Armed aggression and geopolitical rivalry are realities of today's international environment. Whether because of these realities or in spite of them, negotiation toward nuclear arms control has faded from the scene. My purpose in this short book is to suggest practical steps that the US and its allies might take to revive the negotiated approach to nuclear arms control that, in the past, allowed important gains in national security and international stability. I offer an argument for realists in particular to return to nuclear arms control.

As reasonable as it sounds to say that they need to negotiate if nuclear-armed countries are to achieve arms control, the negotiated approach to arms control has come under threat. A new disarmament treaty, the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), attracts support in many quarters, and it calls for immediate elimination of nuclear weapons without negotiation. The US and like-minded countries need a good faith effort toward nuclear arms control, because, without it, unrealistic calls for unnegotiated disarmament will complicate the already-difficult search for sustainable defense and security.

An earlier generation of strategists had the insight that nuclear arms control, in the world as it exists, requires negotiation. In the NPT, the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, realists fashioned a negotiated approach, supporting a search for verifiable limits on nuclear arms, and, by so doing, they ensured that nuclear-weapon states would preserve the opportunity to achieve progress toward the eventual disarmament that was, and remains, a shared goal. It is timely to consider how to renew the negotiated approach.

As much as it entails coming to the table to explore possible solutions, a pledge to negotiate also entails refraining from conduct that pre-judges the outcome of negotiations. China refuses to come to the table and, having embarked on a largescale nuclear weapons buildup, pursues a strategic fait accompli before negotiations have even begun.

Meanwhile, engagement with the NPT in the US is at a low ebb. Important voices nevertheless continue to champion this cornerstone treaty. As the US and its nuclear-weapon allies enter a season of political transition, I think it timely to turn our minds to overcoming the impasse at which nuclear arms control now stands.

This book is not about the history of nuclear arms control. It is instead about its possible future. A page of history nevertheless helps us understand where nuclear arms control might go and to appreciate why, as the title of this book suggests, nuclear arms control at the moment is in peril.

On July 16, 1945 the US tested the first atomic bomb. On August 29, 1949 the USSR tested its first atomic bomb. Finding themselves in a world in which two antagonists possessed weapons of enormous destructive power, political leaders began to consider possibilities for negotiating arrangements that might place those weapons under agreed limitations and controls. Progress in the first decade was unsteady. Countries reached a modest milestone in 1957 when they created the International Atomic Energy Agency, the IAEA, a multilateral organization intended to support the peaceful use of nuclear technology and, ‘so far as it is able’, to ensure that nuclear technology transferred to countries without nuclear weapons is used only for peaceful ends. The US, the USSR, and the UK— the last having tested its first atomic bomb in 1952— at length agreed to stop nuclear tests in space, the atmosphere, and oceans. However, the Partial Test Ban Treaty, which the US, the USSR, and the UK adopted in 1963, did not place any other limits on the nuclear arsenals of these three countries, and it placed no obligation whatsoever on other countries. As for the IAEA, its governing statute left it to individual states to decide how, and whether, they would engage with the new Agency. No legally binding instrument with widespread membership did anything in itself to limit countries’ freedom to develop or acquire nuclear weapons. With France having tested its first atomic bomb in 1960, and China having received technical support from the USSR to expedite its own development efforts— China would test its first bomb in 1964— concern grew that the spread of nuclear weapons was only beginning. US President John F. Kennedy, in 1963, the year of the test ban treaty, apprehended that in another decade or so as many as 25 countries would have nuclear weapons.