ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a history of twentieth-century disarmament and arms control negotiations to illuminate why they have achieved so little in the past. It notes the tension between preventing the occurrence of war and mitigating its effects, should it occur. After the First World War, disarmament efforts were intensive but failed: in their attempts to deal with the innovations of 1914–18, there was only success with gas warfare but failure of attempts to protect merchant shipping from submarines and cities from bombers. Attempts to regulate numbers of arms aggravated tensions when there was an agreement and failed to reach agreement when tensions were on the rise. After the Second World War, there was limited enthusiasm for disarmament but new atom bombs represented a special issue. Attempts to prohibit them quickly failed. Soon there was a shift to recognizing that they could not be removed and that their effects could not be contained in any future war. Effort was therefore put into stabilizing the strategic balance to reduce any temptation to start a war. Agreements did contain the spread of nuclear weapons but had only a limited impact on core political relationships.
