CIAO DATE: 06/02

Reinvigorating Multilateral Arms Control

Abstract

Sadly, it was no April Fools' Day joke that the US Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA) closed its doors on 1 April 1999, following 38 years of activity. ACDA was seen as a unique model for promoting disarmament and arms control. Its closure, together with the US Senate's refusal to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Agreement, US inertia at the Geneva Conference on Disarmament (CD), moves to slow down the implementation of the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), and numerous other events in the late 1990s reflects a deeper US disaffection with arms control. Furthermore, the revived US plans to build a national missile defence (NMD) system have called into question the very foundations of arms control.

The US is not the only country to have reservations about arms control. In Russia, it proved extremely difficult to obtain the necessary parliamentary majorities required to ratify the CWC and the START II agreement to reduce strategic nuclear systems. The nuclear tests conducted by India and Pakistan in May 1998 dealt a severe blow to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), and the non-co-operation of North Korea and Iraq in dismantling weapons of mass destruction, laboratories and installations has cast doubts about the potential to control these weapons. Further negative examples could be added to the list.

Paradoxically, governments have reduced their military arsenals substantially, despite the gridlock in arms control negotiations. Arms have been decommissioned, forces demobilized, defence production capacities cut, military bases redeveloped and military expenditures reduced. Although disarmament has slowed down in the late 1990s compared to the early part of the decade the crisis in arms control did not lead to a crisis in quantitative disarmament.

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