the military balance and the nature of warfare, is one of the most fundamental factors which arms control must contend with. Sometimes this has led people to think that the principal purpose of arms control should, in fact, be to "freeze" all military technology. There is an element of truth in this idea. One unquestionable effect of the changes in military technology since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution has been to increase the potential destructiveness of warfare; with the advent of nuclear weapons, and their accumulation, this deadly potential has assumed human implications that are beyond our comprehension.

One objective of arms control is indeed to slow or halt technological changes which increase the destructiveness of warfare. However, given the close relationship between these changes and equally massive ones in civilian technology-of transportation, communication, manufacturing, chemicals, electronics and many others-it is difficult to see which steps could have prevented much of this increase, except perhaps extraordinary and virtually inconceivable limitations on all scientific and industrial developments. In any case, the spread of nuclear weapons technology has brought us to a level of destructive potential which future developments can hardly surpass.

Future technological changes will have less effect on the sheer destructiveness of weapons than on other characteristics. One aim of arms control should be to limit the development or deployment of new types of weapons with undesirable characteristics-those which might increase incentives for war, increase risks of accidents, or reduce the scope for rational control. This has been the aim of limitations on anti-ballistic missiles (ABMs), on multiple independently targeted reentry vehicles (MIRVs) and on space-based and seabed-based weapons of mass destruction.

At the same time, arms control should not restrict and should even encourage-technological changes which make forces more stable or less destructive. This includes technology which reduces the vulnerability of forces, reduces the collateral damage they inflict, or improves the reliability of command and control procedures. In addition, it includes very important technologies for increasing our ability to verify arms control agreements and to provide adequate and timely warning in the event such agreements are violated.

In actual practice, it is extremely difficult to distinguish between desirable and undesirable new technologies. The development of nuclear-powered sub

marines and improved technical means of verification are two of the most notable improvements in military technology of the last 20 years. The first has made possible significant reductions in the vulnerability of strategic forces and thus made surprise attack less likely. The second has reduced uncertainty in arms competition and also made possible new and far-reaching progress in arms control. Today no one would question the value of these new technologies. Yet at the outset, their net impact was much less clear. Not only were there serious doubts about technical feasibility and cost effectiveness, but there were grounds for concern that other countries might view such developments as provocative, as efforts to achieve a unilateral U.S. advantage or improve our capability to launch a surprise attack.

A fundamental obstacle to the control of technology is that the overall impact of technological change is so hard to predict. Most new technologies have more than one effect. The most important effects are often indirect, and may not even emerge until further technology is developed.

For example, the impact of ballistic missiles is difficult to assess even now. They have greatly reduced the potential warning time available to respond to a strategic attack, but they have also made it possible to build strategic forces which can be based in less vulnerable facilities much farther away from possible sources of attack. Ballistic missiles have been instrumental in the development of the submarine-based nuclear deterrent. Any early attempt to assess the overall impact of the introduction of ballistic missiles would have underestimated or missed entirely the future significance of strategic missiles carried aboard nuclear submarines. The history of technology includes many similar examples of the indirect and interactive effects of technological change.

One way of trying to limit technological development is through restrictions on testing, as in the Limited Test Ban Treaty, which prohibited tests of nuclear weapons in the atmosphere. Because of the difficulty of predicting the overall impact of technological changes, it is difficult to anticipate whether a particular test limitation will prove to be a useful arms control measure. The Limited Test Ban is based not only on intuition that increased knowledge about the effects of nuclear weapons in the atmosphere would hurt more than it would help, but also on the knowledge that such tests are harmful to the environment.

In the case of the atmospheric test ban the United

States was confident that the limitations were verifiable. Other kinds of tests may be similarly conspicuous and difficult to conceal. However, some military technologies can be tested in laboratories and may be virtually impossible to detect. If these tests could have significant impact on national security, we cannot rely on unverifiable test limitations. But verifiable limitations may be acceptable at other stages in weapons development.

Test limits, of course, do not slow the rate of technological change directly. Any test limitation may prompt technicians to design around it, and quotas on testing may lead to efforts to maximize the information derived from each test that does

occur.

Arms Control and the Reduction of Tensions

In addition to the beneficial effects mentioned above, arms control efforts may also contribute to reducing international political tensions. By encouraging countries to abandon military postures which appear threatening to their neighbors, arms control efforts can encourage the resolution of underlying political differences. By facilitating agreement on the fundamentals of an equitable military balance, arms control can ease or even eliminate the tensions that result from efforts to achieve small and transitory advantages. Finally, the process of negotiation itself can stimulate more intense attention to basic political problems and improve communication between adversaries.

None of these results are certain, however. Relaxation of tension can be deceptive if fundamental sources of conflict are only temporarily concealed. Agreements can lead to mistrust if mutual confidence cannot be established. And communication can be used to mislead as well as to inform. But true dialogue, understanding and the trust that a long experience of faithful compliance with agreements can create are important products as well as ingredients of the arms control process.

Still, arms limitation alone is not enough to reduce the principal causes of antagonism in the world. These antagonisms are typically the cause of arms competition rather than its result. Arms control must therefore be a part of an overall strategy which seeks to resolve underlying causes of tension where possible, and at least to reduce the frequency and severity of confrontations in situations where tensions persist. As Secretary of State Kissinger has declared, "an equilibrium based on constant con

frontations and mortal antagonisms will ultimately end in cataclysm."

Unilateral vs. Cooperative Arms Control

Although the term "unilateral disarmament" arouses justifiable skepticism, some unilateral arms control measures can promote both national and global security. They may be unilateral actions by which we reduce the risks of accidental use of our own weapons or reduce the possibility that another country might be tempted to attack us. For this reason we have introduced a wide range of technical devices designed to eliminate the possibility that one of our nuclear weapons could be fired by accident or without authorization. For this reason, too, we have invested enormous sums of money to foreclose the possibility that a surprise attack might cripple our nuclear deterrent forces, in order to discourage the leaders of other countries from thinking, even in a severe crisis, that war is preferable to negotiation.

Beyond these unilateral measures, the U.S. Government sees other steps that could reduce the risks of war, but these require the active cooperation of potential adversaries and thus require arms control agreements. Large-scale reduction of forces is an important step that cannot be simply unilateral, but must be reciprocated by potential adversaries. The ABM question had to be resolved by an explicit agreement or not at all. Simply giving up our own ABM system and permitting the Soviet Union to continue with its program would have been harmful to our national security. Agreed and equivalent limitations on American and Soviet ABM programs made it possible to avoid large investments in missile defenses (and countervailing offensive forces) whose effect might have been solely to neutralize one another.

If cooperative arms control of this kind is to succeed in maintaining and improving U.S. security, it is essential that we have confidence that other countries are living up to their commitments. Such arms control requires adequate means of verification. Unless we can establish confidence that agreements are being respected, arms control generates mistrust and fear, ultimately worsening tensions.

Negotiations vs. Unilateral Initiatives

Cooperative arms control is more complicated and difficult than unilateral measures, not only because of the requirement for verification but also

because of the difficulty of negotiation. International arms control negotiation is frequently a protracted, even painful, process. Persuasion and discussion are helpful, but rarely sufficient by themselves to achieve agreement on complex and controversial matters involving supreme national interests.

Effective negotiations require that the United States maintains sufficient strength and momentum in its arms programs to impress its bargaining opponents that the benefits of cooperation outweigh the risks of competition. This means that decisions about our own force posture sometimes must be taken with a view to the likely effect on the negotiations, more specifically that we make clear what we will do if negotiations fail. It means, also, that we must be prepared to resist pressures by other countries designed to extract unwarranted concessions from the United States, even if this resistance sometimes makes negotiations protracted and contentions.

Thus it seems worth asking whether another way might not achieve results more quickly, avoiding the undesired secondary effects of prolonged negotiations. Could more be accomplished by having the United States take the lead unilaterally in reducing or limiting our military forces, and thereby encouraging other countries to follow our "good example"? In fact, this technique has been tried in the past. How well does it work?

On November 25, 1969 the United States took an important unilateral initiative when President Nixon announced that the United States was abandoning any use of biological or bacteriological weapons. This American initiative was followed by the signing, on April 10,1972, of the Biological Weapons Convention, a treaty banning development, production and stockpiling of such weapons.

In announcing its intention to refrain from basing weapons in outer space, the United States also opened the way for an eventual treaty on this subject. On September 5, 1962, Deputy Secretary of Defense Gilpatric announced that we did not intend "to place any weapons of mass destruction in outer space" and expressed hope that the Soviet Union would similarly refrain. Although there was no Soviet response for more than a year, the Soviet Union did later join in supporting the "no orbiting" resolution in the U.N. General Assembly and ultimately signed the Treaty on the Use of Outer Space on January 27, 1967. By limiting military competition in outer space, this treaty should help to forestall the development of weapons which might reduce warning of

nuclear attack while being highly vulnerable themselves.

One successful unilateral initiative actually occurred during wartime. During World War II, although neither the United States nor Japan were parties to the Geneva Protocol prohibiting the use of poison gas, President Roosevelt declared that we would not be the first to use chemical weapons. (Only in January 1975 did the United States ratify the Geneva Protocol.) Except for isolated uses by Japan against China, chemical weapons were not used in the war, even in situations where they might have had some marginal military utility.1

While some unilateral initiatives to restrain arms competition have been successful, there have been noteworthy failures as well. On April 26, 1965, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Adlai Stevenson observed that:

... by mid-1966 the United States will have inactivated or destroyed over 2,000 B-47 bomber-type aircraft . . . In addition, the United States will make a reduction during 1965 in the number of B-52 heavy bomber aircraft in the existing operational forces. These reductions also will be accomplished by the destruction of aircraft. Moreover, the United States now plan to forgo the construction of some Minuteman missiles which were included in our plans, as well as further increments of such missiles for the future.

Ambassador Stevenson called on other nations to reciprocate, declaring that these were "examples of restraint on the part of a nation which is capable, as I am sure everyone here knows, of far greater military production." In an interview that same month, Secretary of Defense McNamara asserted that "the Soviet rate of expansion today is not such as to allow them even to equal, much less exceed, our own 1970 force... the Soviets have decided that they have lost the quantitative race, and they are not seeking to engage us in that contest ... there is no indication that the Soviets are seeking to develop a strategic nuclear force as large as ours."

Unfortunately, the Soviet Union failed to show the restraint for which Ambassador Stevenson had hoped and which Secretary McNamara had predicted. Ambassador Tsarapkin instead attacked the American step-by-step approach and asserted that "the question can be solved only in the context of the total destruction of all delivery vehicles and the total destruction of nuclear weapons." It is only now, a decade later, after difficult negotiations and an

1 All of the other major belligerents were parties to the 1925 Geneva Protocol. The only uses of poison gas after World War I were by Italy, a party to the Geneva Protocol, in its 1936 attack on Ethiopia, by Japan in China, and during Egypt's intervention in the civil war in Yemen in the 1960's.

unrelenting Soviet strategic buildup, that long term limits on strategic offensive forces finally seem in sight.

Experience suggests that unilateral initiatives are not effective in changing positions on issues where there is basic disagreement. For several years in the 1960's, American officials publicly urged the benefits of mutual restraint in ABM deployment. In an interview on February 15, 1967, then Secretary of Defense McNamara stated his belief that the introduction of ABM systems "would be wasteful" and that "it would actually increase the risk to both of the parties were they to deploy anti-ballistic missile systems."

The Soviet view at that time was quite different. In response to whether a moratorium on ABM development was possible, Premier Kosygin stated rather emphatically at a London news conference on February 9, 1967:

... I think that a defensive system, which prevents attack, is not a cause of the arms race but represents a factor preventing the death of people ... At present the theory is current in some places that one should develop whichever system is cheaper. . . . An antimissile system may cost more than an offensive one, but it is intended not for killing people but for saving human lives. I understand that I am not answering the question that was put to me, but you can draw appropriate conclusions yourselves.

Only after the United States abandoned its earlier restraint and began vigorous pursuit of an ABM system did Soviet views about the value of ballistic missile defense begin to change. Without this U.S. military effort, it is doubtful that we would have been able to negotiate the ABM Treaty.

During the decade 1965 through 1975, the leveling off and subsequent decline in the U.S. military budget was accompanied by growing strategic initiative by the Soviet Union. Even though the nominal defense budget increased during that period, the value of the dollar declined rapidly due to inflation, so that the actual cost of U.S. defense programs decreased until 1973 when it was below the 1965 level. As the comparative trend lines in the charts (Figure 1) show graphically, this unilateral restraint enabled Soviet military programs to outpace their American counterparts during the early 1970's. To realize these advances the Soviet Union had to spend up to twice as great a share of its national output because its economic production remained substantially smaller than that of the United States.

The Soviet Union has evidently been willing to bear heavy costs to maintain the momentum of its military programs. As long as this momentum contin

ues, and the Soviet Union continues to value its growing military strength so highly, the prospects for reciprocal restraint are unpromising even though it has approached, and in certain respects even exceeded, a position of military equivalence to the United States. Fortunately, we have temporarily benefited directly and indirectly from the strength of other nations. However, the United States will have to arrest, and in some cases reverse, adverse trends in the balance of Soviet and American strength to reinforce Soviet incentives for more mutually binding restraints on their arms programs in the future.

The Need for Agreed Limitations

If negotiations sometimes have unsatisfactory consequences, so, too, do "informal" arrangements that attempt to paper over a negotiating impasse. For a period of almost 3 years, from 1958 to 1961, the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union suspended nuclear testing in an effort to facilitate negotiation of a nuclear test ban treaty. That experience offers useful lessons in the pitfalls of informal restraint.

Unilateral initiatives designed to promote progress in arms control are sometimes difficult to distinguish from efforts to gain propaganda advantages. There had been unilateral offers, first by the Soviet Union and later by the United States and the United Kingdom, to suspend nuclear testing, but these offers came after the parties had just completed extensive test series. Not too surprisingly, the selfserving offers were not reciprocated. Then, on November 7, 1958, President Eisenhower announced that the United States would continue its suspension of testing despite the most recent Soviets tests, and a self-imposed test moratorium began.

Understandably, the parties to the informal moratorium had sharply conflicting views about the terms on which it should continue. The United States was concerned about the possible consequences of a prolonged and unverifiable suspension of testing. Accordingly, President Eisenhower's initial proposal carried a time limit of 1 year. Toward the end of 1959, he announced that the U.S. moratorium on testing would expire on December 31st, but he pledged that the United States would continue to negotiate and would not resume nuclear weapons tests "without announcing our intention in advance of any resumption." There were in fact no tests by the United States, nor any substantial preparations for tests, prior to the Soviet Union's resumption of testing in August 1961.