ARMS CONTROL

any international limitation of the development, testing, production, deployment, or use of weapons that, at the same time, accepts the inevitability of the continued existence of national military establishments. Implied in arms control is some form of collaboration between generally antagonistic states in areas of military policy. In a broader sense, arms control embraces the related notion of disarmament (q.v.). Complete disarmament is the elimination of a nation's entire military capacity. Partial disarmament, by contrast, can consist of the elimination of certain types or classes of weapons or a general reduction (but not elimination) of all classes of weapons. Disarmament agreements usually directly prohibit the possession or production of weapons, while arms-control agreements act more indirectly by setting limitations on the testing, deployment, or use of weapons. Arms-control agreements proved particularly useful in limiting the nuclear arms race in the second half of the 20th century, and by century's end the term arms control had come to denote any disarmament or arms-limitation agreement. The possibility of arms control did not come before an international assembly until 1899, at the first Hague Convention (q.v.). Although this and later conventions failed to limit armaments, they did adopt a number of agreements on related matters. In the wake of World War I, the Washington Conference (q.v.) of 192122 incorporated disarmament, arms-limitation, and arms-control agreements in order to halt the Great Powers' naval arms race. There were no further major arms-control agreements until the 1960s, by which time the world's two emergent superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, had each developed large arsenals of nuclear weapons. The possibility of both nations' mutual destruction in an intercontinental exchange of nuclear-armed missiles prompted them to undertake increasingly serious efforts to limit first the testing, then the deployment, and finally the possession of these weapons. The United States and the Soviet Union thus took the lead in arms control through the sponsorship of several international agreements of a limited risk character. The first such agreement was the Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty (q.v.; 1963), which banned tests of nuclear weapons in the atmosphere, in outer space, and underwater, thus effectively confining nuclear explosions to underground sites. In 1968 the two superpowers took the lead in a treaty whereby they agreed not to promote the spread, or proliferation, of nuclear weapons to countries that did not already possess them. (See Non-proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, Treaty on the.) The most substantial advances in limiting the superpowers' nuclear arms race in the 1970s came out of the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (q.v.), or SALT, which were intended to restrain the two nations' continuing buildup in nuclear-armed intercontinental (long-range or strategic) ballistic missiles (ICBMs). One major part of the SALT I complex of agreements reached in 1972 severely limited each nation's future deployment of antiballistic missiles, which could be used to destroy incoming ICBMs; the agreement thus kept both sides subject to the deterrent effect of the other's strategic offensive forces. Another portion of the SALT I agreement froze the number of each side's ICBMs and submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) at current levels. The SALT II agreement of 1979 set limits on each side's store of multiple independent reentry vehicles (MIRVs), which are strategic missiles equipped with multiple nuclear warheads capable of hitting different targets on the ground. This agreement placed limits on the number of MIRVed ICBMs, SLBMs, strategic bomber planes, and other strategic launchers each side possessed. The SALT agreements stabilized the strategic arms race between the two superpowers, but at very high force levels, with each nation possessing many times the long-range offensive capacity needed to utterly destroy the other in a nuclear war. The accession of a liberalizing Soviet regime under Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985 intensified arms-control efforts between the two superpowers and bore its first fruits in the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (q.v.) of 1987, in which the United States and the Soviet Union agreed to eliminate their stocks of intermediate- and medium-range land-based missiles. In the meantime, a new set of bilateral negotiations between the superpowers had begun in 1982 with the aim of reducing rather than merely limiting their arsenals of nuclear warheads and launch platforms (missiles and bombers). These negotiations were called the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (q.v.), or START. In the START I treaty signed in 1991, both superpowers agreed to reduce their strategic nuclear forces by 25 to 30 percent over a period of years. Both sides also began eliminating various types of tactical (battlefield) nuclear-armed weapons, including artillery shells, depth charges, land mines, bombs, and the warheads carried on various tactical missiles. Following the breakup of the Soviet Union in late 1991, newly sovereign Russia undertook efforts to drastically reduce its nuclear and conventional armed forces through unilateral actions and agreements with the United States. Newly independent Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakstan, the other inheritors of the Soviet Union's nuclear arsenal, pursued policies aimed at eventually attaining complete nuclear disarmament. In 1992 an informal agreement (START II) was reached between the United States and Russia that would further drastically reduce each nation's strategic nuclear forces over a period extending into the early 21st century.