Negotiating Primacy: Strategic Stability, Superpower Arms Control, and the End of the Cold War

Abstract: The United States successfully used the concept of strategic stability to tip the nuclear balance against the Soviet Union during the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START) of the 1980s and early 1990s. Both superpowers sought to employ strategic stability to legitimate their objectives for START, but differed significantly over how it should be operationalized in an arms control agreement. Despite appearances, the 1991 START I treaty did not reflect the reconciliation of these two divergent views of strategic stability, but rather the triumph of Washington’s conception over Moscow’s, thereby laying the groundwork for arms control in an era of US military primacy.