Reimagining Nuclear Arms Control

Abstract: The governments of the United States, China, and Russia all express support for arms control. They disagree profoundly, however, about its purposes and preconditions. Reimagining Nuclear Arms Control sets out a comprehensive arms control agenda to break this logjam, stabilize emerging nuclear arms races, and reduce escalation risks. Its nine measures address a range of capabilities—strategic offensive forces, nonstrategic nuclear weapons, ballistic missile defenses, high-precision conventional weapons, fissile material, and space and counterspace systems. In this talk, we will focus on two of these measures: a trilateral agreement to establish keep-out zones around satellites in geostationary and Molniya orbits, and a trilateral treaty to limit ground-based missile launchers, sea-launched ballistic missile launchers, and bombers.

James Acton holds the Jessica T. Mathews Chair and is co-director of the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. His work includes the International Security article "Escalation through Entanglement." Acton has testified to both the Armed Services and Appropriations Committees of the U.S. House of Representatives as well as the congressionally chartered U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission. He has published in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, Dædalus, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, and Survival. He holds a Ph.D. in theoretical physics from Cambridge University.

Thomas D. MacDonald is a fellow in the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. His research interests include arms control verification and the impact of remote-sensing and emerging and disruptive technologies on nuclear stability. He has an interdisciplinary scientific background, holding a B.Sc. in Biochemistry from the University of Waterloo, a M.Sc. in Pharmaceutical Sciences from the University of Toronto, and a Ph.D. in Nuclear Science and Engineering from MIT.