308 CHAPTER EigHT ■ War and Strife
power ful and straightforward: fewer weapons means greater security. Regulating
arms proliferation (arms control) and reducing the amount of arms and the types of
weapons employed (disarmament) should logically reduce the costs of the security
dilemma.
During the Cold War, many arms control agreements were negotiated to reduce
the threat of nuclear war. For example, in the 1972 Treaty on the Limitation of Anti-
ballistic Missile Systems (ABM treaty), both the United States and the Soviet Union
agreed not to use a ballistic missile defense as a shield against a first strike by the other.
The Strategic Arms Limitations Talks in 1972 and 1979 (SALT I and SALT II, respec-
tively) put ceilings on the growth of both Soviet and U.S. strategic weapons. However,
due to the Soviet invasion of Af ghan i stan in 1979, the U.S. Senate never ratified the
second SALT treaty. The Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) was negotiated in
1968 at the United Nations in response to the Cuban missile crisis.
The NPT illustrates both positive and negative effects of such treaties. In force since
1970, the NPT spells out the rules of nuclear proliferation. In the treaty, signatory coun-
tries without nuclear weapons agree not to acquire or develop them; states with nuclear
weapons promise not to transfer the technology to nonnuclear states and to eventually
dismantle their own. During the 1990s, three states that previously had nuclear weap-
ons programs— South Africa, Brazil, and Argentina— dismantled their programs and
became parties to the treaty, along with three other states— Belarus, Kazakhstan, and
Ukraine— that gave up nuclear weapons left on their territory after the dissolution of
the Soviet Union. As with many of the arms control treaties, however, several key nuclear
states and threshold non- nuclear states remain outside the treaty, including Cuba,
India, Israel, and Pakistan.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), a UN- based agency established
in 1957 to disseminate knowledge about nuclear energy and promote its peaceful uses,
is the designated guardian of the treaty. The IAEA created a system of safeguards,
including inspection teams that visit nuclear facilities and report on any movement of
nuclear material, in an attempt to keep nuclear material from being diverted to non-
peaceful purposes and to ensure that states that signed the NPT are complying.
Inspectors for the IAEA visited Iraqi sites after the 1991 Gulf War and North Korean
sites in the mid-1990s. Their purpose in the first case was to verify that illegal materi-
als in Iraq had been destroyed and, in the second case, to confirm that nuclear mate-
rials in North Korea were being used for nonmilitary purposes only. But the work of
the IAEA has been constantly challenged. In 2009, Iran, which, as a signatory to the
NPT was obligated to report any fa cil i ty actively enriching fissile material, was discov-
ered to have an unreported fa cil i ty in violation of its treaty obligations. Iran’s cheating
in 2009 has called into question whether it will abide by the constraints of the Joint
Comprehensive Plan of Action signed in 2015. This agreement calls upon Iran to cease
enrichment of nuclear weapons- grade fuel in exchange for an end to international