Policy Briefs on Cooperative Security, Arms Control and Disarmament

The process just before, during and after the Stockholm Conference on Confidence- and Security-building Measures and Disarmament in Europe which took place between January 1984 and September 1986 formed part of a wider chain of events, the full importance of which was not widely understood until 1989, or perhaps even much later. The added value of this Policy Brief may be to highlight the potential importance of what many would refer to as associated measures when dealing with the current dangers of nuclear weapons and a renewed arms race with ever more devastating weapons.

Arms control during the years of détente remains almost a legend: it was born in the middle of a dangerous stand-off between two implacable rivals and achieved reasonable successes in substance and the overall atmosphere of cooperation. As the world has entered an unstable and dangerous phase in 2010s, we look back to the 1970s in search of lessons to be drawn and examples to follow. Can that experience be replicated? How can we launch a new arms control effort at the time of worsening and increasingly dangerous geopolitical competition? If two rival superpowers could engage in a cooperative endeavour in the midst of a geo-political conflict, perhaps we could repeat the experience today and mitigate the more dangerous aspects of the conflict that will likely continue for an extended period of time.

China and India are the two most populous countries in the world and relations between them oscillate between conflict, competition and cooperation. Both countries have dynamic economies. They have fought a war with each other, continue to tussle over territory at their shared border and both invest heavily in their military posture. Their trade relations have greatly improved and cordial cooperation in various global and regional forums brought them closer to each other in selected political and economic areas. Is there hope for better conflict management, for fruitful competition, and for improving collaboration?

The international arms control regime is in peril, concluded a meeting of leading arms control officials, scholars and policy advisers from the US, Europe and Russia. This group was brought together by a consortium of international think tanks—Toda Peace Institute, NUPI, Chatham House, Clingendael and the Council on Strategic Risks—in a track 1.5 workshop held in Oslo, Norway in October 2018.

Over the past 30 years, arms control treaties and unilateral initiatives have resulted in the destruction of more than 50,000 nuclear warheads.1 The vast majority of those warheads were Russian and U.S. weapons. These accomplishments reflected a political will and conviction that nuclear forces had to be constrained and the role of nuclear weapons reduced. Over the past decade, however, both the will and conviction have changed. Instead, Russia and the United States – and by extension also NATO – are now embroiled in a deepening political clash that has rekindled Cold War rhetoric and triggered significant changes in military postures and strategies. Although less of an ideological clash and intensity compared with the old Cold War, the changes contain all the building blocks needed to create a new one.