Can nuclear arms control be revived in the era of nuclear multipolarity?

Abstract

The conventional wisdom is that there is a new great-power competition among the United States, Russia, and China, as they have shown a renewed interest in modernizing their nuclear arsenals while reaffirming the centrality of nuclear weapons in their internationalsecurity policy and nuclear strategy. There is an impending multipolar nuclear arms race while important nuclear-arms-control treaties negotiated during the Cold War, such as the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM) and the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, have disappeared. The combination of the return to great-power rivalry, the deterioration of the international-security environment since Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, and aggressive nuclear doctrines creates the danger of nuclear use in regional conflict scenarios. Under these circumstances, can arms control be revived? These two books give an affirmative answer. Despite their important differences, they complement each other and make a significant contribution to the literature on nuclear arms control in the era of nuclear multipolarity. Winning and Losing the Nuclear Peace is the latest book from Michael Krepon, a leading specialist on South Asian security who is the cofounder of the Stimson Center inWashington, DC. The book provides a thorough and intensive historical analysis that starts with a prehistory of nuclear arms control: the Acheson-Lilienthal Report, the failed Baruch Plan, how atomic scientists became political actors, and how the enormous anxiety provoked by the first use of nuclear weapons in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was “institutionalized” through deterrence theory. The prehistory chapter ends with the first Soviet nuclear test, in 1949; the US decision to develop the hydrogen bomb; “NSC-68,” a document produced by the US National Security Council that provided “a comprehensive... assessment of the nature of the Soviet threat and what to do about it” (p. 41); and the launch in 1957 of Sputnik, a Russian satellite that could carry a nuclear bomb. The book is divided into seven sections covering the rise of nuclear arms control in the 1950s and 1960s, the pivotal summit meeting between US President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in Geneva in