for Strategic and International Studies, April 2019, https://tinyurl.com/vwo77oh.
9 Brian Weeden and Victoria Samson, “Global Counterspace Capabilities: An Open Source Assessment,” Secure World Foundation, April 2019, https://tinyurl.com/qmnndgj.
10 Harrison et al., op. cit.
11 Ibid.
12 Kelsey D. Atherton, “The chicken-and-egg debate about new threats in space,” C4ISRNET, April 8, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/t9m5wjq.
But the budding detente quickly dissipated after Washington and Moscow lined up on opposing sides of the 1973 Arab-Israeli War. After two weeks of fierce fighting, Israeli forces had blunted a Syrian attack on the Golan Heights and advanced to within artillery range of Damascus while Israeli tanks had crossed the Suez Canal and surrounded Egypt’s Third Army. With Moscow threatening to intervene with nuclear weapons to save its beleaguered Arab clients, Nixon placed U.S. nuclear forces on a midlevel alert, once again bringing the two superpowers to the precipice of nuclear war. Eventually, a battlefield ceasefire defused the crisis.
A year later, Nixon resigned over the Watergate scandal. U.S.-Soviet Arms control talks resumed, and in June 1979, President Jimmy Carter and Soviet General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev signed the SALT II accords, further limiting the number of each side’s nuclear warheads and ICBMs. But six months later, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, prompting Carter to ask the Senate to delay consideration of the treaty. Although the Senate never ratified SALT II, both sides honored it, underscoring the value each placed on its controls.44
President Ronald Reagan made arms control a priority with his bold 1981 “zero-option” proposal, which called for the removal of all U.S. and Soviet intermediate-range nuclear missiles from Europe. He followed up the following year with a proposal to reduce the number of each side’s strategic nuclear warheads.45
In 1983, Reagan introduced a plan for a space-based missile shield against Soviet nuclear attack. Some experts questioned the effectiveness of the initiative, which they nicknamed “Star Wars.” But the program alarmed the Soviets, who feared they were falling behind the Americans in both defense technology and spending.46
That same year, Mikhail Gorbachev became the Soviet Communist Party’s general secretary and introduced greater openness along with economic and political reforms, transformative policies that set the stage for more cooperation on arms control.
In 1986, Reagan and Gorbachev met in Reykjavík, Iceland, for what arms control experts have called one of the most extraordinary U.S.-Soviet summits ever held. The two leaders nearly agreed to complete nuclear disarmament within 10 years. Gorbachev’s demand to limit tests for Reagan’s space missiles killed the deal, but experts say their talks paved the way for later arms control agreements.47
One was the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces, or INF, Treaty, which Reagan and Gorbachev signed in December 1987. It banned all intermediate-range nuclear missiles, an arms control milestone, experts say, because it was the first agreement to abolish an entire class of nuclear arms, as opposed to limiting their number.48
On Nov. 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall fell, marking the beginning of the end of the Cold War and greater progress on arms control. In July 1991, Gorbachev and President George H.W. Bush signed the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START I), which limited the United States and the Soviet Union each to deploy 6,000 warheads and 1,600 delivery vehicles.49
After the Soviet Union collapsed in late 1991, Bush signed bipartisan legislation creating the Cooperative Threat Reduction Program. The brainchild of Democratic Sen. Nunn of Georgia and Republican Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana, the legislation provided financial and technical assistance to former Soviet republics to dismantle thousands of nuclear weapons, remove their stockpiles of plutonium and highly enriched uranium needed to make such weapons, and provide their nuclear scientists with civilian jobs.50
In 1993, Russia and the United States signed START II, banning the use of multiple nuclear warheads deployed on ICBMs. Although the U.S. Senate and the Russian Duma, or parliament, ratified the agreement, it never went into effect because of unresolved differences in other areas of arms control.51
Cracks Appear
Those differences opened the first cracks in the arms control edifice. In June 2002, President George W. Bush, the son of the former president, withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty Nixon had signed 30 years earlier, arguing that it limited U.S. ability to deploy missile defenses against rogue states. Russia’s new president, Vladimir Putin, strongly opposed the move, and in response, he also pulled out of the treaty, preventing it from taking effect.52
Tensions between Washington and Moscow escalated in 2007 when Bush announced plans to base anti-missile batteries in Poland and the Czech Republic, former Soviet-controlled Warsaw Pact countries that joined NATO after the Soviet Union’s demise. Bush maintained the missiles were needed to defend NATO allies against Iran’s missiles. But Putin saw them as anti-missile systems that could potentially be turned against Russia, blunting its nuclear arsenal.
U.S.-Russia relations improved after President Barack Obama took office in 2009. Eager to enhance cooperation, Obama announced he would scrap Bush’s plan for the Eastern European anti-missile sites and rely instead on the anti-missile systems aboard U.S. Navy warships.
The following year, Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev signed New START, capping each country’s deployed nuclear warheads at 1,550 and its long-range delivery systems at 700. Like the previous U.S.-Russia treaties, New START included extensive verification procedures, providing transparency for both sides.53
In 2012, in another major nonproliferation effort, the United States and five other world powers began negotiating with Iran to halt its nuclear program, which many experts suspected was close to developing a nuclear bomb. In 2015, Tehran agreed to curtail its nuclear program in return for relief from international sanctions that had hobbled Iran’s economy.
Israel and its supporters in Congress condemned the deal, arguing that once key provisions expired after 10 years, Iran would be free to resume its weapons development. In his 2016 campaign for the presidency, Republican nominee Trump echoed those allegations, vowing if elected to withdraw from the Iran deal and negotiate a tougher accord permanently halting Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile programs and ending its support for proxy military forces across the Middle East.
After winning the 2016 election, Trump turned his attention to North Korea, which was testing its nuclear weapons and long-range ballistic missiles capable of reaching the United States. Trump and North Korean leader Kim taunted each other with personal insults and threats.
In early 2018, the Pentagon released its updated “Nuclear Posture Review,” detailing the administration’s plans to modernize the nation’s nuclear arsenal and presenting limited tactical nuclear war as a viable battlefield strategy.54
On May 8, that year, Trump made good on his promise to withdraw from the Iran deal. Six months later, he reimposed crippling sanctions on the Islamic Republic and gave its leaders a stark choice: sign a tougher accord or watch Iran’s economy collapse. A defiant Iran refused and slowly reactivated its nuclear program.
In June of that year, Trump stunned arms control advocates and defense hawks by becoming the first sitting U.S. president to meet with a North Korean leader. Gambling that their personal diplomacy could sweep away decades of hostility and distrust, Trump and Kim held talks in Singapore and agreed to begin negotiations toward denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.55
Meeting Kim for a second time in Hanoi in February 2019, Trump abruptly walked out of their summit after rejecting what U.S. officials said was the North Korean leader’s demand for relief from all U.S. sanctions in return for dismantling his main nuclear facility at Yongbyon. North Korea said it had asked for a partial lifting of sanctions.56
Last August, the two leaders met a third time,