Reconceptualising Arms Control

Controlling the Means of Violence

Neil Cooper, David Mutimer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415688833
• eBook ISBN: 9781317995364
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

The theory and practice of arms control seemed to have its heyday during the height of the Cold War, with its focus on the East-West conflict and nuclear arms. In the past twenty years, both arms technologies and various practices aimed at their control have continued to develop, but scholarly thinking has not kept up. This volume seeks to redress this scholarly neglect of the range of issues associated with the control of the means of violence, by asking the question: what does arms control mean in the 21st Century?

In asking this question, the volume examines issues surrounding sovereignty, geopolitics, nuclear disarmament, securitization of space, technological developments, human rights, the clearance of landmines, the regulation of small arms and the control of the black market for arms and nuclear secrets. The book discusses terrorism with reference to the case of the suicide attacks in Beirut in 1983 and how the Obama administration is orientating its posture on nuclear arms.

This book was published as a special issue of Contemporary Security Policy.

Arms Control for the 21st Century: Controlling the Means of Violence

NEIL COOPER AND DAVID MUTIMER

The period between 1960 and 1961 saw the emergence of some of the key texts upon which Cold War arms control practice and theory was built. This included the Daedalus special issue on arms control of 1960, Schelling and Halperin’s Strategy and Arms Control, and Hedley Bull’s The Control of the Arms Race both of which appeared in 1961.¹ The same year also witnessed the publication of Donald Brennan’s edited book, Arms Control, Disarmament and National Security, based on the articles in the earlier special issue of Daedalus.² The influence of the Daedalus publication in particular is reflected in the journal’s production of further special issues on arms control in 1975 and 1991 each of which reviewed progress on the agenda of the 1960 publication and assessed the new arms control challenges emerging on its fifteenth and thirtieth anniversary respectively.³ Given the fiftieth anniversary of the Daedalus special issue has only just passed and that the same landmark has now been reached for the other publications, it is an apposite time to once again review the arms control agenda of the 1960s, to consider new practices that have emerged since then and to ask whether either are fit for purpose in a post-Cold War, post-9/11 era, apparently replete with new arms control challenges.

Over and above the question of timeliness however, the production of this special issue was animated by our concern that the academic community has largely been reduced, on the one hand, to recording the new practices or challenges of arms control (although often using language other than that of arms control), rather than shaping the former or anticipating the latter. On the other hand, it has engaged in an extensive reconceptualization of security and its associated practices that has, nevertheless, managed to pay scant attention to questions of arms and their control. Instead, it has tended to be the policy or NGO community that has driven new agendas in arms control rather than the academy. Moreover, given the predominantly problem-solving orientation of academic arms control, there has not even been much that can be described as an attempt to critically reflect on the relationship between current practice and traditional arms control theory, on the security framings underlying current policies or on the functions served by the current global architecture of arms control. In part, this may reflect one of the downsides of the widening and deepening of security studies that has occurred since the 1980s, which has arguably resulted in relatively less attention being paid by more critical analysts to some of those areas normally associated with the thinner and shallower notion of security held in traditional security or strategic studies.

It was this context that led us to hold two conferences on Arms Control for the 21st Century from which the papers in this special issue have emerged. The first took place in New York in February of 2009, in conjunction with the annual convention of the International Studies Association. The second took place at York University in Toronto in January of 2010. The articles collected in this special issue are drawn from those presented at one or both of those meetings. This is not to claim that this special issue offers some grand theory of arms control replete with multiple policy panaceas – although we do suggest there is a need to move away from the label arms control and to reformulate the traditional aims of arms control (see below). Nor is it even to suggest that the papers included here arrive at a critical consensus on the role and functions of arms control in the 21st century. Indeed, the Toronto conference was marked by notable divisions between what became labelled as the problem-solvers and the paradigm shifters.

We would claim, however, that the special issue makes an important contribution to our thinking about weapons, military technologies and security in other ways. First, whilst there were many differences between the participants at both conferences, most, if not quite all, were drawn from various radical traditions of thinking on international affairs and security – a rough and ready mixture of disarmers, post-positivists and campaigners. In this sense the conferences bore some similarity to the earlier York conference of 1994 that produced the broad church understanding of critical security studies.⁴ The two conferences and this publication therefore can be viewed as reflecting a similarly broad church critical school of thought on the challenge of controlling arms. Second, the two conferences and this publication were never envisaged as providing the last word on arms control. On the contrary, both of us in our role as convenors and editors are acutely aware of the need for arms control as a field to come out of its intellectual (and sometimes literal) Cold War silos, to engage in what Duffield in another context has termed ‘unscripted conversations’ and to foster what Campbell has labelled an ‘ethos of democracy’.⁵ Our aim here then is to bring together a series of articles that collectively start a conversation designed to explore options rather than foreclose them, as much of mainstream arms control has tended to do.

We are aware that for those used to the frisson that comes from speaking acronyms to power (START, NPT, CWC, etc…) this may not seem a particularly ambitious agenda. By contrast, we would suggest that ours is actually quite a radical move in a field that has more usually operated as the servant of various academic, economic and military hegemonies. We would also note that given the current role of arms control as an instrument of global counterinsurgency (see below) mainstream policy discourse does not so much consist of unscripted conversations as overbearing monologues performed to audiences unable to speak by speakers unwilling to listen – a rather worrying state of affairs when the topic supposedly being discussed is how to constrain technologies specifically designed to perpetrate mass killing. Indeed, we would suggest that in this respect at least, the state of the international debate on controlling arms is at an even lower ebb than was the case in the Cold War – for all its flaws, classical arms control did at least inaugurate an era of scripted conversations within the same paradigm. There is not even much of this kind of discussion going on at the moment. If we sound overly pessimistic, it is worth briefly reviewing the core tenets and practices of classical arms control as enumerated in those earlier texts and reflecting on the changes in practice that have occurred post-Cold War.

Arms Control as Science Fiction

Perhaps even more so than other fields of International Relations (IR), arms control as a field has always claimed scientific rigour and policy relevance. This is reflected in the very story the academy tells itself about the birth of arms control – it is represented as the love child of game theorists, scientists, and liberal internationalists who conceived it as an alternative to the ‘maze of unrealism’ and ‘fictional utopias’ embodied in successive disarmament initiatives.⁶ Instead, proponents claimed to be adopting a hard-nosed realism (in every sense of the word) about the nuclear condition. Yet what is striking about the texts of classical arms control is that whilst very rich in many respects they don’t so much resemble science, as science fiction.

First, the field of arms control shares with science fiction, particularly science fiction of the so-called ‘Golden Age’, a fascination with new – and even fictional – technology, sometimes as a solution to arms control (national technical means of verification), but mostly as the embodiment of potentially dystopian futures that need to be guarded against. Examples include: Herman Kahn’s thought experiment (later satirised in the film Dr. Strangelove) regarding various Doomsday and Doomsday in a Hurry Machines that might, for instance, allow a blackmailing nation to start a process by which the temperature of the earth was artificially dropped five degrees a year; Frye’s ‘super-Damoclean threats’ of H-bombs in earth satellites ‘ready to be propelled downwards on a second’s notice’ that necessitated arms control to return them ‘to the realm of science fiction’ or Harvey Brooks’ concern in 1975 that the use of smart bombs in Vietnam presaged an era where war intervention by the superpowers could be undertaken ‘with minimal internal and external political cost’.⁷

Second, whilst classical arms control claimed to be an approach grounded in an appreciation of the immutable laws of state behaviour imposed by anarchy – the balance of power, the security dilemma, and mutual assured destruction (MAD) – what is really striking is the extent to which the arms control literature (like science fiction) is really a creature of its time. Indeed, one might even say it is a literature in which supposedly timeless verities become ‘what arms controllers make of them’ in particular time-bound moments. Thus, each of the Daedalus special issues, as with the series of Star Treks that appeared at about the same times, very much reflected the particular eras in which they were produced. The original Star Trek was both a celebration of American triumphalism, and a reflection on civil rights, despite being set in the 24th century. Similarly, the 1960 Daedalus edition is obsessed with the failures of disarmament, the pressures of Cold War bipolarity and the logic of deterrence. In contrast, the 1975 edition, reflecting the backdrop of oil crisis and global recession, is as much concerned with the implications of these factors as it is with issues such as India’s peaceful nuclear explosion or the evolving critiques of arms control. The 1991 edition of Daedalus moves on again, being principally concerned with how to handle the transition from Cold War to post-Cold War along with the implication of Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, and the spread of both conventional and NBC weapons to the developing world. This reinvention of the themes of arms control is similarly mirrored in the way Star Trek was also reinvented for the same era, with the crew of The Next Generation’s Enterprise (1987–1994) inhabiting a Federation that resembles a less assured but more inclusive United States, whose primary enemies are now its allies.

Finally, arms control shares the same schizophrenic concern with time that characterizes science fiction, although it is expressed rather differently. Science fiction rewrites or ignores the past, in part because it is ostensibly concerned with anticipating the future – although mainly to comment on our present. Similarly, one of the notable features of Cold War arms control was the way in which the much longer history of arms control was either deemed irrelevant, consigned to the category of failed disarmament initiatives or more usually, just forgotten (for a story of arms control with rather longer lineage, see the recent monograph by Burns).⁸ For example, Jerome Wiesner in his forward to the 1960 Daedalus publication could note ‘the lack of popular or technical literature’ on the problem of arms limitation, a problem he put down to the fact that ‘until now there has actually been little intellectual effort expended on it’.⁹ Indeed, so new was the subject deemed to be that the publishers of the Daedalus edition felt compelled to publish an illustrative bibliography of key texts. Likewise, much of the contemporary literature on issues such as landmines or small arms is profoundly ahistorical in its treatment of these topics (see Cooper, this issue). Where science fiction and arms control do differ however is in their relationship to the present and the future. For science fiction, history is of only passing importance, because its primary concern is to project aspects of the present onto an imagined future. In contrast, arms control claims contemporary relevance and indeed bases its claim to authoritative knowledge on allying detailed reading of treaties and contemporary policy documents with those immutable verities noted above. Ironically however, arms control makes its claim for salience on its science fiction-style ability to imagine the future but to then also project various imagined futures back onto the present problem-solving moment.

Of course, arms control is not the only area of International Relations to do this – much of what passes for security studies bases its claims to expertise on similar prophesies of the present. Nevertheless, much of IR is concerned to study and learn from the past – what is striking, particularly about the Daedalus special issues, is the extent to which it is speculation about the future that informs thinking about the Cold War present. In part, this is because classical arms control was open to much the same criticisms as those levelled at deterrence theory – that it was an exercise in making assumptions about a form of war that had never occurred. But the extent to which arms control was (and is) an exercise in long-term futurology is quite striking. Examples include Kahn’s suggestion in 1960 that the 20th century ‘may see a world government or the equivalent’ and his concern that the commercial attractions of peaceful nuclear explosions would exacerbate a drive to proliferation in the 1970s; Hedley Bull’s confident assertion that ‘There is no prospect of a system of arms control that would single out chemical or biological warfare as the subject of a separate arms control agreement’ and Doty’s article in 1991 entitled ‘arms control: 1960, 1990, 2020’.¹⁰ Nor is this tradition unique to classical arms control – much of what passes for contemporary arms control represents exercises in predicting the future – the restraint on excessive and destabilizing arms transfers embodied in Wassennaar or the European Union Code for example.¹¹ And contemporary arms control literature is still replete with sections outlining ‘visions of the future’ or even whole texts on ‘the future of arms control’.¹²

None of this is to suggest that we want to disparage arms control as science fiction – it would be rather at odds with a volume that claims to rethink arms control for a 21st century that is barely out of the blocks. As far as we are concerned it is as just as valid to imagine the future in order to construct the present as it is to reimagine the present in order to reconstruct it. We would however, want to make two points. First, that arms control as an academic field needs to be more modest about its claims to operate in a contemporary world of problem-solving relevance in which the ‘maze of unrealism’ and utopian/dystopian fictions have been abandoned. Arms control always has been the domain of the soothsayer and – ironically – probably needs to be so if it is to have any real salience in addressing the challenge of the armaments dynamic. Second, that our criticism of mainstream arms control is not that it engages in science fiction but rather that the quality of the ‘sooth(ing)’, is generally quite poor, in part because much of it is hindered by a lack of reflexivity about its soothsaying.

At its best however, the literature on arms control can be remarkably prescient. For instance, the following extract from Richard Falk’s contribution to the 1975 special issue is worth quoting at length – despite his explicit recognition that his article represented a ‘futurist inquiry’ and a ‘utopian exercise’ undertaken by a ‘problem-stater’ rather than a ‘problem-solver’.¹³ Looking forward to a world where underdevelopment and ecological scarcity predominated, he suggested:

the most powerful states may come to feel extremely vulnerable to disruption by escalating terror tactics. In this eventuality such governments may undertake actively to disarm the weaker and poorer regions of the world, subjecting them at the same time to rigorous forms of imperial administration, including surveillance and suppression of any threatening mode of deviance. It seems likely that such a global strategy, by its very character, would necessarily be preceded by the destruction of democracy in the United States… In such circumstances, governance would involve protracted counter-revolutionary warfare on a global scale, since popular sentiment would be strongly aligned with insurgent goals. To offset its universal unpopularity, the constituted authorities would come to rely on terror and military repression, both at home and abroad.¹⁴

This, we would suggest, captures important aspects of arms control practice today – not least that, in its post-Cold War, post-9/11, non-proliferation mode, the global architecture of arms control operates largely as a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. Arms Control for the 21st Century: Controlling the Means of Violence
• 2. Leashing the Dogs of War: Arms Control from Sovereignty to Governmentality
• 3. Critical Geopolitics and the Control of Arms in the 21st Century
• 4. From Arms Control to Denuclearization: Governmentality and the Abolitionist Desire
• 5. The Securitization of Outer Space: Challenges for Arms Control
• 6. The Arms Control Challenges of Nanotechnology
• 7. The Body and Controlling the Means of Violence: The Impact of the October 1983 Beirut Suicide Attacks on France’s Action directe
• 8. Humanitarian Arms Control and Processes of Securitization: Moving Weapons along the Security Continuum
• 9. Dangerous Terrain: Re-Reading the Landmines Ban through the Social Worlds of the RMA
• 10. Humanitarian Practices of Arms Control and Disarmament
• 11. Small Arms Control and the Reproduction of Imperial Relations
• 12. Controlling the Shadow Trade
• 13. More Business as Usual? The Obama Administration and the Nuclear Posture Review
• Index