The Foreign Service Journal, December 2009

22 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / D E C E M B E R 2 0 0 9 responsibility for all aspects of nu- clear weapons and their constituent fissile materials, including peaceful uses of such materials. Enforce- ment would not be subject to veto by permanent members of the Se- curity Council. Once the authority was in place, the United States would relinquish its nuclear wea- pons. In effect, this would create a world free of such weapons. The Soviet Union countered with the Gromyko Plan, revers- ing the order of steps so that the U.S. would first destroy its stockpile, and preserving Moscow’s veto right in the Se- curity Council. The unbridgeable divide between these approaches, to- gether with the growing animosity between West and East, meant the failure of these first attempts at nuclear arms control. Had they succeeded in reliably banning nu- clear weapons, their spread to other states (“horizontal” proliferation) and the nuclear arms race (“vertical” prolif- eration) would not have occurred. Thereafter, both in the U.N. framework and among themselves, the major powers and other states sought ways to address the grave threat posed by nuclear weapons through partial, step-by-step measures. Key Agreements, Old and New The first agreement aimed directly at constraining the nuclear arms race was the 1963 Limited Test Ban Treaty, prohibiting nuclear tests in the atmosphere, outer space and under water. That was followed five years later by a pact that remains a key element of the arms control (and nonproliferation) regime: the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Aside from India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea (which has announced its withdrawal from the treaty and twice tested a nuclear explosive), the NPT has near-universal adherence, and has been a basis for related undertakings aimed at ensuring that nuclear weapons spread no further horizontally, and are ultimately abolished by those already possessing them. The NPT assigns to the Interna- tional Atomic Energy Agency the role of safeguarding peaceful nu- clear activities to ensure that diver- sion of regulated nuclear materials to nuclear weapons does not occur. The current impasse arising from Iran’s formerly secret enrichment program in violation of its safe- guards commitments points to the critical role the IAEA plays in global nuclear arms control. Beginning in 1967 at the Glassboro Summit, bilateral U.S.-Soviet nuclear arms control assumed an increasing role in addressing the “vertical” proliferation of nuclear weapons. The 1972 strategic arms limitation agreements (SALT I), the 1979 SALT II Treaty, the 1974 Threshold Test Ban Treaty and the 1976 Peaceful Nuclear Explo- sions Treaty were early successes. These were followed by the 1987 Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty, the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty and the 2002 Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty. Developments since the breakup of the USSR have prompted attention to security threats not previously fo- cused on in the arms control regime. In particular, the prominence of terrorism in the past decade, and the shock of the 9/11 attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C., point to the necessity of strong international action to ensure that nuclear (or biological) weapons do not fall into the wrong hands and are then unleashed against mass civilian targets. The proposals of former Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger and George Shultz, former Secretary of De- fense William Perry and former Senator Sam Nunn pub- lished in the Wall Street Journal on Jan. 5, 2007, and Jan. 15, 2008, and the op-ed by the Reagan administration’s chief nuclear arms negotiator Amb. Max Kampelman ( New York Times , April 24, 2006), have given new impe- tus to the step-by-step process to achieve a nuclear- weapon-free world. Their sober articulation of the necessity of achieving this outcome for U.S. national se- curity returns to the forefront the goal first articulated more than a half-century ago in the Baruch Plan. These new proposals have clearly served as a point of departure for the Obama administration’s approach to arms control. The president outlined his objectives in an address in Prague on April 5, committing the U.S. to the F O C U S Arms control cuts across the traditional bureaucratic structures for managing foreign policy and defense policy. Pierce Corden is a visiting scholar at the Center for Sci- ence, Technology and Security Policy of the American As- sociation for the Advancement of Science. The author thanks Amb. James Goodby, Dr. Robert Rochlin, Mr. Dean Rust and Amb. Norman Wulf for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this article.