"How arms control's past shapes its future"

Some of us took a break yesterday from the grind of the second week of the NPT PrepCom to attend a Geneva Forum brown bag lunch featuring University of Michigan historian of science Dr Susan Wright.

Susan spoke about some of her recent research, around the topic "how arms control's past shapes its future: biological disarmament as a case study". Originally trained as a natural scientist, Susan has done a great deal of research in American and British archives on how the process that led to the 1972 Bacteriological and Toxin Weapons Convention emerged - the BTWC, usually known as the Biological Weapons Convention.

The escalating nuclear arms race after World War Two had led, by the late 1960s, to schools of strategic analysis in both Britain and the US concerning arms control that viewed war as a recurrent but inevitable tragedy. This epistemic community's views were well represented by both the work of economist Thomas Schelling ('Strategy and Arms Control) and Aussie-Brit political scientist Hedley Bull's 'The Control of the Arms Race', both published in 1961. Using differing frameworks, these two reached similar conclusions - in the Cold War context, strategic stability rather than disarmament was the dominant concern. Moreover, like war, arms control was about seeking strategic advantage, according to Susan.

This concept of arms control came to dominate US official thinking during the 1960s, and was a major thread in British officialdom too. Although an Australian by birth, Hedley Bull was - remarkably - invited to head its arms control office in 1965, which he did for two years and produced a number of influential internal government reports. Moreover, Wright's archival research exposed the considerable extent of the classified work Bull did for the British Foreign & Commonwealth Office, something not generally known before.

One of Bull's special reports focused on chemical and biological weapons (CBW). At that time, the US was using chemical agents on an increasing scale in South East Asia, including riot control agents like CS gas as well as BZ agent and chemical defoliants. Many countries, including the UK and US, had active germ warfare programmes, not to mention those of the Warsaw Pact.

Against the backdrop of a burgeoning domestic nuclear disarmament movement in Britain and internal government concern about the potential harm to the UK of retaliation for allied CBW use, Bull suggested to the Labour Government that biological weapons weren't really useful. This kicked off a long internal policy debate, which eventually resulted in a UK proposal to the 18-nation Committee on Disarmament in Geneva (a precursor of the Conference on Disarmament) late that decade after much departmental in-fighting, and initial reluctance by Britain's key ally, the US.

In Susan's view, the UK's initiative to ban biological weapons was the product of its national strategic goals, rather than the pursuit of a particular disarmament paradigm. The UK government figured it and others could renounce BW without changing the balance of power with the Warsaw Pact - in fact, it would place more weight on nukes. The UK proposal (and, eventually, the BTWC agreed in 1972) didn't address chemical weapons, which at the time were viewed as the greater menace - a point the Soviet Union and Non-Aligned states were quick to point out. And, neither the UK proposal nor the eventual BTWC provided for a verification regime. The public rationale was that the Warsaw Pact wouldn't buy it. But Susan's archival research indicates, she said, that both the UK and US recognized it wasn't in their strategic interests either in case there were secret activities they had that they would prefer remained that way, alongside concerns about protecting proprietary commercial information.

In other words, the eventual BTWC's flaws weren't there by accident. And, on verification, the BTWC - and the world - are still living with this decision, as the Convention still lacks such a regime a generation later. In the NPT context, it is still painfully clear that many states use the language of disarmament while still in the mindset of strategic stability or advantage in the narrow sense. On the plus side, there is now the Chemical Weapons Convention, which is non-discriminatory and has a strong and comprehensive verification system.

The disarmament community's achievements shouldn't be underrated, but sometimes there is a tendency to impute motives to those involved in past initiatives that don't necessarily reflect what was going on behind the scenes. What people say in public doesn't necessarily reflect what they're actually thinking. Susan's research demonstrates the importance of viewing the past with a critical eye.

Just as importantly for those who feel overawed or discouraged about difficulties in current disarmament efforts, it shows that we stand on the shoulders of human beings, rather than mythical giants.

John Borrie


Image by judy_breck retrieved from Flickr.

Fun and Games

The New York Times has just published an interesting profile of Harvard scientist, Professor Martin Nowak, director of the university's Program for Evolutionary Dynamics. Nowak is a gamer - that is he takes informal ideas and builds them into versatile mathematical models in fields as diverse as economics and cancer biology.

What's this got to do with human security or disarmament diplomacy? For some time, we on the DHA project have been thinking about what insights from the natural and behavioural sciences could do for work in these areas. We explored some of these in a recent book we published, entitled "Thinking Outside the Box in Multilateral Disarmament and Arms Control Negotiations" (click on the pink book at left to explore its contents).

The underlying theme in Nowak's many projects is that of cooperation, "one of the most puzzling yet fundamental features of life".

It's also a particular source of fascination for me because international relations are essentially problems of cooperation played out among states with different levels of interest, power and resources - inspired in part by the work of scholars like Robert Axelrod and Thomas Schelling.

In some multilateral contexts structural or institutional factors can constrain the ways in which cooperation can develop. I discussed this in a chapter of our book called "Cooperation and Defection in the Conference on Disarmament" using some simple insights from game theory like variations of the classic Prisoners' Dilemma. I talked about the importance of "clusters of cooperators" in a population, who can change the rules of the game in real life situations as varied as the spread of viruses to the core group behind the 1997 Anti-Personnel Mine Ban Convention.

My hunch is that behind all of the complexity of multilateral relationships lie some pretty basic rules-of-thumb, which could be summarized like this:

1. Figure out what's in your best self-interest, but take a broad view and look in the longer term if you can (call it enlightened self-interest, if you will).

2. Identify others you can work with to pursue your interest. Common interest is the best basis for sustained cooperation.

3. Cooperate. In the short term you may face opposition and obstacles from "defectors". But don't worry so much about it. You're stronger in a cluster, and over the long term you'll change the rules of the game - or pay-off structure - of interactions for everyone. Social interactions matter.

In contrast, Nowak has been working on problems like the spread of cancer cells in the body. But he realised the tools he was using might be applied to human problems, especially when applied to thinking about social networks:

"Dr. Nowak and his colleagues found that when they put players into a network, the Prisoner elsewhere in the network are not able to undermine their altruism. "Even if outside our network there are cheaters, we still help each other a lot," Dr. Nowak said. That is not to say that cooperation always emerges. Dr. Nowak identified the conditions when it can arise with a simple equation: B/C>K. That is, cooperation will emerge if the benefit-to-cost (B/C) ratio of cooperation is greater than the average number of neighbours (K). "It's the simplest possible thing you could have expected, and it's completely amazing," he said."

John Borrie


References

Carl Zimmer, "In Games, an Insight Into the Rules of Evolution", New York Times (31 July 2007), see http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/31/science/31prof.html
?_r=1&8dpc&oref=slogin.

John Borrie, "Cooperation and Defection in the Conference on Disarmament", in Thinking Outside the Box in Multilateral Disarmament and Arms Control Negotiations", Geneva: UNIDIR: 2006.

Picture by revlimit retrieved from Flickr.

How do you teach a Canadian to be rational?

Actually, this blog posting's title isn’t the first line of a joke (apologies to any Canadians out there already reaching for their poison pens). Rather, it’s a reference to an interesting lecture delivered by Thomas C. Schelling, a recent winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, and transmitted on Ontario TV (OTV)’s “Big Ideas” program.

Schelling is less a man than an institution in the domain of rational choice theory. And, unlike a lot of theorists, he’s had extensive experience over his long life in many fields including government, industry and in making government policy. He’s also written many books, but the one that’s perhaps influenced me the most is “Micromotives and Macrobehavior”, which I’d recommend as background to anyone interested in understanding obstacles to making individual and collective decisions.

“Micromotives and Macrobehaviour” can be involved in places, so an easier way to become familiar with rational choice theory is to listen to Schelling's TVO audio talk (see reference below).

In his talk, Schelling pointed out that while people act rationally much of the time (or at least think they do) it’s worth looking at situations in which they’re not rational, and to explore why. To illustrate the value of this, Schelling used the analogy of the magnetic compass: in most contexts it’s an excellent navigational tool because it always points to magnetic north. But if you’re close to the North Pole it’ll point southeast, which is something that’s important to know. If you don’t it could lead to mishap.

Schelling also observed that social arrangements are sometimes good for helping to “do the right thing” – that is, benefiting us in the long run. Years before, as a new analyst at the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, Schelling said he was puzzled by the fact that lunchtime joggers there always ran in packs of several people. It turned out that people quit after a while if they jog alone. Undertaking something in cooperation with other people, then, can sometimes help us be rational utility maximizers.

Schelling’s talk was about lots of other things besides, outlining several different ways in which apparently rational people can make irrational decisions. But his jogging story got me wondering about what happens when the group of joggers grows too big. When going running at lunchtime with some friends there’s usually a bit of positive peer pressure to turn up, and some healthy competition to keep running even when stitch or apathy set in.

Make the group too large, though, and one would expect to see increasing free rider behaviour. Who’s really going to notice whether you turn up if you’re only going to be one runner in 30, or one in 100? Why encourage and pace others if you think you’ll look better by racing ahead? Indeed, why run those hard yards at all if you don’t feel under much pressure among a group of near-strangers? Far from being good for “doing the right thing”, large-scale social arrangements might even encourage the opposite.

These sorts of concerns emerge in international relations too (something about which Schelling is, of course, well aware). Arrangements like political institutions, treaties and coalitions are sometimes good at enabling actors to maximize their rational interests, assuming that they have identified those interests. But they aren’t always if they grow too large – a dilemma that emerges in the context of NATO, for instance, or the European Union or Conference on Disarmament.

Care needs to be taken that multilateral arrangements help rather than hinder the identification and pursuit of interests collectively that might just be too hard to do alone. Smaller-scale arrangements in which those involved can spur each other on may sometimes achieve better results than the anonymous crowd of the marathon. It’s both an opportunity and a risk that others will notice and want to join the group: a large coalition isn’t always best, even if in the long run you'd like everyone to be a runner.


John Borrie


References

Thomas Schelling’s 45 minute audio lecture can be found by visiting the TVO website (http://www.tvo.org), selecting “Big Ideas” from programs A-Z, and then selecting the past episodes page. It’s also possible to subscribe to “Big Ideas” pod casts for free through the iTunes Music Store pod cast directory.

I discussed Schelling and inefficient equilibriums in my chapter entitled “Cooperation and Defection in the Conference on Disarmament”, which can be downloaded by clicking on the pink book ("Thinking Outside the Box...") at the left of this column.

See also Thomas C. Schelling, “Micromotives and Macrobehaviour”, (New York/London, Norton, 1978).