The Irreversibility Paradox: What Makes for Enduring Arms Control and Disarmament

ABSTRACT

The principle of irreversibility poses a paradox for arms control. On the one hand, negotiators often seek to ensure that progress made in nuclear arms control is enduring and that agreements are resilient over time. This may include the dismantlement of certain types of weapons or the elimination of weapons-usable fissile materials. Simultaneously, policymakers must seek to ensure that arms control agreements are palpable to domestic stakeholders, especially if the treaties require legislative consent, and have the flexibility to respond to changes in the security environment. This often takes the form of withdrawal clauses, giving parties the option to leave an agreement and reverse any potential gains or the underlying intent of an agreement. This paradox bears many similarities to the transparency-security tradeoff identified by Coe and Vaynman whereby, “Any deal that is transparent enough to assure that one side complies with the deal may also shift the balance of power so much that the other side reneges in order to exploit the shift”. We argue that a parallel tradeoff is between political, legal, and technical measures, including verification and transparency, which can confirm irreversibility, and security concerns that will motivate states to build flexibility into agreements, making them less irreversible, i.e. more reversible.

KEYWORDS:

• Irreversibility
• nuclear disarmament
• negotiations
• nuclear deterrence
• arms control

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ We are grateful to the King’s College London workshop discussion for highlighting this as a potential area for future research. Two such comparisons that would be of use for future research would be comparing the NPT and CTBT, and comparing START and New START.

² For a detailed history of the Soviet biological weapons program, see Leitenberg and Zilinskas (2012).

³ December, 1987. Article XIII, Treaty Between the United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics on the Elimination of Their Intermediate-Range And Shorter-Range Missiles (INF Treaty), US Department of State, Bureau of Arms Control, Verification, and Compliance.

⁴ Ibid.

⁵ December, 1897. INF Treaty Signing, CSPAN.

⁶ See, for example, Koch (2012).

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the King’s College London .

Notes on contributors

Joseph Rodgers

Joseph Rodgers is an Associate Director and Associate Fellow with the Project on Nuclear Issues in the International Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). He is also a PhD student in the biodefense program at George Mason University. Previously, he worked as a graduate research assistant at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies and interned with the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research. Joseph holds an MA in nonproliferation and terrorism from the Middlebury Institute for International Studies.

Heather Williams

Heather Williams is the Director of the Project on Nuclear Issues and a senior fellow in the International Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). She is also an associate fellow with the Project on Managing the Atom in the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School. Before joining CSIS she was a visiting fellow with the Project on Managing the Atom and a Stanton Nuclear Security fellow in the Security Studies Program at MIT. Until 2022, she was a senior lecturer (associate professor) in defense studies at King’s College London and taught on arms control, deterrence, and disarmament. Dr. Williams has a PhD in war studies from King’s College London, an MA in security policy studies from the George Washington University, and a BA in international relations and Russian studies from Boston University.