NATO Territorial Ballistic Missile Defense and its Implications for Arms Control

ABSTRACT

Since 2002, NATO's territorial missile defense has evoked continuous debates between NATO states and the Russian Federation. Thirteen years have passed without reaching a common denominator. This article provides a comprehensive overview of the historical background of the debate and the technical details of the missile defense system, highlighting its shortcomings and the state of its deployment process. It also contrasts the military-technical and political arguments of both sides, before addressing the applicable norms of international law to highlight violations and the effect of this noncompliance on existing arms control measures.     

Britain's Great Security Mirage: The Royal Navy and the Franco-Russian Naval Threat, 1898–1906

This article focuses on the relationship between the threat perception analyses of the British Admiralty and the strategic orientation of the Royal Navy at the outset of the twentieth century. The current view is that this was an era when fear of France and Russia drove British naval policy. However, as this article will show, Britain's Naval Intelligence Department formed a low opinion of French and Russian naval capabilities at this time and this negative evaluation exerted considerable influence over decision making. The belief that, owing to multiple qualitative deficiencies, these powers could definitely be beaten in battle lessened the standing of the Franco-Russian naval challenge and freed the Admiralty to consider the danger posed by other possible enemies, most notably Germany.     

Budget allocation under uncertainty and the costs of war and insecurity

This study presents a framework and models for the analysis of government budget allocation into defense and civilian expenditures in situations of uncertainty about the incidence of war. The models display the intricate relationships between security levels, subjective probabilities of the occurrence of war, and potential war damages. We show that poor countries tend to perceive greater probabilities of war than their richer rivals, and that the psychological burden of insecurity is larger when the country’s wealth is larger and when its preference for security is higher. We apply our models to the Israeli–Syrian arms race and show that the higher rate of growth of Israel’s gross domestic product relative to that of Syria is expected to lead to an increase in Syria’s perception of the likelihood of war and to a decrease in Israel’s perception of such a likelihood. We also show that if Syria’s regime becomes ideologically more extreme, the monetary cost of maintaining Israel’s security at the level that it enjoyed prior to the change will be very high, whereas the monetary cost of maintaining Israel’s welfare will be moderate.     

Kazakhstan's Nuclear Decision Making, 1991–92

This article examines Kazakhstani nuclear decision making from December 1991 to May 1992. The study is based on unique archival data and reveals how Kazakhstan's policy makers solved a nuclear dilemma that the nation faced in its first years of independence. The article reconstructs the internal policy-making process behind the decision made by President Nursultan Nazarbayev and his circle of advisors to accept non-nuclear status. The author argues that Almaty elaborated a deliberately ambivalent strategy toward the republic's nuclear status with the aim of maximizing the state's strategic interests. The article reviews external pressures affecting Nazarbayev's course of action and discusses policy options articulated during this period.     

Strategic “defensivism” and post-reset blues: US–Russian nuclear arms reductions,missile defenses and minimum deterrence

US nuclear deterrence and arms control policy may be moving, by design and by inadvertence, toward a posture of strategic “defensivism”. Strategic “defensivism” emphasizes the overlapping and reinforcing impact of: (1) reductions in US, Russian and possibly other strategic nuclear forces, possibly down to the level of “minimum deterrence,” (2) deployment of improved strategic and/or theater antimissile defenses for the US, NATO allies and other partners; and (3) additional reliance on conventional military forces for some missions hitherto preferentially assigned to nuclear weapons. This article deals with the first two of these aspects only: the interaction between missile defenses and offensive force reductions in US–Russian strategy and policy. The findings are that stable deterrence as between the USA and Russia is possible at lower than New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty levels, but reductions below 1000 deployed long-range weapons for each state, toward a true minimum deterrent posture, will require multilateral as opposed to bilateral coordination of arms limitations. Missile defenses might provide some denial capability against light attacks by states with small arsenals, but they still fall short of meaningful damage limitation as between powers capable of massive nuclear strikes.     

伊拉克战争对中东地区乃至世界军品贸易的影响

在分析了伊拉克战争对中东地区军品贸易影响的基础上,重点分析了其对世界军品贸易的深刻影响———加剧军备竞赛、刺激军工技术发展、引起军贸格局及产品结构发生变化、国际军控形势更加严峻。