David N. Schwartz

Strategic Arms Limitation: The Precedent of the Washington and London Naval Treaties

Though in some respects unique, the problems of Soviet-American strategic arms limitation have in other respects been encountered before. The most important precedent would appear to be that of the system of naval arms control established by the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922 and the London Naval Treaties of 1930 and 1936. These attempts to limit naval armaments in the interwar years may be compared with present-day attempts to limit strategic armaments as follows:

Disarmament and the International System

The sovereign states of today have inherited from renaissance Europe an ordered system for the conduct of their relations which may be called an international society. For though sovereign states are without a common government, they are not in a condition of anarchy; like the individuals described by Locke in his account of the state of nature they are a society without a government. This society is an imperfect one: its justice is crude and uncertain, as each state is judge in its own cause; and it gives rise to recurrent tragedy in the form of war; but it produces order, regularity, predictability and long periods of peace, without involving the tyranny of a universal state. Much thinking in the West in the last fifty years has been concerned less with understanding this society and the conditions of its preservation than with dismantling or even abolishing it. One of its institutions has been national armaments; and one of the preoccupations of Western thinking has been disarmament, the attempt to do away with or drastically curtail them. Yet if armaments are an integral part of the whole system of international relations, and stand or fall with it, there are serious objections of the notions both of the possibility and the desirability of disarmament.

The Indian Ocean as a ‘Zone of Peace’

It is well known that the increase of Soviet and United States naval activity in the Indian Ocean since 1968 has caused concern among the majority of littoral States, who favour the establishment of the Ocean as a ‘zone of peace’. The lead in canvassing the proposal has been taken by Sri Lanka, which first raised it at the Non-Aligned Heads of State Conference in Cairo in October, 1964, and subsequently at the Lusaka Conference of Non-Aligned States in September 1970 and the Singapore Conference of Commonwealth Prime Ministers in January 1971.1 On 16 December 1971 Sri Lanka was successful in having the United Nations General Assembly, by a vote of 61–0 with 55 abstentions, declare the Indian Ocean, together with the air space above it and the ocean floor subjacent thereto, a ‘zone of peace’ for all time. A year later, on 15 December 1972, the General Assembly passed by a stronger majority — 95–0 with 33 abstentions, a resolution reaffirming the idea of a zone of peace, and establishing an Ad Hoc Committee of fifteen nations to study the implications of the proposal. This Ad Hoc Committee has met during 1973 and reported to the General Assembly which on 19 December 1973 passed a motion asking the Ad Hoc Committee to continue its working for another year and calling for a statement by experts on the great powers’ military presence in the Indian Ocean.

The Classical Approach to Arms Control Twenty Three Years After

It is sometimes said today that the classical arms control thinking of the early 1960s has now run into the ground.1 I do not think that this is so; on the contrary, it would be truer to say that Western policymakers in recent years have lost sight of the ideas put forward at that time and now need to return to them.

Arms Control and the Balance of Power

In the international society as we know it, security is not provided by the concentration of military power in an authority superior to sovereign states, but rests on a balance of power among them.

Pros and Cons of Unilateral Disarmament

The history of disarmament is, for the most part, the history of unilateral reductions of armaments: if we except the discriminatory disarmament imposed by victors on vanquished Powers, like that imposed on Germany by the Treaty of Versailles, it is doubtful whether any very substantial reduction (as distinct from limitation and regulation, of which there are examples) of armaments has been brought about by treaty in modern times. Unilateral disarmament is constantly carried out in respect of particular categories of armaments, as they become obsolete; and is carried out in respect of armaments generally, when, and to the extent that, it is believed that there exists no external occasion for their use.

Arms Control: A Stocktaking and Prospectus

The foundation of the Institute for Strategic Studies ten years ago coincided with the beginnings of a great debate within the Western world about the implications of nuclear weapons for arms control and disarmament. One of the high points of that debate was the Conference of the Institute held here at Oxford in 1960, when the ‘new thinking’ on this subject that had been developing in the late 1950s, chiefly in the United States, was first presented to a wide international audience.

Strategic Studies and its Critics

The civilian strategic analysts who now constitute a distinct profession in the Western world have from the first been subject to criticism that has called in question the validity of their methods, their utility to society and even their integrity of purpose.1 Some of it is directed at particular strategists or at particular techniques they employ, but much of it purports to expose deficiencies that are characteristic of the genre. Some of this is of so scurrilous a nature as not to deserve a reply, but some raises issues of real importance. What are in fact the distinguishing features of the new style of strategic analysis? What has given rise to the criticisms that have been made of it? And what substance do the criticisms have?

The Scope for Super Power Agreements

The United States and the Soviet Union are beginning to hold talks on the limitation of strategic nuclear weapons. There is no guarantee that these talks will lead to agreements or even to valuable exchanges of ideas. But potentially they are the most important formal arms control negotiations of the postwar years for they raise directly, as between the two super powers, who alone are able to determine it, the question of the future of the central balance of strategic nuclear power, around which the whole structure of international relationships is built.

The Moscow Agreements and Strategic Arms Limitation

The Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT), which began in November 1969 and are still in progress, are the most important formal arms control negotiations of the post-1945 era. Previous negotiations have been of two kinds. Either they have been sterile polemical exchanges, lacking in seriousness — like the canvassing of rival schemes for general and complete disarmament. Or, in cases where serious discussion and bargaining have taken place, they have concerned subjects which — like the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963 or the Non-Proliferation Treaty of 1968 — are important in themselves but marginal to the central issue of the nuclear confrontation of the superpowers.