The changing global order and ongoing regional conflicts, with the global powers taking sides, have jeopardised the progress made towards disarmament in the past. Comment. (2024, 10 Marks)
Disarmament means reducing or abolishing weapons; arms control, in Hedley Bull’s The Control of the Arms Race (1961), means restraint agreed between adversaries who keep their arsenals. Both advanced from the Partial Test Ban Treaty (1963) to New START (2010). The statement is broadly right, but the wars are accelerants of a structural decline.
What earlier decades achieved
- Warheads fell from about 70,300 in 1986 to 12,187 in January 2026 (SIPRI).
- The INF Treaty (1987) abolished a whole class of missiles; all 72,304 tonnes of declared chemical weapons were verifiably destroyed under the CWC by July 2023.
- The NPT has 191 parties, and since 1998 only North Korea has tested.
How the order and the wars undermine it
- From two poles to three: China’s arsenal has roughly doubled since 2020 to about 620, and Beijing rejects limits that would freeze its inferiority. New START expired on 5 February 2026 with no successor.
- Ukraine, powers on both sides: Western arms face North Korean troops and Iranian drones. Russia signed a defence treaty with Pyongyang (2024), vetoed the UN panel monitoring its sanctions, and placed tactical nuclear weapons and the nuclear-capable Oreshnik missile in Belarus.
- West Asia: the IAEA Board found Iran non-compliant on 12 June 2025; Israeli and American strikes on safeguarded sites followed, UN sanctions returned in September, and the US–Israeli war from 28 February 2026 has all but ended inspections.
- Institutions: Russia de-ratified the CTBT (2023), Washington and Moscow ordered preparations for testing in late 2025, and the 2026 NPT Review Conference ended without consensus, the third failure running.
- Spending: $2,887 billion in 2025 (SIPRI), with NATO pledging 5% of GDP by 2035.
Weighing the claim
- Realists see the security dilemma (John H. Herz, Robert Jervis): in a fluid balance every build-up looks offensive.
- Yet the erosion predates the wars: the US left the ABM Treaty in 2002 and the INF Treaty collapsed in 2019. The deeper cause is the loss of the bipolar dyad that made counting and verification possible.
- Constructivists such as Nina Tannenwald note that the taboo on use has held, and the TPNW’s 74 parties show norm-building among non-possessors.
- India, heir to the Rajiv Gandhi Action Plan (1988), still tables a yearly UN resolution for a convention banning nuclear use; Manpreet Sethi argues that universal no-first-use is the realistic first step.
Conclusion
The wars have jeopardised disarmament, but as accelerants rather than cause. Reductions have ended and a three-way build-up is beginning. The way forward is modest: risk-reduction channels, transparency, a no-first-use norm and human control over nuclear command.