Arms Control

Arms control is the attempt to limit weapons by agreement rather than by war: capping numbers, banning categories, restricting tests, or constraining where forces deploy. It rests on a cold-blooded premise, not trust but verification. The treaties that worked did so because each side could count the other's compliance, through satellite photography, data exchanges, and on-site inspections, and because both sides preferred a bounded competition to an open-ended one.

What the architecture looked like

The Cold War built a lattice of agreements. SALT froze launcher numbers in 1972, and the ABM Treaty limited missile defenses on the logic that defenselessness kept deterrence stable. START I forced actual warhead reductions with intrusive inspections. The INF Treaty of 1987 eliminated an entire class, ground-launched missiles of 500 to 5,500 km range, and destroyed 2,692 of them. Alongside the bilateral treaties sit the multilateral pillars: the Non-Proliferation Treaty of 1968, the Chemical Weapons Convention, which has overseen destruction of declared stockpiles including the last US chemical weapons in 2023, and export-control regimes like the Missile Technology Control Regime that police what may be sold.

The unraveling

Most of that lattice is gone or dying. The US left the ABM Treaty in 2002. The INF Treaty died in 2019 over Russian cruise-missile violations. Open Skies collapsed in 2020. New START, the last cap on US and Russian strategic warheads at 1,550 deployed each, was suspended by Russia in 2023 and expires in February 2026 with no successor in sight. Meanwhile China, never party to the bilateral treaties, is expanding its arsenal toward an estimated 1,000-plus warheads by 2030, which turns the two-player math every Cold War treaty assumed into a three-body problem nobody has solved on paper, let alone at a negotiating table.

Why does this matter to the defense industry?

Treaties shape markets. INF's death legalized an entire missile class, and the US Army's new mid-range and hypersonic programs stepped straight into it. Export-control regimes decide which technologies can be sold where, binding every supplier through ITAR and its foreign equivalents. And verification itself is a technology market: the satellites, seismic networks, and sampling equipment that monitor compliance are built by contractors, a niche that grows whenever trust shrinks.