Alexey Arbatov is the head of the Center for International Security at the Primakov National Research Institute of World Economy and International Relations.
Arbatov is a former scholar in residence and the chair of the Carnegie Moscow Center’s Nonproliferation Program. Formerly, he was a member of the State Duma, vice chairman of the Russian United Democratic Party (Yabloko), and deputy chairman of the Duma Defense Committee.
He is a member of numerous boards and councils, including the research council of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the governing board of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, the Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute, and the Russian Council for Foreign and Defense Policy.
Arbatov is author of several books and numerous articles and papers on issues of global security, strategic stability, disarmament, Russian military reform, and various current domestic and foreign political issues.
Please join us for a conversation with Carnegie Nuclear Policy Program James Acton and Pranay Vaddi, as they share insights from their new report: “A ReSTART for U.S.-Russian Nuclear Arms Control: Enhancing Security Through Cooperation.” They will be joined by Alexei Arbatov, and Rose Gottemoeller as moderator.
As the world enters an age of seemingly unconstrained great power competition, arms control between Russia, China, and the United States could help strengthen arms race and crisis stability and provide a platform for strategic dialogue.
Only the continuation of nuclear arms control can create the political and military conditions for eventual limitations of innovative weapons systems and technologies, as well as for a carefully thought through and phased shift to a multilateral format of nuclear disarmament.
Nuclear deterrence can serve as a pillar of international security only in conjunction with negotiations and agreements on the limitation, reduction, and nonproliferation of nuclear weapons. Without them, deterrence fuels an endless arms race, while any serious crisis between the great powers will bring them to the brink of nuclear war.
Breaking arms control agreements is much easier than concluding them, but history shows that rejecting arms control agreements never improves one’s security and always damages it, a lesson that Moscow and Washington should heed. Indeed, the demise of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty and, in turn, the collapse of the U.S.-Russia nuclear arms control architecture threaten to unleash chaos and make not only the two countries but also the rest of the world far less safe.
The change in administration resulting from the 2016 U.S. election has brought an unprecedented element of uncertainty into U.S.-Russian relations and world politics.
The risk of a nuclear war is rising because of growing non-nuclear threats to nuclear weapons and their command-and-control systems.
The risk of an inadvertent nuclear war is rising because of the entanglement of non-nuclear weapons with nuclear weapons and their command-and-control capabilities.
A complete cessation of violence in southeastern Ukraine, the essential first condition of Minsk implementation, requires nothing less than a full-scale peacekeeping operation authorized by the U.N. Security Council.
Moscow is trying to rattle Washington by projecting its political and military might as the most dangerous crisis develops in U.S.-Russian relations since the Cold War era. The suspension of the 2000 plutonium agreement may threaten a whole range of nuclear disarmament and nonproliferation treaties.
