative thinking about strengthening the norms of restraint and responsibility. A joint effort is needed to make sure nuclear weapons are not used in the twenty-first century.

Avoiding nuclear war remains a shared interest among great powers, and certain behaviors may be particularly destabilizing. Targeting nuclear command and control systems with cyberattacks would be one such bad behavior. Attacking early-warning satellites might be another. Testing nuclear weapons—already viewed by a majority of states as off limits—also risks escalation or a renewed arms race. Although the United States adheres to the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, it has unfortunately failed to ratify it, along with China and a handful of other states. Focusing on preventing destabilizing behaviors and promoting better ones should be the goal of this new chapter of arms control.

States can also take actions that strengthen global stability, including announcing upcoming missile tests well in advance and taking steps to avoid potentially escalatory close calls between adversaries operating in proximity. These kinds of near misses are happening between Russian and NATO members’ aircraft over the Black Sea, often as a result of ignoring existing risk reduction measures such as the 1972 Incidents at Sea Agreement. Ensuring a level of human control in nuclear decision-making could also find many supporters.

This type of behavioral arms control approach would not focus on negotiating legally binding limits to specific weapons. Instead, it would seek politically binding declarations of intent that would not require congressional approval. It could involve the five permanent members of the UN Security Council—China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States—but might also include as many nuclear powers and nonnuclear states as possible. It would focus on specific good behaviors, such as notifying others about missile test launches and not relying on hair-trigger alerts, and it would include other nonnuclear military domains and technologies such as cyberweapons and AI. So far, no country has made a serious push to devise acceptable (and stigmatize unacceptable) rules of conduct. And to be clear, behavioral arms control is not mutually exclusive from the strategic arms control of the past. Indeed, behavioral arms control could lay the groundwork for such efforts when geopolitical conditions improve.

THE UNITED STATES LEADS

Behavioral arms control will ultimately rely on American leadership. Because of the political polarization in the United States, this will be a challenge. But strengthening global stability and acting as a responsible great power must include leading on arms control. Nonetheless, the country’s allies will play a crucial role. Most important, allies would serve as interlocutors for countries that favor global stability and prosperity but also do not want to take sides in great-power competition. Those countries, such as Brazil, India, or South Africa, might tacitly welcome a responsible American stance on global stability. At the same time, they might be hesitant to simply follow the United States’ lead, given the country’s long history of ignoring these states’ interests and preferring unilateral action instead. Here, U.S. allies with a stronger multilateral track record, such as Germany, would play a role, making sure that global South countries have a real role and voice in the arms control agenda.

Rallying as many supporters as possible in the global South is essential. Washington and its allies would have to convince governments in Brasilia, Mexico City, New Delhi, and Pretoria that supporting responsible behavior is a credible and worthwhile endeavor to avoid nuclear war. Washington will have to convince skeptics around the world that agreeing on certain rules of the road for responsible behavior is possible, even with Moscow and Beijing. In the past, Washington has sometimes forced others into regulating certain behaviors while making exemptions for itself. In a multipolar global order, this approach will not work. Instead, recognizing and dealing with the ultimately limited resources of the United States’ global reach should be an ideational driver behind behavioral arms control. By giving the global South a chance to buy into that process on an equal footing, Washington might convince these countries that it is serious this time.

One proposal put forward by the White House is for the so-called P5—China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States—to play a greater role in arms control. Although such efforts should indeed be pursued, reducing nuclear risks in the twenty-first century must appeal to a much larger and more diverse audience. The G-20 is another important forum for such a process, as it comprises the United States, its allies, and China and Russia, as well as heavyweights from the global South.

Avoiding nuclear war remains a shared interest among great powers.

To get traction in Moscow and Beijing, Washington would have to offer something that would interest U.S. competitors. An official confirmation to China that both states would suffer unprecedented damage from attacking each other with nuclear weapons, basically a confirmation of what’s been a reality for decades, and should therefore avoid behaviors that could bring them to the nuclear brink might elicit interest from Beijing. But such a confirmation would be quite controversial in some capitals: U.S. allies such as South Korea or Japan would fear that Washington could give in to Chinese nuclear blackmail in a regional crisis, exposing these allies to Chinese aggression.

Similarly, a U.S. statement accepting the interrelationship between offensive and defensive strategic arms could provide leeway for future arms control talks with Russia, given that Moscow fears that the U.S. military could one day blunt its strategic deterrent by using a deadly combination of missile defense and conventional precision-strike weapons. But again, such a statement would likely be poorly received in allied capitals that attach an important political and strategic significance to missile defense systems. Like the formal arms control treaties of the past, behavioral arms control would have to square the circle between safeguarding the security of the United States and its allies while eliciting enough interest from Beijing or Moscow to reciprocate a U.S. opening.

Even if China and Russia ultimately reject such an approach, rallying as many countries as possible behind a behavior-based agenda would still help slow down the unraveling of global stability and could win the United States much-needed credit around the world.

The goal for the G-20 should be a global charter on responsible military behavior. The Cold War holds some valuable lessons here. In 1975, the Soviet Union and the United States agreed on the Helsinki accords, which contained general rules of conduct in the military, societal, and economic domains. Though the charter was nonbinding, the principles it enshrined contributed to managing the peaceful end of a global standoff. Imagining Russia’s engaging on such an approach, having only recently announced plans to deploy tactical nuclear weapons to Belarus, might be difficult. Then again, in 1965, almost no one would have thought that an East-West accord such as Helsinki would become possible a decade later. All these efforts, however, may hinge on the outcome of the war in Ukraine and Russia’s and Ukraine’s actions there.

DEAL OR NO DEAL?

An arms control agenda focused on changing behaviors instead of limiting arsenals would have some disadvantages. Compared with the meticulously negotiated arms deals of years past, it would be less formal and therefore less constraining. Verification of compliant behavior would be tricky, although the observance of general rules as well as the punishing option of public naming and shaming would still exist. But in the absence of any body with the power to verify compliance, mechanisms for oversight and conflict resolution would not exist.

Still, in the current competitive environment, a behavior-based approach could be arms control’s last lifeline. It is worth accepting its potential risks. The good news is that it could build on existing initiatives. NATO recently adopted general principles of responsible use of AI. The United Kingdom currently seeks to establish global behavioral norms to reduce the threat of conflict in space. Russia, despite its New START suspension, continues to notify the United States about its missile tests. The former head of the Munich Security Conference, Wolfgang Ischinger, recently suggested that Moscow would not deploy nuclear systems in Belarus and that Washington, for its part, would reaffirm its policy of not deploying such weapons in Poland and other eastern NATO states. The United States should use these existing building blocks of responsible behavior to create a new arms control architecture. As a starting point, for example, the United States might propose a ban on testing fractional orbital bombardment systems, which China has already tested. These weapons and their tests have the potential to escalate crises and spark an arms race.

Once nuclear peer competitors find it in their interests, a return to more formal arms control agreements should be on the agenda. Until then, arms control that focuses on behavior might be the most promising way to manage competition and to avoid global instability and, ultimately, nuclear use. The resulting framework may look very different from arms control of the past. But it would be better than a future in which proliferation proceeds in the absence of any shared guardrails for handling the most dangerous weapons in the world.