The Foreign Service Journal, May 2020

26 MAY 2020 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL n my line of work, you have to have a long memory. Periods of success in negotiations are followed by droughts, because of politics, military upheaval, arms buildups—yes, sometimes the weapons have to be built before they can be reduced—or a sense of complacency: “We have arms control treaties in place; let’s just focus on implementing them.” In those cases, new thinking and new negotiations may slow or even stop. Yet, the national security interest of the United States continues to drive the necessity for nuclear arms control. The calculation of our own national security interest must always be front and center when we consider a nuclear negotia- tion. Sometimes arms control is touted as an absolute good, one that should be pursued for its own sake. We do have interna- tional obligations in this realm, most prominently the commit- ment under Article VI of the Non-Proliferation Treaty to reduce and eliminate nuclear weapons until we reach zero. This com- mitment is shared by the other NPT nuclear weapon states— France, the U.K., Russia and China; and sometimes it gets a boost, as it did when President Barack Obama strongly reiter- ated U.S. intent to proceed on the path to zero nuclear weapons An accomplished negotiator puts nuclear arms control in perspective—what it has achieved, where it has failed and what it can do for our future security. n BY ROSE GOTTEMOE L L ER FOCUS ON NUCLEAR DIPLOMACY during his speech in Prague in April 2009, the first major foreign policy speech of his presidency. That international obligation is important, but still we must consider first and foremost our own national security interest. I think about that interest as follows: Nuclear arms control is the only way that we can attain stable and predictable deployments of these most fearsome weapons, and it is the only way that we can assure that we won’t be bankrupted by nuclear arms racing. These points are especially important now, as we contemplate a world where China has more nuclear weapons and more missiles with which to deliver them. China now has many fewer nuclear weapons than the United States and Russia, and it has not yet shown an interest in coming to the table to negotiate constraints on them. It is constrained by its doctrine, which has held that China will not strike first with nuclear weapons and will only maintain enough secure nuclear weapons to ensure a second strike can take place if another coun- try strikes China first. In the Chinese view, this doctrinal approach forges a kind of insurance policy for the international commu- nity. However, since China has now started to build more kinds of nuclear delivery systems, including long-range submarine- I A Short History U.S.-Russian Nuclear Arms Control Negotiations