From the end of the 19th century to the beginning of the Cold War

The idea of disarmament had not had a strong echo in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Exceptions were the projects of perpetual peace imagined by philosophers and some initiatives taken in the nineteenth century, notably by the tsars, to reduce the inconvenience of armed peace and prevent the outbreak of war between European powers. As a consequence, the issue made it onto the agenda of the Hague Peace Conferences of 1899 and 1907.

The initiative came from Tsar Nicholas II of Russia, who feared an international arms race and invited the great powers to meet in The Hague. Because of the opposition of most major powers, no limitation of arms or military budgets could be agreed upon. But at least the use of certain existing munitions and weapons systems could be restricted:

First, aerial bombings were outlawed. Second, the use of submarines was prohibited. And third, the laws of war were revised and codified on the basis of the principle that belligerents do not have an, and I quote from the treaty text, “unlimited right to choose the means to injure the enemy” and that it is forbidden “to use weapons projectiles and materials calculated to cause superfluous injury.”

Unfortunately, these recommendations had no effect and the statements on “the prohibition of launching projectiles from balloons” and “the prohibition of asphyxiating and noxious gases” had no effect during the First World War.

Although the concrete results of the two Hague conferences were very limited, both conferences ushered in the era of institutional multilateralism on a global scale, introduced new actors and profoundly innovative principles into international relations. In particular, many of the provisions adopted or envisaged at The Hague were extended in the 1920s: The 1899 Convention “respecting the laws and customs of war on land” was followed in 1925 by the Geneva Protocol prohibiting the use of chemical and bacteriological weapons and the 1929 Geneva Conventions on the treatment of prisoners of war.

Less well-known, The Brussels General Act of 1890 “Relative to the Slave Trade and Importation into Africa of Firearms, Ammunition, and Spiritous Liquors” was a collection of anti-slavery measures signed in 1890 and which entered into force in 1891. Even if the scope of this legally binding multilateral instrument was bigger than arms control, it was the first of its kind for regulating the African firearms trade.

It was really in the aftermath of the Great War that disarmament became a full-fledged diplomatic exercise and that states sought to consolidate peace through a concerted reduction of their armaments.

After the United States intervention that hastened the end of the conflict, President Wilson set out how he envisaged the organisation of peace. Among the fourteen points of his programme was “the reduction of national armaments to the extreme limit compatible with the internal security of the country.” The League of Nations pact enshrined the Wilsonian philosophy of disarmament. However, the negotiations for general disarmament that opened in Geneva in 1932 were not successful and the Washington (1922) and London (1930 and 1936) naval disarmament agreements were limited in scope.

Arms control as a technical and diplomatic discipline was not born with the invention of nuclear weapons, even if it is consubstantial with them. It was not until the turn of the 1950s that it emerged in Washington. But when nuclear weapons were used for the first time in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and in the few years following the end of the Second World War, thinking about the limitation of violence in the nuclear age was still dominated by the more traditional objective of general and complete disarmament, which stemmed from inter-war thinking.

In 1945, disarmament had been revived by the United Nations. Articles 11 and 26 of the San Francisco Charter deal specifically with it.

It is worth noting that unlike the objectives of the League of Nations, the ambition to regulate armaments became a consequence rather than an essential condition of collective security. The main emphasis was on saving money on military expenditure.

Initially, disarmament negotiations took place in two subsidiary bodies of the General Assembly and the Security Council. The United States used the novelty of the nuclear threat to call for urgent measures: as a result, in January 1946, the General Assembly decided to create an Atomic Energy Commission to develop mechanisms to ensure the use of the atom for exclusively peaceful purposes. The so-called “Baruch Plan” was supposed to meet this requirement by providing for the creation of a supranational body to directly manage all atomic-related activities. Once this was in place, the destruction of nuclear weapons, of which the United States had a monopoly at the time, would take place.

Such an approach was unlikely to satisfy the USSR, and indeed, the USSR and the West maintained irreconcilable positions on disarmament until the mid-1950s.

It is therefore important to bear in mind the relative historical gap between the emergence of nuclear weapons and the specific thinking behind them. In this respect, nuclear weapons began to be perceived as a strategic breakthrough ten years after their appearance, and as the power of nuclear testing increased between the two main competitors.

The seminal “book” that launches modern, specifically nuclear, arms control thinking is the special issue of the American Academy of Sciences journal Daedalus, published in the autumn of 1960. Following this publication, Donald Brennan collected and prefaced some of the texts in this issue in a book entitled: Arms Control, Disarmament and National Security. Morton Halperin and Thomas Schelling published another seminal work at the same time: Strategy and Arms Control, in 1961.

According to all these Scholars, arms control has a threefold objective: to prevent nuclear war, to limit the damage if a conflict does break out, and to reduce military expenditure. In this scheme, priority is given to measures likely to prevent direct confrontation between the US and the USSR. The key word in this new thinking became “strategic stability.”