Jeffrey Lewis at ArmsControlWonk has a couple of good posts on the purpose of arms control in the post-Cold War era. Lewis points out that some of the traditional objectives of arms control (ensuring strategic stability, building trust, saving money, and creating the grounds for disarmament) are in tension with one another, and thus that even a strongly pro-arms control approach needs to make some value trade-offs. With the hope that a Democrat wins the White House and the Democrats hold significant majorities in both houses of Congress, this is hardly a trivial discussion; we may see some serious arms control efforts in the next four years, certainly in comparison to what we've seen in the last eight (and really since 1994). For my part, strategic stability and trust building really trump the other considerations. It's true enough that, for example, the non-proliferation treaty enshrines a particular distribution of power in the international system, but this seems like a small price to pay for reducing the number of nuclear programs worldwide. Of course, I would expect that both disarmament advocates and states that lack nuclear weapons would dispute these priorities, but conflict, after all, is inevitable in politics. -- Robert Farley
