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The strategy of deterrence can also increase the threat of WMD use, however.
Most importantly, the desire to deter adversaries possessing WMD creates incentives
for additional states to acquire such weapons themselves. Russia, Great Britain,
France, China, India, Israel, Pakistan, and North Korea largely fit this pattern.
Deterrence and the Arms Race
In the case of the United States and the Soviet Union, each side's efforts
to ensure that its own nuclear forces were adequate to deter the other's led
to an unrestrained nuclear arms race. As a result, each side acquired tens of
thousands of nuclear weapons. Both sides deployed nuclear delivery systems,
such as multiple-warhead
land-based intercontinental
ballistic missiles (ICBMs), that encouraged each side to launch its missiles
early in a crisis before it might be destroyed in a surprise attack. U.S.-Russian
arms control agreements have sought to reduce the number of deployed long-range
(strategic) nuclear
weapons and, specifically, to eliminate those types of nuclear missiles that
could create incentives to strike first in a crisis.
Long delays in negotiating
and in bringing these treaties into force have led the
Bush administration to declare that it will use a different approach for reducing
U.S. and Russian nuclear forces. This new approach will rely on unilateral reductions
and informal arrangements, rather than formal treaties with elaborate verification
measures. After much debate, however, U.S. President Bush and Russian
President Putin signed the Strategic
Offensive Reductions Treaty (Treaty of Moscow) on May 24, 2002, agreeing to
reduce their nuclear arsenals over a ten-year period to between 1700-2200
strategic offensive nuclear weapons. While the Treaty of Moscow is a
formal treaty, its simplified provisions allow for greater flexibilty than any
prior arms control treaty. The Treaty of Moscow also supersedes the
unimplemented START II treaty, under which
Russia's multi-warhead land-based ICBMs (especially its 10-warhead SS-18s),
would have been eliminated as a means of reducing the instability presented by
such systems. Although the Treaty of Moscow does not address
multiple-warhead land-based ICBMs, the Bush Administration believes Russia's
retaining such systems is not necessarily destabilizing because the United
States and Russia no longer consider each other to be enemies.
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