Why Did Bush and Gorbachev Finally Agree to Cut Nuclear Arsenals?

The Clash and the Stakes

By the time President George H. W. Bush and Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev sat down in Moscow on July 31, 1991, the two men were putting their names to something that had taken nearly a decade to reach, a treaty that for once did not just freeze the size of the American and Soviet nuclear arsenals but actually forced both sides to shrink them. The Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, shortened almost immediately to START and later to START I once a follow-on round of talks began, set a shared ceiling of 6,000 warheads and 1,600 intercontinental ballistic missiles and bombers for each country, numbers that sound abstract until you remember that both nations were sitting on stockpiles built up over four decades of Cold War rivalry.

What made START I different from the arms control agreements that came before it, and there had been a few going back to the 1970s, was that it did not just cap future growth, it demanded real cuts, and it backed those cuts with an inspection regime that the United States and the Soviet Union actually had to live with. Negotiators eventually built in twelve separate kinds of on site inspection, along with routine data exchanges on missile locations and technical specifications, which meant neither government could quietly cheat on the numbers without a fairly good chance of getting caught. That verification framework, more than the specific 1991 warhead count, is probably what historians tend to point to when they talk about why this treaty mattered.

Reports From the Front

The road to that Moscow signing ceremony really started back in May 1982, when Ronald Reagan first floated the idea in a commencement speech at his old college in Illinois, then laid it out more formally to Soviet negotiators in Geneva a few weeks later. Progress stalled for years afterward, and the Soviets walked away from the table for a stretch in the mid 1980s. Things only really started moving once Mikhail Gorbachev took charge in Moscow and began pushing his own reform agenda, and the 1986 Reykjavik summit between Reagan and Gorbachev, tense and inconclusive as it was at the time, came before the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty a year later, with negotiations over strategic weapons continuing on from there toward START itself.

By the time Bush and Gorbachev actually put pen to paper in the summer of 1991, the Soviet Union Gorbachev represented was already coming apart at the seams, though almost nobody in that Moscow signing room could have guessed just how soon. Diplomats and journalists who covered the event tended to describe an atmosphere that was cordial but noticeably subdued compared with earlier superpower summits, as if both delegations sensed that the ground beneath the Soviet side of the table was shifting even as the ink dried. Just five months later, in December 1991, the country Gorbachev had signed the treaty on behalf of no longer existed.

The Military and Political Fallout

The Soviet Union collapsed in December 1991, just five months after that Moscow signing, and the country that had put its name to the treaty split into fifteen separate states. The following May, the Lisbon Protocol bound Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine, the four former Soviet republics that had inherited Soviet nuclear weapons on their soil, to honor the treaty's terms. Only Russia kept nuclear weapon status going forward, while Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine each agreed to give up the warheads stationed on their territory and to join the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty as non nuclear states, a process that dragged on for years and, in Ukraine's case, involved considerable domestic political wrangling before its parliament finally ratified the arrangement.

All told, START I did not formally enter into force until December 5, 1994, more than three years after that Moscow ceremony, once the Lisbon Protocol arrangements were finally settled. From there, though, the reductions moved forward more or less as planned, and by the time full implementation wrapped up in late 2001, something like eighty percent of the strategic nuclear weapons that had existed back in 1991 were gone. The Congressional Budget Office had estimated the reductions would save the United States somewhere around 130 billion dollars through 2010 compared with the cost of maintaining the eliminated forces, savings that came on top of whatever security benefit anyone assigned to simply having fewer nuclear weapons in the world.

How the Balance of Power Shifted

START I ran for its full fifteen year term and then some, formally expiring on December 5, 2009, by which point Washington and Moscow were already negotiating its successor rather than bothering to extend it. That successor, the New START treaty, was signed in Prague in April 2010 by Presidents Obama and Medvedev and entered into force the following year, carrying forward the same basic logic of deep cuts paired with real verification that START I had pioneered two decades earlier.

Looking back at it now, what tends to stand out about that July 1991 afternoon in Moscow is less the specific warhead ceilings, which have been superseded more than once since, and more the fact that the United States and the Soviet Union, after generations of building ever larger nuclear arsenals, finally sat down and agreed, with inspectors watching, to make them smaller instead. That is a harder habit to start than most people probably appreciate, and it is worth remembering on days when arms control agreements feel like they are eroding rather than expanding.

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