The INF Treaty Proved Arms Control Works Only When You Hold Cards

Imagine you are a bargainer at a table, and the other fellow has a pile of chips as high as your head, and you have a polite letter asking him to share. How do you think that negotiation goes? Now you know the whole history of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, and I could stop right here and send you home early.

I will not, because the story is too good to waste. Folks, it is one of the clearest lessons in the history of arms control, and it was taught by the very people who spent years telling us the opposite. The treaty that eliminated an entire class of nuclear missiles was not produced by a freeze, a candlelight vigil or a strongly worded resolution. It was produced by American and allied missiles arriving in Europe over loud objections. The treaty then died because the other side cheated. Both halves of that story point the same way.

The missile that started it

In the middle of the 1970s the Soviet Union began deploying a new medium-range ballistic missile, the SS-20. It was road-mobile, later versions carried up to three warheads, and it could reach targets across Western Europe from bases inside the Soviet Union. It was accurate and hard to find. The older missiles it replaced were slow to fuel and easy to target. The new ones were neither.

Here is what mattered about it. The SS-20 was a theater weapon, built to hold Europe at risk rather than the American homeland. That was the point. It was a weapon aimed at the seam in the alliance, at the question every European government asked in private: would Washington risk New York to save Bonn? A Soviet planner who could threaten Europe with a weapon that was not aimed at the American homeland was betting that the answer was no. The doubt itself was the weapon.

NATO had no matching missile on the continent. It had aircraft, it had submarines and it had the strategic forces back home, but it did not have a theater system that could answer the SS-20 on equal terms. Defense planners call that a gap in the ladder of escalation. I call it an invitation.

The 1979 dual-track decision

On December 12, 1979, NATO's foreign and defense ministers meeting in Brussels adopted what became known as the dual-track decision. The first track was deployment: 108 Pershing II ballistic missiles and 464 ground-launched cruise missiles, to be based in several European countries starting in late 1983. The second track was negotiation: the alliance offered to talk with Moscow about limiting these missiles on both sides.

The design was clever, and it is worth saying plainly why. The deployment gave the Soviets a reason to bargain. A negotiation with no deployment behind it asks the other side to give up something for nothing. A negotiation with a deployment on the calendar offers a trade. The Soviets could keep their SS-20s and watch American missiles arrive, or they could dismantle theirs and keep the Americans out. Leverage is the whole game, and NATO had manufactured some.

The protests and the predictions

The response across Western Europe and in America was a mass movement. Hundreds of thousands marched in European capitals, and the nuclear freeze movement in the United States held its own rallies and promoted its own ballot measures. The central claim of the movement was that deployment would make war more likely, and that restraint, not missiles, would bring the Soviets to terms.

Let me give the movement its due, because it deserves a fair hearing. Its members were not fools and they were not agents of anybody. Many were afraid of nuclear war, and fear of nuclear war is the most reasonable fear a person can have. The freeze idea was also appealing in its simplicity: stop building, stop testing, and the danger recedes.

But the plan had a flaw you could see from orbit. A freeze that locks in the present locks in the Soviet advantage in these missiles. It asked the democracies to stop at the exact moment when the other side was ahead. As an agreement it rewarded the party that had built first. And the predictions that came with it, that deployment would shatter any hope of talks, turned out to be wrong in the most embarrassing way possible.

The zero option and the walkout

In November 1981 President Reagan proposed what became known as the zero option: the United States would cancel its deployment if the Soviets dismantled all their SS-20s and the older missiles they replaced. The press found this proposal laughable. It was dismissed as a propaganda stunt, because everyone knew the Soviets would never agree to remove weapons they already had in exchange for the cancellation of weapons that did not yet exist.

Notice how that reaction treated the Soviet position as fixed and unchangeable. That was the whole error. A position is not fixed when the cost of holding it changes.

Then the deadline arrived. In November 1983, the West German parliament voted to go ahead on November 22, and the first Pershing II missiles arrived in West Germany within days. The Soviet delegation walked out of the Geneva negotiations on intermediate-range weapons. The freeze movement's prediction seemed to have come true: talks were dead, and the world was scarier.

If the story ended there, the freeze would have a point. It did not end there.

The return to the table

The Soviet walkout was a bluff that did not work. The missiles stayed. The alliance held, even though several governments faced angry streets. In 1985 Mikhail Gorbachev became General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, inheriting an economy that could not keep up with the arms race and a diplomatic position that had failed to split NATO. He came back to the table.

The Reykjavik summit in October 1986 ended without an agreement, famously because of disputes over missile defense, but it pushed both leaders toward deep cuts and set the stage for what followed. Within a year the Soviets accepted the substance of the zero option they had mocked. They even went further than the original proposal in one respect, by agreeing that shorter-range missiles would be eliminated too.

On December 8, 1987, Reagan and Gorbachev signed the INF Treaty in Washington. The Senate gave its advice and consent in May 1988 by a vote of 93 to 5, as the Constitution's treaty clause requires, and the treaty entered into force on June 1, 1988. Article II, Section 2 reads that the President "shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur." Ninety-three to five clears that bar with room to spare.

What the treaty actually did

Here is what the treaty required, and it is remarkable. It banned all ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles with ranges between about 500 and 5,500 kilometers, together with their launchers. That was the first time two nuclear powers had agreed to destroy an entire category of weapons, rather than merely to cap the number they could build.

The numbers were lopsided in a way that tells you who had the cards. The Soviet Union destroyed far more missiles than the United States did, roughly 1,800 to about 850, for a total of nearly 2,700. The deal was not symmetrical in what each side gave up, because the situation had not been symmetrical in what each side had built. That is the nature of a trade where one side holds a bigger pile that the other wants removed.

The treaty also contained something the earlier arms control agreements had lacked: intrusive on-site verification. Inspectors from each side were allowed to watch the elimination of missiles and to visit production facilities and bases. Soviet inspectors on American soil, and American inspectors on Soviet soil, would have been unthinkable a few years earlier. The verification regime mattered because it addressed the oldest problem in the field, which is that an agreement is worth only as much as your ability to catch a cheat.

The freeze movement's report card

Let us grade the predictions. The freeze movement's claim was that deploying the missiles would make a deal impossible. A deal followed four years after deployment. Its claim was that restraint would bring concessions. The concessions arrived after the missiles did.

I want to say this with a smile and without gloating, because the people who made those predictions were sincere. But the record is the record. Peace came through strength that was credible to the other side, and the coverage of the time, with its confident headlines about a more dangerous world, hardly ever returned to check its own work. When the missiles arrived, the headlines said the world was closer to the brink. When the treaty was signed, the story became a triumph of diplomacy, as if diplomacy had arrived by itself in a taxi. It arrived in a truck, with a launcher on the back.

The lesson, if we can call it that, applies well beyond the 1980s. Negotiated limits are an outcome of leverage. They are not a substitute for it.

The cheating years

Now the second half of the story, the part the arms control enthusiasts like to skip.

Treaties bind only those who keep them. American officials grew concerned about a new Russian ground-launched cruise missile. In 2014 the State Department's annual compliance report concluded that Russia had violated the INF Treaty by testing a ground-launched cruise missile to prohibited ranges. The missile Washington later cited was the 9M729, which NATO calls the SSC-8. Washington raised the matter repeatedly with Moscow. Moscow denied the charge, and in December 2018 NATO allies stated their own conclusion that Russia had violated the treaty.

In February 2019 the United States announced that it would suspend its obligations and give formal notice of withdrawal, citing the Russian violation, and the withdrawal took effect on August 2, 2019. Critics said Washington was tossing aside a pillar of arms control. The reply is simple. A treaty that one side obeys and the other ignores is not a pillar. It is a handicap that you have agreed to wear while your opponent runs without one.

There is also a point about China that deserves a mention. China was never a party to the treaty, so it was free to build exactly the class of missiles the United States and Russia had given up. A large and growing arsenal of intermediate-range systems sat on the other side of the Pacific, and the United States was the only major power barred from matching it. Whatever you think of withdrawing, the world of 1987 was gone. A treaty with two parties was trying to govern a competition with three.

Five tests for any arms treaty

Let me boil the history down into a short numbered argument. These are the tests a treaty must pass if it is to be worth signing.

One. Leverage first. The other side bargains when it has something to lose. The INF Treaty followed the deployment of Pershing II and cruise missiles by four years, and without them the Soviets had little reason to move.

Two. Verification you can carry out. The INF inspections worked because both sides could watch each other. A promise you cannot check is a hope with a signature on it.

Three. Eliminate or cap what matters. The INF Treaty banned a class outright, which was easy to measure and hard to hide. Complex ceilings with many exceptions invite lawyering.

Four. Consequences for cheating. An agreement without a response to violation teaches the cheater that cheating is free. The American withdrawal was the consequence.

Five. The right parties. An agreement that leaves a major power out of the room has an expiry date, and the date is set by that power's arsenal.

The strongest objection

The best objection to this reading goes as follows. The Soviet Union under Gorbachev was reforming and desperate for relief from the arms race, and the treaty came as much from Soviet economic exhaustion as from American deployments. Withdrawing in 2019, the objection continues, discarded a framework that had constrained Russian missile programs for three decades, and nothing replaced it.

Part of that is right, and we should say so. Soviet economic strain was real, and it helped drive Gorbachev's choices. But the strain is part of the leverage argument, not a rival to it. The Soviets were spending themselves into a corner by the very arms competition America had shown it would not lose. As for the withdrawal, the framework was not constraining Russia. Russia had been violating it for years, and an agreement that restrains only the honest party is not a framework. The right response to a violator who refuses to come back into compliance is to stop pretending.

The Founding anchor

There is a good American reason for all this, and it goes back to the beginning. The Constitution gives the treaty power to the President and the Senate together, and it demands a two-thirds vote. The Framers wanted treaties to be hard to make, because a treaty binds the whole nation as the supreme law of the land under Article VI. They also wanted them made in the open, by officials who answer to the voters. The INF Treaty was debated in the Senate for months, with hearings, testimony and reservations. It is a model of how the process is supposed to work, and a reminder that a good treaty can survive scrutiny because it was built on solid ground.

For the longer story of the strategy behind all this, see Mutual Assured Destruction Versus Missile Defense, the Debate Never Ended, and for the policy that Reagan carried into the 1980s, NSC-68 and the 1950 Memo That Told America the Price of Staying Free. The same thread runs through Reagan at Westminster in 1982 Predicted the Soviet Collapse Out Loud and through Deterrence Fails When an Enemy Thinks You Will Not Pay the Price. For the document-by-document account of what the Cold War archives overturned, try Textbook Cold War Tales the Soviet Archives Quietly Overturned.

The case in brief

1. The Soviet SS-20 threatened Europe without touching America, and NATO answered with the 1979 dual-track decision: deploy Pershing II and cruise missiles, and offer to negotiate.
2. The freeze movement predicted that deployment would end any chance of a deal. The Soviets walked out in 1983, returned in 1985 and later, and signed in December 1987.
3. The treaty eliminated a whole class of missiles and added on-site inspection, and the Senate approved it 93 to 5.
4. The treaty ended because Russia deployed a prohibited missile, the 9M729, and the United States withdrew in 2019 once the violation was clear.
5. Arms control works when it is built on leverage, verification, clear limits, consequences for cheating, and the participation of the powers that matter.

What you can do: read the text of the INF Treaty, which is public and short, and then read the Senate's vote record on it; both are available through Congress.gov, and they show how a serious treaty is debated.