Bargaining on the curve: Technological change, state strategy and the prospects for international arms control

This study explores the influence of technological change on the willingness and ability of states to engage in qualitative arms control. States understand that technology is a dynamic property, but the pace and potential implications of technological change are not uniform across time. Military and political leaders therefore must develop assessments and expectations regarding the likely pace of technological change, and the impact any change will have on the military's ability to maintain or improve the security of the state. By focusing on the expectations of the military impact of technological change, it is possible to understand and predict the probability that a state will cooperatively restrain or limit a given military application through an arms control agreement.;This focus on the expectations of the potential military impact of technological change (termed Military Expectations Theory) provides a missing component to existing theoretical investigations of arms control and security cooperation. Defensive realist approaches view arms control as a useful means of improving security and decreasing the probability of conflict, while offensive realists argue that states should never engage in such endeavors precisely because of the costs and risks of defection. Yet the historical record of international arms control seriously undermines both the more positive predictions of defensive realists and the grim views of offensive realism. Moreover, although arms control represents an important subset of security cooperation, its successes and failures have not been adequately addressed by institutional approaches. How can we determine the conditions under which states are most likely to engage in arms control? This study demonstrates that leaders' assessments of future military technological change explain when states will pursue arms control agreements and when they will avoid them, thus accounting for the range of outcomes not explained by existing approaches.;This focus on military expectations can be applied to explain successes and failures in a substantial universe of cases of attempted qualitative arms control across the 20th century, thus allowing for wide variation in terms of number of actors involved, technologies considered (conventional versus nuclear), and political-military settings.