Richard Perle Dissects the Failed History of Arms Control — and Its Even More Dubious Prospects for the Future

(Washington, D.C.): Former Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Perle recently
bearded the
lion (or, should we say “the lamb”?) in its den by sharply critiquing the practice and results of
arms control before the 1999 Nobel Symposium of the Stockholm International Peace Research
Institute (SIPRI). In the process, Mr. Perle — universally known as one of the world’s most
authoritative critics of the cottage industry assiduously promoted for decades by organizations
like SIPRI — not only demonstrated the futility of traditional arms control endeavors. He also
described four rules that might guide a more thoughtful and useful approach to dealing with
proliferation and other threats increasingly dominating the post-Cold War security environment.

Secretary Perle is a Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a founding member
of the
Center for Security Policy’s National Security Advisory Council. Highlights of his remarks
before the Nobel Symposium include the following (emphasis and subheadings added).

Excerpts of

Good Guys, Bad Guys and Arms Control

Remarks by Hon. Richard Perle

The Problem

From my student days in California in the early 1960’s, when my friend and mentor Albert
Wohlstetter sparked my interest in strategic policy and arms control, I have been skeptical of
agreements aimed at regulating conflicts among adversaries. It has seemed to me that when
agreements were most useful — that is, when the danger of hostility leading to war was greatest
— they were least obtainable; and when they were most attainable, they were least useful.

* * *

Many advocates of arms control acknowledge its limitations but argue that it is far better to
reach
imperfect agreements than to have none at all. Indeed, the conventional wisdom about arms
control has held that any agreement was better than none, that deadlocked arms
negotiations
meant failure, and that “tough” and demanding negotiating proposals were a form of disguised
opposition to arms control itself.

* * *

If we are to think clearly about arms control in the “new” security environment, it is essential
that
we understand how arms control has worked in the immediate past, in the “old” security
environment. Happily, our prospects for understanding the results of arms control agreements in
the half century of the Cold War are greatly improved by the end of the Cold War and the
collapse of the Soviet Union.

Let me be clear about my own view. I believe the most important arms control
agreements of
the Cold War failed to achieve their principal intended purpose, which I take to have
been
the mitigation of a competition in amassing weapons, especially nuclear weapons.

* * *

The theoretical desirability of agreements to restrain competition in armaments, to say
nothing of
their actual use, was — and remains — theoretical; in practice, agreements could, and often did,
have unexpected consequences, some of which were quite the opposite of what their proponents
desired. Let me give some examples.

First, by banning strategic defenses, the ABM Treaty of 1972 almost certainly encouraged
the
Soviet Union to increase its strategic offensive forces….

* * *

Looking to the Future

There would be no reason for cataloguing the failures of arms control in the old
security
environment if past failures were unlikely to be repeated in the new security
environment.
But it seems to me far more likely that the failures of the past resulted from fundamental defects
inherent in the nature of arms control. So while the new security environment is different from
the old, so must the approach to arms control be different — and in ways that recognize its
limitations.

The end of the Cold War has changed fundamentally the security environment in
which
future arms control agreements may be reached. Gone is the over-arching struggle
between
the communist and non-communist worlds.

* * *

For now at least, the new security environment is marked by the absence of a great power
rivalry.
There is nothing in prospect like the half-century long titanic struggle between the United States
and the Soviet Union. For the foreseeable future there is one superpower, the United States,
which has shown no inclination to use military force to advance its selfish interests.

Enter the Multilateralists

For this reason bilateral arms control no longer commands the attention it did during the old,
bipolar security environment, and attention is now focused on multilateral arms control
affecting such matters as nuclear testing, the proliferation of chemical and biological
weapons, the use of land mines, and the like.

Multilateral arms control differs in several important respects from bilateral arms control as
the
latter was practiced during the Cold War. For one thing, the large number of participants who
negotiate treaties intended to bind most or even all the countries of the world, cannot possibly
comprehend the intricacies equally. Some will be better, some less well informed. Those whose
plans are such that they will be unaffected by the treaty or convention are bound to see things
differently from those whose plans and programs are impinged by the agreements being
negotiated.

In multilateral negotiations, some of the participants have interests to protect, others do not —
or
if they do, those interests may be only remotely affected by a treaty’s terms. In one sense,
all
states have an interest in a convention banning chemical weapons. But there is a vast
difference between, say, Iceland’s interest in such a convention and the interest of, say,
Iran — which has been both a victim, and a producer, of such weapons.

The interest of my country is different from that of many others for whom the possibility of a
chemical weapons attack, or the use of chemical weapons against their forces or installations
abroad, is remote. This difference in the depth and salience of one state’s interest compared to
another helps explain why the United States sometimes seems cautious in its approach to
multilateral arms control: as a source of wealth and influence and a object of anger and envy, it is
invariably more deeply affected than most other countries.

* * *

Moral Equivalence

It is characteristic of global agreements — which is what those limiting
nuclear testing and
chemical and biological weapons aspire to be — that they lump together, under a unitary
set
of constraints, states that can be counted upon to comply and those which intend to find
and use loopholes — or, if that doesn’t work, actually to cheat — to defeat the purpose of
the agreement. To make matters worse, states joining global conventions, even if they
do so in
bad faith, obtain the same treatment as those who join in order to advance the proper purposes of
the agreement.

While it was not a treaty as such, there can be little doubt that Indian participation in the
“Atoms
for Peace” program facilitated India’s acquisition of nuclear weapons by legitimating the
construction of a Canadian designed reactor from which nuclear material was extracted. And we
now know that Saddam Hussein made full use of the information provided by Iraqi inspectors
under the IAEA to evade detection in its clandestine nuclear weapons program. By learning the
sources and methods by which the IAEA attempts to ferret out cheating, Iraqis in the IAEA were
better able to circumvent the purpose of the NPT and the IAEA.

During the Senate debate on the Chemical Weapons Convention a number of American
senators
argued that by becoming parties to a largely unverifiable agreement, potential violators could
expect to learn a great deal about how to conceal their chemical weapons programs. This concern
is bound to recur as agreements are proposed that include both the good guys and the
bad guys–if you will allow me to use a term not common in diplomatic parlance but helpful in
defining the classes of participants in multilateral agreements.

Good guys and bad guys do not equate exactly to democratic and non-democratic
states,
but the correlation is close. For one thing, democracies with a political opposition and
an
inquiring, free press find it difficult if not impossible to violate agreements. Since international
agreements achieve legitimacy by the adherence of states, the citizens in that are parties to
agreements are unlikely to approve violations. Totalitarian states, by contrast, have little trouble
organizing clandestine cheating. Iraq, North Korea, the Soviet Union, in the old days: all found
it easy to violate arms control agreements without fear that they would be found out by the press
or opposition.

In domestic affairs, no one would seriously propose that the police and criminals
come
together and sign agreements according to which they would accept the same set of
constraints on their freedom of action. Yet that is the underlying logic of many multilateral
arms control arrangements: a compact among nation states, some of which are current
or likely
criminals, others — the majority — respectful of international law and their treaty obligations.
The importance of this anomaly lies in the increasing extent to which the subjects of arms control
in the new security environment — chemical, biological and nuclear weapons proliferation–are
largely unverifiable.

* * *

Four Alternative Approaches

So what role should arms control play in making the world safer? I have four
answers.

First, it should do no harm. Yet harm is the inevitable result if arms
control becomes a
substitute for other means of containing threats to the security of nations. The negotiation of
elaborate multinational arms control regimes must not become a substitute for individual nations
acting to make the world safer, even if such action is unilateral. A good example is Israel’s
destruction of an Iraqi nuclear reactor in 1981. Had Israel not taken that action, Saddam
Hussein’s army might still be in Kuwait, and possibly well beyond Kuwait.

* * *

Second, we must understand that limitations on the use or manufacture of specific
weapons systems have broad and varied implications, some of which may argue for
treaty
constraints while others may argue against them. Where the weapons in question elicit powerful
emotions, we may do things that make us feel good but have potentially damaging consequences.

Take the case of a ban on land-mines, for example….Had it agreed to be bound, the United
States
would unquestionably have honored its commitment. This would have precluded us from using
mines in a variety of ways that have the potential to discourage military actions — providing
perimeter defenses of refugee areas, for example — or to reduce casualties in combat situations
or otherwise save lives.

* * *

Unsophisticated land mines are cheap and easy to produce and their production cannot be
adequately verified. Those who have used land mines in a way that gave rise to the concern
about them will not be constrained by an international convention banning them….A multilateral
convention that of necessity treats all states alike with respect to the manufacture and use of land
mines is another instance of the pitfalls of arms control that fails to distinguish between
the
effects of international legislation on good guys and bad guys.

The ABM Treaty is another example of a treaty that precludes action that could make the
world
safer….The ABM Treaty was never intended by either of its original parties to prevent…prudent
protection. Legal scholars have made a powerful case that the ABM Treaty — as a two
party agreement — lapsed automatically when the Soviet Union became extinct. In any
event, it is time to recognize that the new security environment, whatever one thought about the
old, requires that we deploy a robust defense against ballistic missiles.

Third, we should recognize that many treaty constraints that would be desirable if
honored
are not desirable where there can be no assurance of compliance. Treaties that cannot
be
verified are in general a bad idea.

Finally, we must recognize that the world will be a safer place when countries that
respect
the rights of others are more powerful than those which do not. However high-minded
their
purpose, agreements that weaken the Western democracies relative to states that support terror or
launch wars of aggression are foolish excursions that allow statesmen to feel good while they are
actually doing bad.

* * *

The real problem in world affairs is aggression. It is, in important respects, similar to that
terrible problem in domestic affairs, violent crime. In both cases the essence of the problem is
not weapons as such but power in the hands of aggressors and criminals. The failure to
distinguish between guns in the hands of the cops and guns in the hands of the robbers is
not just a practical absurdity, it is a profound moral failure.