Historical Efforts in Arms Control and Disarmament

The story of arms control and disarmament is, in many ways, the story of humanity trying to manage the very weapons it builds. After two world wars and the arrival of the atomic bomb, nations realised that unchecked weapons competition could threaten the survival of civilisation itself. The decades that followed produced a remarkable series of conferences, plans, and treaties – some that failed, others that quietly reshaped global security. Understanding this history helps explain why the world today still negotiates over nuclear arsenals and why the gap between “controlling” weapons and “abolishing” them remains so wide.

Arms control and disarmament: what is the difference? 🔗

Before tracing the history, it helps to separate two ideas that are often confused. Disarmament refers to the actual reduction or complete elimination of weapons. Arms control is a broader and more modest concept – it involves agreements that regulate, limit, or manage weapons rather than abolishing them outright. A treaty that caps the number of missiles each side may possess is arms control. A plan that seeks to destroy all atomic bombs is disarmament.

This distinction matters because most successful agreements in history have been arms control measures, not full disarmament. States have generally been willing to limit competition but reluctant to give up weapons entirely, especially when they fear rivals might cheat. The tension between these two goals runs through the entire history that follows.

The interwar years: the first organised attempts 🔗

The enormous death toll of the First World War pushed the international community to put weapons reduction on the global agenda for the first time. The Covenant of the League of Nations, ratified in 1920, stated in Article 8 that maintaining peace required reducing national armaments. For over fifteen years, states worked toward this goal both inside and outside the League.

Naval limitation and the Washington system 🔗

The most concrete early progress came in naval arms. The Washington Naval Conference of 1921-22 produced a treaty that limited the capital ships of the major naval powers – the United States, Britain, Japan, France, and Italy. It established the famous 5:5:3:1.75:1.75 ratio for battleships and battlecruisers, an attempt to curb a costly naval race. This was followed by further naval limitation treaties signed in London in 1930 and 1936.

These naval agreements showed both the promise and the limits of arms control. Because a formula for limiting smaller warships was not found, navies simply rushed to build cruisers that fell just below the tonnage threshold that defined a capital ship. Controlling one category of weapons often pushed competition into another.

Chemical weapons and the Geneva Protocol 🔗

The horror of poison gas in the trenches produced one lasting achievement. The 1925 Geneva Protocol prohibited the use in war of asphyxiating, poisonous, and other gases, as well as bacteriological methods of warfare. It remains one of the few interwar disarmament instruments still relevant today, although it banned only the use of such weapons, not their production or stockpiling.

Why the interwar effort ultimately failed 🔗

Despite many conferences, the broader project collapsed. The general disarmament process the League pursued between 1926 and 1934 – covering all nations and all categories of weapons – fell apart as political tensions rose and Germany under Hitler walked away. The lesson historians draw is blunt: the success or failure of these efforts was always determined by the political will and self-interest of the major powers, not by the elegance of the agreements themselves. When trust collapsed, so did the treaties.

The atomic age changes everything 🔗

The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 transformed the entire debate. A single weapon could now destroy a city. For the first time, the question was not merely how to limit war, but whether a new kind of weapon could be brought under international control before it spread. This urgency drove the first major post-war disarmament initiative.

The Baruch Plan 🔗

In January 1946, the United Nations created the UN Atomic Energy Commission to advise on eliminating atomic weapons and using atomic energy for peaceful purposes. The United States prepared a proposal, built on an earlier expert study known as the Acheson-Lilienthal Report. On 14 June 1946, the American delegate Bernard Baruch presented it to the Commission.

The Baruch Plan called for an international authority to control all atomic activity, with inspection of nuclear facilities. Crucially, however, it stated that the United States would keep its nuclear monopoly until every stage of the plan was in force and working. Only then would it surrender its bombs to the new authority.

The Soviet Union rejected the plan. From Moscow’s perspective, accepting it would freeze American nuclear superiority in place while the USSR was still developing its own bomb. The Soviets offered a counterproposal for an immediate ban on all nuclear weapons, which the United States in turn rejected. The result was deadlock. This failure was historically significant – it was effectively the only serious attempt to create a nuclear-free world, and its collapse opened the door to the nuclear arms race that defined the Cold War.

The UN Disarmament Commission 🔗

Negotiations did not stop after the Baruch Plan failed. The early UN institutional machinery for disarmament evolved through the 1950s, and the UN Disarmament Commission was established as a body to deliberate on disarmament questions. Although it produced few binding results during the height of the Cold War, it kept the issue formally alive within the United Nations system and provided a forum where proposals could be debated rather than abandoned entirely.

Atoms for Peace 🔗

A different approach emerged in late 1953. On 8 December, President Dwight D. Eisenhower delivered his famous “Atoms for Peace” speech to the UN General Assembly, presided over that day by India’s Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit. Rather than focusing only on the dangers of atomic war, Eisenhower emphasised the peaceful uses of nuclear technology in medicine, agriculture, and power generation.

The speech proposed an international body to promote the peaceful uses of nuclear energy for the benefit of all mankind. This idea eventually led to the creation of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in 1957. Atoms for Peace marked a shift in strategy: if weapons could not easily be abolished, perhaps the destructive potential of the atom could at least be channelled toward beneficial ends, while building a system of safeguards to monitor its use.

The Cold War: managing rivalry through arms control 🔗

As both superpowers accumulated vast arsenals, total disarmament looked increasingly unrealistic. Attention shifted toward arms control – agreements that would reduce the risk of war and maintain what strategists called strategic stability. The central idea was that if neither side could win a nuclear exchange, and neither feared a disarming first strike, the temptation to attack would fall.

The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty 🔗

The most widely adopted agreement of this era was the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), signed on 1 July 1968 by the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The treaty rested on a bargain: non-nuclear states agreed not to acquire nuclear weapons, while the nuclear powers committed to pursue disarmament and to share peaceful nuclear technology under IAEA safeguards. Today the NPT is the most widely joined arms control agreement in the world, though a handful of states – including India – have remained outside it.

SALT and the ABM Treaty 🔗

The most direct attempts to stabilise the superpower rivalry came through the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks. Full negotiations began in 1969, and on 26 May 1972 the first set of agreements (SALT I) was signed in Moscow. According to Britannica, the most important of these were the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty and the Interim Agreement on offensive weapons.

The logic behind the ABM Treaty is worth understanding, because it reveals how arms control thinking actually worked. By sharply limiting missile defences, the treaty ensured that neither side could shield itself from retaliation. This may sound counter-intuitive, but it reinforced deterrence: if both nations remained vulnerable, neither had an incentive to strike first. Limiting defensive weapons therefore made an offensive attack less, not more, likely.

These agreements were imperfect and did not actually reduce arsenals – they mostly capped their growth. But as the Arms Control Association notes, they were a modest first step toward the disarmament obligations under the NPT and set a standard for future negotiations. The verification procedures and bilateral consultation mechanisms developed during SALT later made possible the deeper reductions of the START treaties in the 1980s and 1990s.

What this history teaches 🔗

Looking across these decades, a few patterns stand out. First, arms control has consistently proved more achievable than full disarmament, because states will accept limits long before they accept vulnerability. Second, almost every agreement succeeded or failed based on the political relationship between the major powers, not on the technical merits of the proposal. Third, controlling one category of weapons often simply shifted competition elsewhere – from battleships to cruisers, from offensive missiles to defences and back again.

Perhaps the most striking lesson is that the Baruch Plan’s failure was a turning point the world never fully recovered from. Had it succeeded, the entire nuclear age might have unfolded differently. Instead, humanity settled for managing its most dangerous weapons rather than eliminating them – a compromise that still shapes international security today.

What do you think? If the Baruch Plan had required no transition period and offered to surrender American weapons immediately, do you think the Soviet Union would have accepted it – or was the deeper problem simply a lack of trust between rivals? And in a world of many nuclear powers rather than two, is genuine disarmament still possible, or has arms control become the only realistic goal?

References

1. https://cd-geneve.delegfrance.org/Did-you-know-France-and-disarmament-during-the-inter-war-period
2. https://www.americanforeignrelations.com/A-D/Arms-Control-and-Disarmament-Between-the-world-wars-1919-1939.html
3. https://www.the-trench.org/1925-geneva-protocol-negotiation
4. https://history.state.gov/milestones/1945-1952/baruch-plans
5. https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/june-14/the-united-states-presents-the-baruch-plan
6. https://www.un.org/disarmament/institutions/disarmament-commission/
7. https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/60-years-atoms-peace
8. https://www.britannica.com/event/Atoms-for-Peace-speech
9. https://www.cfr.org/articles/us-russia-nuclear-arms-control
10. https://www.britannica.com/event/Strategic-Arms-Limitation-Talks
11. https://www.nti.org/education-center/treaties-and-regimes/strategic-arms-limitation-talks-salt-i-salt-ii/
12. https://www.armscontrol.org/blog/2022-05-25/fifty-years-ago-first-strategic-arms-limitation-agreements-concluded