Arms Control and International Security Papers 

Volume 11 Number 7 

May 20, 2020 

Arms Control and 

Disarmament: Adjusting to 

a New Era 

by Christopher A. Ford 

The Arms Control and International Security Papers are produced by the Office of the Under Secretary of State for Arms Control 

and International Security in order to make U.S. State Department policy analysis available in an electronically-accessible 

format compatible with "social distancing" during the COVID-19 crisis. 
 

Arms Control and International Security Papers 

Arms Control and Disarmament: Adjusting to a New Era 

Volume I, Number 7 I May 20, 2020 

Arms Control and Disarmament: Adjusting to a 

New Era 

by Christopher A. Ford1 

This latest AC/5 Paper publishes Assistant Secretary Ford's remarks on May 20, 

2020, as the keynote speaker at an event commemorating the 25th anniversary 

of the Sandia National Laboratory's Cooperative Monitoring Center. He offers 

thoughts on some of the most critical challenges the public policy community is 

facing regarding how diplomacy in arms control and disarmament can 

contribute to global security. How we adapt our approaches to a changing 

security environment is perhaps the most important and potentially 

consequential decision diplomats have faced since the height of the Cold War. 

Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for inviting 

me to speak to you - even if it must be through this video 

link. I always enjoy engaging with the great people who 

work at our national laboratories, and it is certainly an 

auspicious occasion to celebrate the Cooperative 

Monitoring Center's quarter century of contributions to 

United States and to international security. 

For this keynote address, I thought I would explore 

with you how we at the Department of State are trying to 

bring new thinking to bear on some of the most critical 

challenges facing the public policy community: how arms 

control and disarmament diplomacy can constructively 

contribute to U.S. and to global security. 

Matters of arms control and disarmament policy, after 

all, have long presented policymakers with special 

challenges. Because weapons of mass destruction issues -

and particularly matters related to nuclear weapons policy 

- raise existential questions of human survival, while 

simultaneously being linked to critical challenges of 

national autonomy in the face of intimidation and potential 

aggression, they are policy matters of inescapable concern 

to every citizen and frequently generate understandably 

strong feelings. Yet they are also matters involving 

sometimes extraordinarily arcane technical questions and 

game-theoretical challenges, which can be baffling to nonexperts even while sometimes hiding unwisdom behind a 

technocratic fa~ade. 

In historical terms, moreover, questions about how we 

approach nuclear weapons policy are still matters of 

collective human first impression. They are also areas in 

which enormously consequential decisions must be made 

with radically incomplete information, which is frustrating 

and challenging, but also in some sense merciful. We have 

no control studies of what would happen if different courses 

of action were taken, nor- happily- any examples to learn 

from of failed nuclear deterrence and the descent to 

nuclear warfare. (When the seminal U.S. nuclear weapons 

theorist Herman Kahn was once criticized by U.S. military 

officers unhappy at being lectured on nuclear strategy by a 

1 Dr. Ford serves as U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for International Security and Nonproliferation, and is additionally performing the Duties of 

the Under Secretary for Arms Control and International Security. He previously served as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director 

for Weapons of Mass Destruction and Counterproliferation on the U.S. National Security Council staff 
 

Arms Control and International Security Papers 

Arms Control and Disarmament: Adjusting to a New Era 

bespectacled, overweight, pencil-pushing civilian, he shot 

back: "How many thermonuclear wars have you fought 

recently?" In this arena, as Kahn admitted, everybody is 

thankfully just a theorist. 2 ) These are among the most 

difficult policy questions, even on the best of days. 

Such challenges are at their most acute, however, 

when they arise in periods of significant geopolitical 

change. To the degree that nuclear weapons policies-and 

approaches taken in the related fields of arms control and 

disarmament, which attempt to use diplomacy to preserve 

the peace and to mitigate nuclear risks as much as possible 

- make sense, they do so in the context of the particular 

global security environment that decision-makers happen 

actually to face. (Few strategies in this respect, one 

imagines, make sense entirely a priori. The details always 

matter.) The ways in which we adapt our approaches to 

changing permutations of that security environment 

represent perhaps the most important and potentially 

consequential decisions presented by statecraft at any time 

since the height of the Cold War. For this reason, it is of 

great importance that we think carefully about how we 

respond to the significant geopolitical shifts that are 

underway. 

I. The New Competitive Context 

So what are the shifts we now face? Many expected 

the post-Cold War era to be one of transnational or postnational opportunity: a time in which the great power 

contests of the past could be put behind us. And indeed it 

did, for a time, seem to be living up to that promise. 

Some politicians spoke of the emergence of a "new 

world order," for instance, while some scholars suggested 

that the resolution of the Cold War ideological contest had 

left liberal democracy as the only legitimate system and 

presumptive "end state" of human governance. Europe set 

about integrating itself into ever-tighter variations of 

Union, and began also to bring many of the former states 

of the Warsaw Pact and the former Soviet Union into its 

fold - an approach also followed by the Cold War-winning 

NATO alliance itself. New agreements were reached to 

eliminate the majority of the nuclear weapons that the 

superpowers had aimed at each other for decades, to 

prohibit entire classes of weaponry (e.g., chemical weapons 

and antipersonnel land mines), and to try to ban nuclear 

Volume I, Number 7 I May 20, 2020 

testing. Moreover, building on ideas that had been 

gestating since the Helsinki Final Act of the 1970s, a global 

criminal court was established, while international legal 

scholars debated the international community's right (or 

obligation) to protect the citizens of countries from their 

own governments. Even the intractable problems of the 

Middle East seemed briefly to be on the mend, with 

negotiations between longtime Israeli and Palestinian 

antagonists and the establishment of a Palestinian protostate, while Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland 

also buried the hatchet. 

Free trade agreements blossomed among the major 

powers, and a newly export-focused China was embraced 

and admitted into the World Trade Organization, despite 

the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP's) massacre of its own 

citizens protesting for democracy on Tiananmen Square, as 

an expression of the world's hope that this embrace would 

help transform China into a more rule-abiding and 

responsible power. All in all, the era's globe-spanning 

financial markets, industrial supply chains, and commercial 

markets - not to mention the development of a truly 

globalized information space that opened up vast new 

human communicative and interactive possibilities largely 

independent of national borders, through the Internetseemed not just to be producing unprecedented growth 

but more generally to be tying the world together into a 

single, cosmopolitan, neoliberal whole. Or so we told 

ourselves. Domestically, politicians of many stripes and in 

a growing number of countries increasingly embraced this 

seeming neoliberal consensus, suggesting for a time that 

the "end of history" pundits may have been correct. 

To be sure, that "new age" had its crises, many of them 

enormous - including an East Asian debt crisis, genocide in 

Rwanda, Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, and violent ethnic 

cleansing in the former Yugoslavia that led to NATO's 

military intervention. After the disappearance of the Soviet 

Union, and while the People's Republic of China (PRC) 

focused upon internal stabilization and economic growth, 

Western leaders' national security attention turned from 

great power concerns to the challenges of preventing less 

powerful countries from rocking the geopolitical boat with 

dangerous weaponry. This raised nonproliferation to a 

central issue of global concern, most dramatically with the 

tragically fraught issue of weapons of mass destruction in 

Saddam Hussein's Iraq, revelations about A.O. Khan's 

nuclear proliferation network, Iran's nuclear weapons 

2 See Sharon Gamari-Tabrizi, The Worlds of Herman Kahn: The Intuitive Science of Thermonuclear War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University 

Press, 2005), at 48-49 & 83. 

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Arms Control and Disarmament: Adjusting to a New Era 

program, and North Korea's development of nuclear 

weaponry. And of course there was also the horrific rise of 

jihadist terrorism in the Middle East and farther afield, and 

the subsequent turn of the West- and especially the 

United States -toward "kinetic" responses to rogue state 

and non-state challenges after the terrorist atrocities 

inflicted upon us in the 1998 embassy bombings and of 

course the attacks of September 11, 2001. 

The post-Cold War world was not, therefore, exactly a 

peaceful one. But it was taken for a while to be an "end of 

history" in at least one sense: for the first time in many 

hundreds of years, the main challenges the world faced 

were not ones related fundamentally to the major powers' 

geopolitical competition with each other. The main issues, 

it appeared, were either supra- or trans-national ones, or 

they were national questions in the sense that they 

concerned what the relationship should be between 

particular (usually less powerful) states and a broader 

international environment that was congealing into some 

kind of neoliberal community. 

Today, however, many of these dynamics seem to 

have reversed, or at least their teleology has been called 

fundamentally into question, in areas ranging from 

domestic politics to economics to security policy. From the 

perspective of global security policy, the most dramatic of 

these shifts- and certainly the one with the most potential 

to result in catastrophic war- has been the largest powers' 

return to the geopolitics of political-military competition. 

I suppose we can take heart that in many 

circumstances, competition today is mediated by an array 

of international institutions, treaties, rules, and norms -

many of which did not exist in prior competitive centuries, 

and all of which reflect deeply embedded social and 

economic preferences for peace, stability, and prosperity. 

Nevertheless, we are clear-eyed about the challenges 

presented by increasingly powerful revisionist states that 

are both dissatisfied with their status in the international 

system and willing to act in dangerous, destabilizing, and 

entirely unscrupulous ways in order to trade up. 

Paradoxically, the challenges we face today are in part 

consequences of our past victories. Claiming to have been 

made anxious by many of the aforementioned post-Cold 

War trends, including a coalescing neoliberal community, 

the expansion of NATO toward its borders, the spread of 

democracy and so-called "color revolutions" in its perceived 

traditional sphere of influence, and nursing grievances of 

lost geopolitical clout, Russia was perhaps the earliest 

Volume I, Number 7 I May 20, 2020 

openly to proclaim its intention to build itself back into the 

kind of great power competitor to the United States it had 

once been. Vladimir Putin made this clear at least as early 

as his so-called "Millennium Message" published in 1999 as 

he first arrived in the Kremlin, declaring that Russia's return 

to muscular greatness - restoring what he viewed as the 

proper order of things after the collapse of Soviet imperial 

power, which Putin has described as a "global catastrophe" 

-was a national duty that required "an immense effort 

from all the nation's intellectual, physical, and moral 

forces." 

Putin's revisionist agenda has thus turned increasingly 

toward self-aggrandizement by means of extravagant 

provocations, such as Russia's invasions of Georgia and 

Ukraine, overseas expeditionary warfare in Syria, 

interference in Western elections, the use of energy as a 

weapon, chronic violations of arms control agreements and 

arrangements, the deployment of "private" military 

contractors to hotspots around the world, a build-up of 

non-strategic nuclear weaponry, and the pursuit of bizarre 

new "exotic" strategic delivery systems, as well as 

assassinations and assassination attempts against 

defectors and political opponents in the West using 

radioactive poison and an illegal chemical weapon. 

Needless to say, such dangerous choices have gravely 

damaged what hopes there might have been for post-Cold 

War reconciliation and cooperation. 

For their part, leaders in the PRC had long signaled 

their own geopolitically revisionist intentions, but for most 

of the post-Mao era they lacked the capacity to act openly 

on such intentions and generally espoused only reassuring 

rhetoric about "win-win" global solutions and the 

supposedly non-threatening nature of the PRC's rise. This 

messaging plan generally hewed to Deng Xiaoping's 

famous "24-character strategy" of encouraging the country 

to "bide its time and hide its capabilities" while quietly 

building up its strength. 

Under Hu Jintao and now especially under Xi Jin ping, 

however, the CCP clearly feels that it no longer needs to 

follow Deng's strategy of "hiding and biding." Chinese 

officials now openly speak of "national rejuvenation" 

objectives that include the "Strong Military Dream" of 

ensuring that Beijing's armed forces acquire world-class 

capabilities superior to those of anyone else on the planet 

by 2049, which will mark the centenary of the founding of 

the People's Republic. Today, the PRC is engaged in a 

gigantic, full-spectrum military build-up that includes the 

development of power-projection capabilities with global 

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Arms Control and Disarmament: Adjusting to a New Era 

reach, and will also involve at least doubling the size of 

Beijing's nuclear arsenal during the next decade. It has also 

adopted a whole-of-system strategy called "military-civil 

fusion" that incorporates the civilian sector-to include 

academic researchers - into its efforts to acquire and 

develop advanced and emerging technologies overseas for 

diversion to military and security end uses that support the 

CCP's global ambitions. 

Nor is the CCP's ambition limited simply to making the 

PRC into what late 19th Century Japanese imperialists 

calledfukoken kyohei ("a rich country with a strong 

military"). Xi himself explained in his speech to the 19th 

Party Congress that in this "new era," China is transitioning 

from a "rich country" to a "powerful country." He also 

outlined that in this "new era," China will make its bid for 

global leadership. Beginning well before Xi Jin ping came to 

power, CCP officials began speaking increasingly of a 

"China model" of governance that the rest of the world 

should follow. This global vision of what the Party 

describes as a "harmonious world" is explicitly modeled on 

the so-called "harmonious society" the Party has been 

aggressively trying to build in China since 2003. 

(Suppressed dissidents in China today sometimes thus 

speak of having been "harmonized" -which tells you pretty 

much all you need to know about whether the PRC vision of 

a so-called "harmonious world" is one that other countries 

should do anything but dread.) 

Today, Xi Jinping himself describes geopolitics in 

notably ideologized terms, inviting international partners 

to join what he calls a "community of common destiny" and 

depicting the international system as a rivalry between 

Western democratic capitalism and the "new model" of 

development he says the PRC offers to the world - that is, 

Party-run, police-state dirigiste capitalism. Through the 

CC P's lens, at least, a competition for the future of the 

world is already in full bloom. 

And now, playing catch-up, U.S. leaders have also 

joined the state competitive game, keenly perceiving the 

degree to which Russian and PRC ambitions represent 

efforts to undermine the United States' own post-Cold War 

position in the geopolitical arena, and alarmed by the 

threats those two countries present to democratic values 

worldwide. Today, we strive to meet these challenges, 

with the U.S. National Security Strategy and National 

Defense Strategy both highlighting interstate competition 

as a challenge requiring renewed focus, with the former 

specifically singling out "the revisionist powers of China 

and Russia" as strategic competitors. 

Volume I, Number 7 I May 20, 2020 

Although in its supra-regional, nuclear-armed, and 

structurally trilateral manifestation, today's competitive 

framework is historically unique -for it does not resemble 

either the dyadic rivalry of the Cold War or the more 

broadly multilateral challenges of 19th Century European 

statecraft, Early Modern European dynastic competition, 

the feuding statelets of the Italian Renaissance, or the 

competing "Warring States" of ancient China. But stateon-state competition is now once again a feature of the 

international arena in explicit ways. And this shift, in turn, 

has profound implications for how we think about issues 

such as arms control and disarmament. 

II. Destabilizing Received Wisdoms 

Whether one admits it or not, geopolitical 

developments have radically destabilized some of the 

received wisdoms that certain portions of the policy 

community have internalized after the end of the Cold War. 

This is particularly the case in the arms control and 

disarmament arena, where some seemed to draw the 

conclusion that we could now just collectively will ourselves 

magically to stable disarmament without concern for 

details such as security and deterrence. while others seem 

to have concluded that the risks and compromises inherent 

in negotiated restraint were anathema. intrinsically 

asymmetric, and in any event unnecessary in a unipolar 

world. 

Well beyond merely the institutional challenges of 

organizing one's policy bureaucracy for a state-competitive 

environment, we thus also face profound conceptual 

challenges. This new era will likely require some new 

thinking- new models, new paradigms. and a new policy 

discourse that transcends debunked verities from an older 

time - if strategy and statecraft are to provide answers to 

today's problems. 

All of this makes it a fascinating, challenging, and 

potentially hugely rewarding time to be part of the national 

security and foreign policy community. Former U.S. 

Secretary of State Dean Acheson titled his 1969 memoir 

Present at the Creation in a reference to his involvement in 

American diplomacy during the seminal years in which an 

entirely new international system was created in the wake 

of the Second World War and with the onset of decades of 

U.S.-Soviet rivalry; a memoir from the world's transition 

from the Cold War to the singular moment of U.S. 

uni polarity and neoliberal globalization three decades ago 

might perhaps use similar imagery. It would seem that we 

are on the cusp now of something yet again different, but, 

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Arms Control and Disarmament: Adjusting to a New Era 

as is so common during important global shifts, the facts of 

the security environment are changing faster than our 

conceptual paradigms. It's time to do better. 

Ill. Building a New Discourse 

In the so-called "T" family of bureaus at the State 

Department-the portions concerned with arms control, 

nonproliferation, disarmament, arms transfers and security 

partnership capacity building, space and cyberspace 

security, missile defense, deterrence, and the national 

security challenges presented by emerging technologies -

we are working to develop, articulate, and implement new 

approaches in response to these new problems. Some of 

these efforts are being undertaken at what might be called 

the strategic level, and others more specifically in the arms 

control and disarmament field itself. 

For one thing, the Western policy community needs to 

rediscover the fact that real strategy- as opposed to 

merely driving toward one's most-desired end state 

irrespective of circumstances - represents a challenge of 

choice-making under constraint: of prioritizing certain 

critical goals and, necessarily, concomitantly de-prioritizing 

others. We cannot afford the luxury of a psychology that 

imagines we can achieve all the policy objectives we want, 

meeting all challenges in all places with equal vigor, outspending and out-thinking all potential adversaries all the 

time, and not having to make difficult trade-offs or to live 

with concededly suboptimal outcomes in some important 

areas in order to ensure we meet critical needs in the most 

important ones. 

Already, the challenges of great power competition 

have forced U.S. leaders into hard choices about such 

trade-offs. The National Defense Strategy. for example, 

openly admits this, emphasizing for the reader that as we 

emerge from a period of "strategic atrophy" and face 

"increased global disorder" and "a security environment 

more complex and volatile than any we have experienced in 

recent memory," there can be "no complacency-we must 

make difficult choices and prioritize what is most 

important." In this context, notes the NDS, "[i]nter-state 

strategic competition, not terrorism, is now the primary 

concern in U.S. national security." 

It is too early to tell precisely what this new 

environment will bring. It may be, for instance, that our 

successors will look back on the United States' years of 

terrorist-hunting in the Middle East much like some later 

observers looked back on Britain's far-flung Victorian wars 

Volume I, Number 7 I May 20, 2020 

-that is, as fascinating and picturesque, if controversial, 

endeavors that yet turned out to be, in geopolitical terms, 

merely a sideshow to and even a distraction from the 

dynamics that shaped the epochal geopolitical contests of 

the generations that followed. It is far too early to tell. 

Either way, the shifts in today's security environment 

clearly demand agile thinking and long-game perspectives, 

habits of mind to which much of our policy community has 

become unaccustomed. Making the difficult choices that 

lie ahead will require a degree of equity-balancing 

prudence and intellectual humility that may have to be 

painfully re-learned by those who still inhabit the various 

we-can-have-it-all mindset of the fading unipolar moment. 

We are presently doing what we can to help meet the 

conceptual demands of the current geopolitical moment. 

In a recent edition of the State Department's Arms Control 

and International Security (AC/5) Papers. I sketched a 

conceptual framework through which our various efforts in 

my corner of the State Department can be fit together into 

a vision of competitive strategy that focuses upon relative 

rates of progress, rather than necessarily assuming an 

absolute teleology of "victory." In a nutshell, our efforts 

promote U.S. comparative advantages and slow the 

development of adversary threat capabilities. so as to buy 

time in which diplomatic, political, and socio-economic 

change can eventually soften the competitive harshness of 

the current environment. In such ways, we are trying to 

build upon the insights of the NSS and the NDS in 

articulating a sustainable approach to competitive posture 

and long-term success. 

More specifically in the arms control and disarmament 

arena, we have not shied away from pointing the finger at 

some of the obsolete modes of thought that the dynamics 

of the current global security environment tend to 

problematize. I have, for example, pointed out some of the 

conceptual pathologies of those convinced that arms 

control and disarmament can be approached 

independently of questions of geopolitics and security. In 

another monograph in the AC/5 Papers series. I also 

described the progress being made with our message that 

in a competitive environment of constrained resources - in 

which our side does not hold all the cards and cannot 

realistically expect entirely to run the board -there remains 

real value in seeking negotiated restraints and measures to 

improve mutual confidence-building and transparency, 

even if such agreements must be reached, ever so very 

carefully, with scofflaws and scoundrels. 

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Arms Control and Disarmament: Adjusting to a New Era 

The cautious but supportive reaction across the policy 

community to current U.S. diplomatic initiatives on 

disarmament suggests that we are making progress 

against such pathologies, and beginning to build a 

common-sense coalition of serious thinkers from both the 

Left and the Right. Convinced by our own internal U.S. 

"nuclear vision review" in 2017 that prior approaches to 

nuclear disarmament were conceptually flawed and even 

counterproductive in the current security environment, we 

have been working to build a new disarmament discourse 

that marries the United States' longstanding commitment 

to its obligations under Article VI of the Nuclear 

Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) with a renewed awareness 

of, respect for, and emphasis upon the need to address 

real-world security challenges if disarmament is to have 

any future. 

One of the results of this work is the Creating an 

Environment for Nuclear Disarmament (CEND) Initiative, 

which - despite delays caused by travel lockdowns 

associated with the COVID-19 pandemic - is now poised to 

begin substantive work along three distinct lines of effort in 

exploring potential ways in which the disarmament 

community can move forward in realistic, security-aware 

ways. This dialogue and engagement across the various 

chasms that divide the disarmament policy community is 

critical. If you'll forgive the comparison, transformative 

chemical reactions tend to occur at the margins, rather 

than in the center, of a homogeneous substance; 

analogically, it is our hope that by bringing a broad range of 

stakeholders together from across these divisions we will 

catalyze new answers to at least some of the problems that 

have long stymied disarmament discourse. Sandia's 

Cooperative Monitoring Center knows from its own 

experience the value of bringing diverse parties together in 

cooperative and collaborative security-building, so I'm sure 

you can apprecaite the importance of this approach. 

Another manifestation of our commitment to meeting 

the needs of today's state-competitive environment is our 

effort to model a mature and realistic approach to arms 

control. This means pursuing verifiable agreements that 

meet security needs - such as our search for "nextgeneration arms control" that will achieve the President's 

objective of a trilateral arms control agreement with 

Beijing and Moscow-while being willing to walk away 

from agreements that do not serve the interests of security 

and stability, or that are simply being flouted, to our 

detriment, by the other side. With a new Special 

Presidential Envoy for Arms Control now on board at the 

Department, we are stepping up our efforts to build a new 

Volume I, Number 7 I May 20, 2020 

framework for arms control in order to prevent the nuclear 

arms race that threatens to emerge if the PRC and Russia 

do not end their current nuclear build ups and join us in a 

new arms control framework. So far only Russia has 

responded to our invitation to those two countries in 

December 2019 to begin discussions on this topic, but I can 

assure you that we will hold the PRC to account if it 

continues to refuse to come to the table to negotiate 

effective measures to prevent a nuclear arms race. Security 

and humanity both demand this. 

Even where traditional arms control frameworks do 

not seem viable for a variety of technical reasons, U.S. 

diplomats are today also on the cutting edge of efforts to 

develop global consensus on norms of responsible state 

behavior in new areas such as outer space. as well as 

emerging areas of technology such as lethal autonomous 

weapons systems (LAWS). We have already had 

tremendous success building consensus around such a 

framework for cyberspace, which now includes: affirmation 

that existing international law applies to state behavior in 

cyberspace; adherence to certain non-binding norms of 

responsible state behavior in cyberspace during peacetime; 

and the development and implementation of practical 

confidence-building measures to reduce the risk of conflict 

in cyberspace. Through such efforts, we hope not just to 

direct U.S. policies into the most productive available 

channels and to thwart certain disingenuous Russian and 

PRC diplomatic overtures. but also to restructure and 

reorient global arms control and disarmament discourse 

more broadly- into forms that are adaptive. rather than 

maladaptive and dangerous, in the present statecompetitive security environment. 

To be sure, change, especially to one's mindset, can be 

slow and challenging. Some still cling to outmoded ideas 

and approaches even while the geopolitical "facts on the 

ground" change around them in ways that make their 

understandings increasingly incoherent and their favored 

policy recipes increasingly inapt. There are signs. however. 

that some of the more intransigent reflexive enthusiasms 

of the past are losing momentum. 

The counterproductive and misguided Treaty on the 

Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), for instance, has 

lost much of its early momentum. This is not entirely 

surprising. of course, since its supporters remain unable to 

explain how that treaty's ineffective and polarizing virtuesignaling actually meets nations' security needs and does 

not undermine collective efforts to deter aggression in the 

current security environment. TPNW supporters also 

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Arms Control and Disarmament: Adjusting to a New Era 

remain unable to explain why their civil-society activism for 

disarmament-which, after all, is only meaningfully 

directed at politicians and publics in Western democracies -

is not, in practice, likely to embolden and empower the 

nuclear-armed autocrats and geopolitical revisionists in 

Moscow and Beijing who do not face such pressures. (In 

fact, it would appear that even the basic science behind the 

TPNW-galvanizing "humanitarian impact" movement is 

today being increasingly called into question, with state-ofthe-art combustion. soot-propagation. and climate 

modeling having undermined some of the hypotheses that 

catalyzed many of the earlier hyperboles of "nuclear 

winter" theorizing.) The TPNW remains deeply flawed, and 

however well-intentioned many supporters of this treaty 

may be, these are the sorts of conceptual, evidentiary, and 

structural flaws that real-world national leaders and 

parliamentarians are starting to notice. 

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Volume I, Number 7 I May 20, 2020 

Accordingly, there is hope that this progress will 

continue, and even the polar fringes of the arms control 

and disarmament policy community will continue to pull 

back from the crumbling received wisdoms of yesteryear, 

for those Humpty-Dumpties cannot likely be reassembled. 

I hold out hope that they will see that, even in an era of 

polarized tribal identity politics, we need to move forward 

together through engagement with issues (and difficult 

trade-offs) related to real-world security, power, 

competition, and deterrence, in order to find appropriate 

responses to the great power competitive challenges that 

the PRC and Russia have created. 

Where precisely this ends up we know not, of course, 

for these new security dynamics indeed represent 

uncharted territory. It should by now be obvious, however, 

that there can be no going back to yesterday's 

conventional wisdoms, and this insight should guide us -

and our successors, whomever they may be - in finding a 

thoughtful path forward . 

* 

The Arms Control and International Security Papers are produced by the Office of the Under Secretary of State for Arms Control 

and International Security in order to make U.S. State Department policy analysis available in an electronically-accessible 

format compatible with "social distancing" during the COVID-19 crisis.