Policy Briefs on Cooperative Security, Arms Control and Disarmament

This brief draws from a Nautilus Institute, Technology for Global Security, Preventive Defense Project workshop, when a speed-scenarios exercise involving nuclear weapons and social media experts and practitioners was conducted to explore antidotes to potentially catastrophic effects of social media on the risk of nuclear war. To anticipate how social media might play out in the world of nuclear early warning, studies of social media in other domains where it was used to promote extremist views and behaviour were examined: anti-vaccination, anti-Semitism, gang, ethnic, and terrorist violence in cities. Four “short circuit” hypothetical, imaginary scenarios were produced at the workshop that explored how and what circuit breakers might be created that avoid or overcome the destabilising effect of social media on nuclear early warning systems and nuclear command decisions.

This policy brief analyses the seriousness of the challenges that the international arms control system faces, to explore whether it is possible and how to maintain the values of arms control and to keep the world in strategic stability. With a particular focus on China’s policy on nuclear issues and attitude to nonproliferation, the author argues that it seems to be inevitable for the international arms control system to face challenges at the current stage. The challenges are real and serious, but it is still possible to keep the world restraint and away from military competition, if the world community can work together and re-regulate big powers into the international institutions.

A recent international workshop of experts and diplomats has concluded that sweeping changes in the world order over the last two decades have contributed to the unravelling of the arms control regime. The workshop, convened by the Toda Peace Institute, the Norwegian Institute for International Affairs and the University of Otago, brought together representatives of the arms control communities in the United States, Russia, Europe, China, India, Pakistan, Japan and the Middle East. A key theme concerned the prospects for checking the dangerous dynamics now under way in this time of turbulent change. The workshop examined three historical precedents for managing international security and arms control cooperatively and drew a number of lessons for the present day.

The September 19 Military Agreement adopted by the two Koreas in 2018 is a modest but remarkable success in arms control history. Nevertheless, heated debates are taking place, both inside South Korea and abroad, over the legitimacy and rationality of the agreement. This policy brief analyses the true meaning of the September 19 Military Agreement between the two Koreas, to identify its problems and policy implications in order to draw up supplementary measures to implement it successfully. Furthermore, the paper draws some implications for the relationship between progress on North Korea's denuclearisation issue and further conventional arms control on the Korean Peninsula.

History supplies few examples of successful great power cooperation for preserving peace over long periods. For the emerging multipolar structure, one of the rare templates of successful peace-preserving collaboration has been the Concert of Europe (CoE), which emerged in the course of the Vienna Congress of 1815. The CoE worked for a century; it prevented great power war for two long periods and managed at least to avoid all-out war in the interim period of the Crimea War and the Wars of German and Italian unification). This policy brief examines the achievements and shortcomings of the CoE, and discusses how these insights might be applied in light of current global power relations.