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The Lessons of Arms Control Negotiations
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13448 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
Date : |
9 / 1987 |
3,068 Words |
| Author
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James T. Hackett
James T. Hackett is a California-based defense consultant and
a member of the president's General Advisory Committee on Arms
Control. |
Historian Bernard Brodie traces arms control back to 1139, when Pope Innocent II issued an edict banning the use of the crossbow, the terrible new weapon of the 1100s. The pope's arms control edict, however, did not prevent the use of the crossbow and proved no more effective than most of the arms control efforts that have followed.
The first successful U.S. arms control accord was the Rush-Bagot Agreement signed in 1817 with Great Britain, during the administration of President James Monroe. The treaty prohibited fortifications along the Great Lakes, and its success can be seen today in the undefended border between the United States and Canada. Rush-Bagot remains the mot successful arms control agreement the United States ever signed, perhaps because the other part was Britain and not the Soviet Union.
Arms control negotiations usually are undertaken as a reaction to the use of arms or fear of the use of arms. Modern arms control was pursued in earnest after the terrible ordeal of trench warfare in World War I, which saw the extensive use of machine guns, tanks, poison gas, and an enormous loss of life. The Treaty of Versailles, signed in 1919, forced disarmament on a defeated Germany. It reduced the German army to the size of Belgium's and prohibited Germany from developing a navy or an air force - and it was an abject failure.
In 1941, just 22 years after the Treaty of Versailles prohibited German rearmament, the Wehrmacht, with 106 combat divisions, and the Luftwaffe, with the world's best combat aircraft, swept across Europe and into Paris in five weeks. Imposing arms limitations on a defeated enemy and then failing to enforce compliance clearly was not effective arms control.
There were other attempts in the aftermath of World War I. The Washington Naval Conference of 1921-22 and the London Naval Conference of 1930 tried to limit the world's principal navies. Numerical limitations were placed on the major warships of the United States, Britain, and Japan. But two things were wrong with the tripartite naval agreements: They put Japan in an inferior position that Japan was unwilling to accept, and the drafters did not foresee the military significance of the rapid advance of technology. They considered aircraft carriers not worth limiting, but just over a decade later carriers dominated the war in the Pacific.
The ultimate arms control agreement was signed 59 years ago by French Foreign Minister Aristide Briand
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