Mikhail Gorbachev startled the world when, in his first appearance at the United Nations on December 7, 1988, he announced that the Soviet Union had decided to reduce unilaterally its armed forces by about 10 percent within a period of two years. Two months later Gorbachev told a visiting group of members of the Trilateral Commission that the Soviet Union would reduce its military budget by 14.2 percent and cut production of weapons and military hardware by 19.5 percent. On June 7, 1989, Soviet Prime Minister Nikolai Ryzhkov stated in a speech before the Congress of People's Deputies that the Soviet government intends to continue steadily cutting the military budget until at least 1995, slashing annual spending by up to one-third.
Given the unfolding reductions in Soviet armed forces, President Bush moved to regain the initiative. At the 40th-anniversary summit meeting of NATO on May 29, 1989, he proposed a cut of troops in Europe to 275,000 for each superpower. This proposal, accompanied by reductions in military hardware and enthusiastically agreed to by the United States' NATO allies, would demobilize some 30,000 American and 325,000 Soviet military personnel. The Soviets have appeared to be receptive to this.
Reducing arms has captured the public's imagination. The euphoria of peace in our time is sweeping Western Europe. In the United States, recent public opinion polls indicate that the American public is considerably ahead of official Washington in favoring reduction of the military budget. A number of influential public figures have suggested alternative uses of resources presently allocated to defense, such as the environment, poverty, drug abuse, education, homelessness, and the disabled.
This development raises a number of questions. What is driving the recent trend toward arms control and disarmament? Is it the benevolence of the new Soviet president, referred to by his own colleagues as a man with a charming smile and iron teeth? What kind of East-West relations can we expect in coming years, and would the interests of U.S. national security be adequately served by the present competition for lower arms budgets? If so, where should we put the resources released from defense to ensure that the interests of U.S. national security are equitably served along with the other components of the national interest in maximizing the nation's well-being?
Fundamentally, two forces are behind the present trend toward arms control and disarmament: (1) the diminished utility of military power for enhancing national power of the superpowers or serving as an instrument of policy, and (2) perestroika, the restructuring of the Soviet economy. The first was a significant, although not the sole, factor in providing the impetus to the second.
Although the availability of nuclear weapons was the single most important factor that propelled the Soviet Union to a superpower status in post-World War II years, the high destructive power of such weapons and their propensity to lead to mutual stalemate limited their utility for actual application and for significantly augmenting national power after a certain level of capability had been achieved. Moreover, the stalemating quality of nuclear weapons tended to spread to the conventional sector because of possible escalation. Even apart from potential escalation, advanced conventional weaponry began to acquire stalemating characteristics of its
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