Arms Control
While the idea of disarmament has been around, presumably, since the
invention of thenation state, arms control is a more recent concept. This
is largely because only a technological society can produce weapons sufficiently
distinct from civilian uses to be covered by an international agreement.
Furthermore the acceptance of the thesis that war is, partially, caused by
armaments is itself a relatively modern idea. Although the First and Second
International Hague Peace Conferences of 1899 and 1907 made gestures
towards the desirability of disarmament and limiting the size of armed forces,
the first treaties to specifically control armaments were those of the Washington
Conference on the Limitation of Armaments of 1921–22 and the London
Naval Treaties of 1930, 1935 and 1936.
Arms control can mean one or more of three things. Quantitative arms
control either limits or reduces the size of a nation’s military capacity by
restricting the number of troops and of weapons in general. Thus theSALTI
agreement of 1972, which set maximum levels for nuclear missiles between the
USA and Soviet Union, was an example of quantitative arms control. Quali-
tative arms control attempts to ban or restrict entire categories of weapons,
without making any limitations on what else a nation might buy or develop to
defend itself. The 1987Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, which
banned all ground-launched nuclear missiles with a range of more than 500
kilometres from Europe, is a recent example of such an arrangement. The
quantitative/qualitative distinction dates to theLeague of Nations’World
Disarmament Conference of 1932–34, when attempts were made to eradicate
the most feared weapons of the day, particularly bomber aircraft and submarines.
A third meaning to arms control can best be described asbehavioural. This
involves restrictions not on what a country can own in terms of military
hardware, nor on how many soldiers it can put into uniform, but on what it
candowith its capacity. The restrictions applying in this case govern troop
movements, the size of exercises, requirement of notice before military move-
ments occur and similar measures. The idea is to reduce the possibility of war
by accident, when one country’s apparently belligerent activities are taken to
imply a threat to another, which then begins to respond. Consequently such
arms control restrictions, best exemplified by the 1986Stockholm Declara-
tion, are usually described as confidence-building measures (CBMs).
Each form of arms control has its own peculiar difficulties, but they all share
two general problems. The first is technical. No treaty is of great value unless
each party can be sure that the others are keeping to it, and not secretly
building forbidden weapons or making covert preparations for an attack. This
is known as the verification problem, and has become increasingly fraught with
modern weapons technology. Agreement in 1930 in London to restrict the
Arms Control