ARMS CONTROL DISCOURSE

Introduction

This thesis is about the process of identity-making underlying the question: what constitutes a State? This process is considered in relation to a particular set of historical, empirical practices that have their expression in the arms control process. Specifically, it is located, for the purposes of analysis, within the debates surrounding compliance or non-compliance with the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks Treaties (SALT) as mediated by and through the SALT Standing Consultative Commission on Arms Limitation (SCC) during the period roughly coinciding with the decade from 1975 - 1985. Its concerns, therefore, are both theoretical and practical.

The 1990s are shaping up, as one wit has described it, to be the decade of Mutual Unilateral Disarmament (MUD). In the half-decade from 1986-1991 the relationship between the superpowers changed radically, and, it would appear, irreversibly. With the demise of the identity-structure of the former Soviet Union the strategic nuclear picture has also changed, and of the body of nuclear analysts, some have declared that their role is as historians of the 'Cold War.' For others it is 'the end of history,'1 while still others cling to a binary threat in a world that is rapidly becoming multipolar.2 Within their own frameworks they are all 'right' which is to say that under the sets of terms within which they operate, events can be read as self-consistent within the parameters of their analysis.

This thesis is not about the 'rightness' or 'wrongness' of any one of those positions. What is of interest in all this are the kinds of structures that enable events to be articulated (narrativised) and the kinds of worlds established as symptoms of particular ways of thinking about events in the world. To do this on a global scale would require as many theses as there are 'realist' case studies. My aim here, and for specific sets of reasons, is to examine one such case in particular.

In the 1990s we are seeing a vertical decline and a lateral proliferation of nuclear weapons. While the present sets of changes in the international/internotional landscape appear categorical, what is emerging is that the conditions under which these changes are occurring have their own history. What we are witness to, therefore, is not the end of history, but its operation. This can be viewed as an alteration in the sets of practices that have enacted, both the State of the Soviet Union and the State of the United States of America.

The Manach¾ism of the Self/Other dichotomy that characterised the 'Cold War' has been articulated along ideological lines and found its most compelling expression in the nuclear arms race between the former superpowers. After 1945 the nuclear arms race may be said to be an 'expression' (that is, a primarily communicative act) since, despite (and partly because of) the materiality of the weapons themselves, what has counted above all is their overall 'potential' or what their specificities 'signified.' Nuclear weaponry has thus represented, first and foremost, a discursive practice.

Within the conceptual framework of 'security' nuclear weapons have played (and continue to play) an important role in articulating the identity of the state. Since 1946 (Brodie, Schelling) however, their role has been a deeply ambivalent one insofar as deterrence has proved to be a Platonic pharmakon - at once poison and medicine. The reversal of the Clausewitzian maxim - from war conceived as an instrument of policy, to policy conceived as a corollary of war (albeit metonymic of its instruments) - forced upon the security state3 by the potentially catastrophic consequences of any large-scale use of nuclear weapons, has rendered the notion of force in ironic terms. Force, under the nuclear regime must be seen to remain an enunciative, or illocutionary force, rather than a straightforward physical force.

What is interesting about this is that the modes of power invoked under the nuclear regime of the security state are normative and judgemental rather than coercive. This is especially visible within the domain of policy of arms control. In this domain power and knowledge are coterminous. As practiced within the larger domain of the security state, nuclear arms control arguably constitutes one of the sites at which the State is enacted in relation to other states. In the case of the former superpowers during the Cold War, the relationship was constituted in largely bilateral terms. The first phase of the Cold War, from the late 1940s to the early 1970s was characterised by the constitution of the Soviet Union as Manich¾an Other to the United States. With the development of dŽtente in the early 1970s the conditions emerged to allow the negotiation of the Anti Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM) and the Interim Agreement on the Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms, collectively known as SALT I. This set of agreements, designed to enact a regime of mutual vulnerability, marked an historic moment in the history of nuclear weapons for two reasons:

1. as a crisis stability measure, the enacting of a pact of mutual vulnerability in the context of a strategy of Mutually Assured Destruction, the ABM Treaty raised the stakes of nuclear use beyond rational possibility.

2. as a treaty of indefinite duration, a mechanism was established in order to negotiate the meaning of ambiguous elements of treaty language, and in which to voice concerns over ambiguous treaty compliance. The establishment of this mechanism marked the recognition of the historicity of the terms within which the Treaty was to be enacted. At a time when other areas of social science research were establishing a-historical modes of analysis through game-theory models, the practitioners of arms control recognised that in the world of action, change is a categorical condition. The mechanism with the responsibility for negotiating ongoing treaty compliance in the face of technological and historical change is the Standing Consultative Commission on Arms Limitation (SCC).

Reading through any number of United States Congressional Reports and Hearings on arms control and on compliance or noncompliance with arms control agreements, one cannot help but notice recurrent sets of phrases. These phrases are concerned with 'national security,' with the 'behaviour' of 'the Soviet Union' and with the 'relationship' between the United States and the Soviet Union. Some speak of 'self-interest' that has aligned nations, while others report that 'the US Government has determined that the Soviet Union is violating É 'various arms control treaties.' Moreover, the consequences of this 'Soviet noncompliance' are represented such that it 'calls into question important security benefits from arms control, and could create new security risks; undermines confidence in the arms control process; casts doubts about the reliability of the Soviet Union as a negotiating partner; and damages the chances for a more constructive US/Soviet relationship.'4

Even from this small sample, several features emerge that warrant closer inspection. When we think of 'behaviour,' or 'self-interest,' or 'noncompliance,' or even 'relationship' and consider what kind of entity might have these characteristics, or be able to act in such a manner, it would seem reasonable to suppose that we are discussing people. When we read the textual context in which these actions take place, the context reveals that these entities are States. There are two possible assumptions that could lead to such a formulation. The first, is that states may be construed as actors and are therefore capable of action. This requires that states operate metaphorically as individual people. The second is that those who carry out the actions are indeed collections of individual people acting in the name of the state - that is, that the state is metonymic of the people it contains.

Proponents of the first assumption require that states are ontologically prior to their action,5 and that states interact within a system of states. Foremost among the proponents of this assumption is Hedley Bull. In his Anarchical Society, Bull argues, after Hobbes, that states exist as islands of order in an ocean of disorder (anarchy). He further argues that there exist forms of order (rules) within a system of states that operate outside of international law. Moreover, he argues that whatever the substantive issues of the day, they take place, or are dealt with in the context of the existing political structure of the world. While this represents an oversimplification of Bull's arguments, it remains the case that for Bull, the constitutive practices of states are outside of the bounds of any study of the substantive issues of the day. Such an assumption serves to maintain the theory/practice dichotomy characteristic of 'Classic Realist' political philosophy.

Proponents of the second assumption require the state to be a persona ficta of the people empowered to make policy 'in the name of the state.'6 For Kenneth Waltz, as with Rousseau and Kant, the state is a product of individuals acting in concert to produce policy 'in the name of the state.' He argues that those so empowered, do so in a manner such that dissenters are carried along, either through their inability to bring force to bear to change the decision, or through 'their conviction, based on perceived interest and customary loyalty, that in the long run it is to their advantage to go along with the national decision and work in the prescribed and accepted ways for its change.'7 Thus the State, under this assumption is metonymic of the people who enact the State.

Such a view, although more complex than the Hobbesian state-as-actor, is still predicated upon the unitary, rational individual of psychology that is itself constituted as ontologically prior to the activities in which it is engaged. Recent approaches to subjectivity offer a critique of the rational unitary subject of psychology. Insofar as for Hobbes the State functions like an individual person and that person is construed as a unitary individual, and insofar as for Waltz the State is a collection of unitary individuals enacting the state, recent approaches to culturally based subjectivity do not construe the individual as unitary, but rather as a site upon which multiple subject positions may be enacted. Moreover, insofar as the subject is culturally construed by its entry into the symbolic order at a specific time and place, then the available subject positions are historically differentiated such that the foundations upon which action is predicated (including the ethical/moral order) are to a large degree historically contingent.

Such a view would argue that, far from being a unitary and originary source, subjectivity is rather an effect of the process of enacting (by differentiating) the subject. The subject, under this rubric, is a cultural artefact, a symptom of its practices. Subjectivity is therefore a verb (or process) rather than a noun (or object). This account of subjectivity would therefore articulate the state as a mode of subjectivity that is of the same kind (if of a different order) as that of the individual. The distinction between the individual and the state, insofar as they can be said to act, is one of locus of practice rather than of ontological difference.8

If this is the case, then analysis of the state should be able to proceed from an analysis of the practices by which the state differentiates itself from its Other. That is to say, by what actions does it enact (and by enacting, maintain) its identity? By what means does the state 'read,' and by 'reading' 'write,' its other. How does the State maintain its integrity? And what do we mean by 'state?' - is not the state itself the kind of multiple subject that the individual displays, according to the roles it is called upon to play?

This thesis sets out to argue that the state is indeed as multiple a subject as the individual. States are rendered most visible through the sets of practices by which they enact their boundaries. This is what I have and shall continue to term the 'security state' - the military/strategic state. States police their boundaries in both a literal and textual form. This thesis focusses on a set of practices within the security state. Moreover, I intend to argue that, if the security state is a product of the practices that enact and maintain it, then one can examine this process by looking at micro-structures. One such microstructure is the SALT Standing Consultative Commission on Arms Limitation (SCC). By examining the activities, context, and conditions that make possible its establishment and operation I intend to examine and trace the process of change that forms the underlying condition that makes possible the identity of the state.

Drawing on the analytical tools of cultural anthropology and discourse analysis, this thesis attempts to trace the process of change in the articulation of the identity9 of the state within the domain of arms control compliance. This is traced through the actions and potential to act of the SALT Standing consultative Commission on Arms Limitation (SCC) at a specific historical moment: the decade marked by the transition from the Carter Presidency to the first term of the Reagan Presidency of the United States of America. That is the period covered roughly by the decade from 1975-1985.

By engaging in a practice of reading the development and deployment of nuclear weapons and their associated systems and technologies as cultural artefacts, and, moreover, as artefacts produced and deployed within a culturally coded system, an attempt is made to chart the changing face of the relationship between the entities articulated as the United States and the Soviet Union during the period in question. That these readings become a focus for the attention of the SCC renders these deployed artefacts as embedded within a cultural value system that, in the choices made about development and deployment, they signal, or make visible the conceptual boundaries of the state as enacted in all of the related practices of arms control that are mediated through the good offices of the SCC. Reading the texts surrounding these artefacts, the process of the narrativisation of history is rendered visible. As Greg Dening notes:

Within any culture an artifact is a manifold text of values, of systems, of perceptions and relations. Beauty, the means and relations of production, ownership and exchange, and morality are written into the cultural things we have in hand [or in silo?] In the context of our culturally given signs and symbols we read the meanings encapsulated within our things. Where things cross a cultural boundary we re-invent their meanings. [Soviet view of Nuclear targeting? - of arms control?, of the SCC?]10

This thesis operates under assumptions that reject the notion of a dichotomy, even a necessary distinction, between theory and practice. This is reflected in the organisational macrostructure of this thesis. There is, therefore, no separate 'theory chapter' as such, as the theory unfolds throughout and forms a necessary part of the practices of reading that are brought to bear on the historical material at hand. In loose terms, the thesis is divided, for analytical purposes, into three sections, (discounting the Introduction and Conclusion) comprising Chapter Two on the SCC's structure and functions, a second section formed by Chapter Three on the operation of the SCC under Carter and a third section formed by Chapter Four on the SCC during the first term of the Reagan Presidency.

The first, necessarily a fairly short section deals with the establishment, the structure, and the functions of the SCC as constituted in the agreements that established it. I say necessarily, as little has been written specifically on the SCC. From limited written sources supplemented by interview material the author was able to piece together a picture of the SCC and its operation, and the need for secrecy in its negotiating practices and the products of those negotiating practices. The second and much larger section deals with the time period surrounding the Carter presidency. Following a brief history of the weapons systems that were subsequently limited by the SALT Treaties, this section deals with the issues and practices of the SCC under Carter. By examining the emergence of specific strategic systems, themselves a product of military/strategic and funding decisions it is arguably possible to read off some of the political perceptions of the capabilities of the Other in terms of the nature of the threat that the developed systems were designed to counter. The importance of perception and its translation into real technical weapons systems should not be underestimated in the constitution of the nuclear regime.

As I have hinted at, these systems required funding. This was at a moment in history when, following the draw-down after the Vietnam War, defence funding was a highly politicised issue. The issue of defence spending as an aspect of the approval process for the development of specific weapon technologies and their support systems serves to demonstrate the role of the domestic polity in the United States in responding to ideological and discursive threats to the integrity of the identity of the United States security state.

At this point in the thesis it is intended to argue that funding decisions for technological research and development were important, not only in and of themselves, but for the purposes of signalling to the 'Other' the intention to provide new paradigmatic choices over the future defence technology structure. It is also intended to show how the issue of defence funding almost a decade before represents part of the process of constituting a political and material reality for those that follow.

Moreover, the development of specific forms of technology concretises and encodes the discourse of danger11 mobilised to constitute the security state, but also this concretising forms part of the process of constituting the objects of SCC discourse in terms of whether or not they constitute a threat to, or a continuation of, the SALT I Treaties. Thus the story of what makes possible some of Carter's decisionmaking rests on an undof the techno-strategic context in which his decisions were made. An argument is further made over the issue of the 'standard' of verification to be applied to the arms control agreements signed half a decade before Carter came to power.

The standard of verification arguably offers a political barometer of the state of relations between the Treaty partners. But it does much more than that. The standard of verification also offers an indicator of the fragility of the identity of the United States in terms of the degree to which it feels it necessary to monitor the agreed boundaries surrounding the extent of mutual vulnerability inscribed in SALTÊI. Observing changes in the standard of verification arguably provides an instance at which one can chart a 'wind-change' in the identity-making inscription of the state.

Again part of the constitution of objects of knowledge for the SCC lies in the terms of the treaties and agreements that form the surface raison d'Žtre of the SCC itself. Moreover, by examining the accusations made on both sides regarding non-compliant behaviour with respect to the SALT Treaties, that is to say, the content of the accusations, one should be able to construe the range of activities open to the purview of the SCC, thereby comparing this range of actual activity with the potential under the regulations of the SCC. By locating the extent to which the SCC was able to perform in relation to its potential, one has (albeit subjectively) the potential to construct a scale showing the extent to which the SCC was able to negotiate in order to ensure that noncompliant behaviour ceased, or was clarified in a manner so as to resolve questions of ambiguous behaviour.

Chapter Three also points out that the SCC did not function in a vacuum. In order for ambiguous compliance behaviour to be located, the resources of intelligence surveillance satellites and their bureaucracies play their role in the constitution by identification of the Other. By textually constituting the Other through isolating and interpreting their behaviour, the identity of the self is thereby constituted and maintained. This chapter argues that this process is as much a concrete reality as a textual one. It becomes textual through the process of interpretation. In the case of the state this interpretation is performed at a number of sites that comprise specific, though interlocking interpretive communities. Thus the discourses of policy are characterised by multiplicity, complexity and uncertainty. The authoritative ordering of this complexity, the policing of the boundaries of 'acceptable' international behaviour represents the principle that characterises political life.

Finally, this chapter argues that verification of arms control agreements itself constitutes a form of power articulated as knowledge, such that the ability to identify, and thus 'name,' the behaviours of the Other makes possible the invocation of normative and normalising judgement. As a moment of interface between the self and Other, the SCC serves to mediate between multiple sites of discursivity that are, singly and together constitutive of the identity of the strategic arms community, that in its turn forms one of the kinds of practice that constitutes the security state, and ultimately the political community operating under the identity of the state as a symptom of those practices.

The third section encompassed by Chapter Four is concerned with the practices surrounding the SCC under the first term of the Reagan Presidency. Noting that the SCC was considered to be largely ineffective under Reagan, an attempt is made to locate the source of that ineffectiveness. Given that under Carter the SCC appeared to be highly successful within the fairly narrow constraints of its mandate, it would seem surprising if the source of its ineffectiveness lay within the SCC process itself. Chapters two and three suggest that, as with other identities, the SCC may also be conceived as a symptom of, not only its practices, but the political environment12 in which its activities took place. With the new conservatism ushered in by Reagan's administration, the seeds of its failure may well be construed as stemming from the changes in the political environment in which it finds itself.

Chapter four opens, therefore, with a passage on the rise of conservatism in the form of the Committee on the Present Danger (CPD) that served as a mouthpiece for American conservatism. Interestingly, to trace the rise of the CPD one finds, not only its Cold War origins in its first incarnation, but also its rebirth on the eve of the Carter Presidency. That it emerged as a side-effect of the reaction to DŽtente on the eve of the first Democrat President of the DŽtente era suggests that its intentions were not as bipartisan as it was made out to be. The account of the failure of SALT II to be ratified attributes much of that failure to the rise of neoconservatism during the beginning of the Second Cold War that arose with the election of CPD member Ronald Reagan to the Presidency.

The chapter goes on to argue that this period was characterised more by controversies over past compliance than by progress towards new agreements. The acrimonious public debate over alleged Soviet noncompliance with arms control agreements rendered the SCC powerless in the face of a conservatism not seen since the McCarthy era of the 1950s. Despite all the acrimony, however, Reagan was obliged under the principles of international law to comply, even with the unratified SALT II Treaty, thus suggesting that there is a palpable normative force even in the so-called realm of international anarchy. This section of the thesis explores the normative power of inscription as expressed through the practice of international law.

Once again the issues raised as ambiguous behaviour, or potential violations are canvassed in order to explore the operation of the SCC during this period. Although there is no access to the processes of the SCC, there is access to the texts surrounding its operation as expressed in the Presidential Reports on Soviet noncompliance and related Congressional Hearings.

Of particular interest here, is the way in which the issue of the large phased-array radar at Krasnoyarsk was taken up as a sign of Soviet intentions to abrogate the terms of the ABM Treaty. This section brings together a number of salient sets of practices, each relatively minor in and of itself, but taken together form a collusion of discourses that made possible the articulation of the Krasnoyarsk radar as a violation and as a sign of political intent. This large concrete artefact was thus endowed with meaning, thus rendering it as a cultural icon. This section argues that the formulation of the Krasnoyarsk radar as a sign required a number of historically prior moves. Central to these moves was, not only the signing and ratification of the ABM Treaty, but the funding and development of national technical means of verification and the associated bureaucratic mechanisms.

The bulk of the literature on the discovery of the Krasnoyarsk LPAR holds that it was found by photo-interpreters examining imagery from a KH-9 (Big Bird) satellite. Again this forms an oversimplification of the process, as, to set the event in its context, it becomes apparent that the KH-9 needed a 'trip-wire' to justify scanning a particular sector of the Soviet Union (as it was then constituted). The evidence suggests that the role of the JUMPSEAT radar 'ferret' satellites has been underplayed. Either way, Krasnoyarsk did not emerge as a 'bolt from the blue' discovery, but was contextually situated in a specific policymaking community that allowed the radar to be interpreted in a culturally specific way at a specific point in time. Moreover, the construction of the radar, itself the product of political decisions regarding resource allocations, was also constrained by geography.

The section argues that the role of the SCC was rendered problematic by the political posturing of the Reagan administration's renewed Manich¾ism. It is argued that, not only was the Krasnoyarsk radar a violation in name, but that in real terms the military significance of the violation was small, and, insofar as the term 'deployed' was never fully defined, the Krasnoyarsk radar does not represent an unequivocal violation. Chapter Four concludes by examining the relationship between the political process and the community that arises as a consequence of the enacting of that process. The chapter as a whole sets out to show something of the complexity and scope of the range of discourse communities that feed into the process of constituting an event as a potential arms control violation. In so doing, the chapter seeks to establish that the political process and orientation of the administration in each of its bureaucracies, not only influences the interpretation of an event as a violation, but in the way the construction of, for example, a concrete artefact, becomes construed in narrative terms as an event.13

If this is so, then the SCC is not only a conduit for policy. It is also acts as a sign that represents the constitution of a whole domain of policy, a space for action in which are brought together a number of other policy domains. Moreover, a number of themes arise from this in terms of how the various domains of policymaking build into a picture of the operation of the (virtual) field in which identity is articulated as the practices of military security through the operation of a number of sub-communities distributed across various domains of the defence and foreign policy community at large.

The Krasnoyarsk radar issue, mediated through the Standing Consultative Commission may be viewed in terms of the materiality of discourse. It shall be argued later, that at the cultural level (the level of image and perception in Jervis' terms), the purpose of large, phased array radars was to assist in the disciplining of boundaries between Self and Other - between those on the 'inside' and those on the 'outside.' But maintaining interiority and exteriority can involve more than the systematic maintenance of physical boundaries by observing, identifying and controlling the legitimate passage across the boundaries. The ABM Treaty limitations on LPARs serve a more sophisticated purpose: the disciplining of the disciplining of the boundaries. This is itself a boundary enacting process of the same kind but of a different order.

The role of the intelligence assets, the intelligence community, the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency in the production of knowledge about the behaviours of the Other represents an aspect of the normative power that is invoked through the SCC. The process of narrativising the events produced by the activities of the Other represents a process of virtual spatialisation of the Other. The effect of this could be construed, through the production of otherness (by specification), as an aspect of the production of self identity (through being differentiated from the actions of the Other). Thus, it could be argued, that the identity of the self (construed as State) is a symptom of the practice of defining and naming the otherness of the Other. This thesis argues that this process takes place on both sides of the US-Soviet divide. A corollary of this is that the moment that the self ceases the practice of maintaining the boundaries, either within or external to the State, then a new identity will be articulated and the State will no longer be what it was.

At any point in time, this process could be argued to take place at countless sites, articulating for different purposes a range of collectivities or identities. If these could be argued to take place in the symbolic order (and where else does conceptualisation take place?) then this thesis represents a contribution to the literature of 'signalling' and theorists of perception/misperception, of whom Robert Jervis and Thomas Schelling are the chief proponents.

In summary, this thesis sets out to show that states are indexically linked to their practices of boundarymaking; and that these are primarily cultural practices of which states may be seen to be products, rather than as sources (as traditionally conceived in Perception, Game and Psychological theories). This thesis can be distinguished from the work of (i) Jervis, (ii) Schelling and (iii) Larson for the following reasons:

i. Jervis' Perception theory14 assumes a relatively unitary actor within its otherwise discursive framework. It also assumes a relatively uniflow model of communication in which a signal is assumed to be sent and received, rather than produced at both the 'sending' and 'receiving' end. Thus Perception theory would find it relatively difficult to cope with or to explain mixed signals or with signal from different sectors of the actor.

Perception Theory's key terms can be defined as follows:

Signalling: - statements or actions the meanings of which are established by tacit or explicit understandings among the actors. Signals are issued mainly to influence the receivers' image of the sender.

Indices (or indexes): - statements or actions that carry some inherent evidence that the image projected is correct because they are believed to be inextricably linked to the actor's capabilities or intentions, and because they are believed to be beyond the ability of the actor to control for the purposes of projecting a misleading image.

ii. Schelling's Game Theory also assumes a relatively unitary actor and operates an oversimplified modelling system that assumes a rational actor (one who will always work to maximise self gain to the exclusion of all others). Moreover, it assumes that each other player of the game is rational in the above sense. Finally, game theory operates exclusively to illustrate situations of conflict of interest.

It is therefore, at best a modelling system capable of indicating ideal outcomes (other factors remaining unchanged). Such idealistic modelling systems are apt to over simplify complex situations. It assumes that the the choice of the game is appropriate to to the situation - ie that the 'rules of play' obtain. By assuming that all players are rational (in a narrowly defined sense), then account cannot be taken of non-ration actors. Finally, Game Theory assumes that the players are unitary - ie they are operating only one game at a time.15

iii. Larson's psychological theory16 is probably the closest to the discourse model used in this thesis. The key distinction from Larson lies in the question of the locus of meaning. Where Larson and discourse theory acknowledge that states are cultural products, Larson sees psychological analysis of the key decision makers as the most appropriate mode, whereas discourse analysis looks to the texts produced by the key decisionmakers - their symptoms - as the most appropriate mode of analysis. Since each theoretical position will generate different products, this thesis is offered as a contribution to the work of these theorists, rather than a complete substitution. Political analysis is not a zero-sum game.

Insofar as the assumptions of this thesis articulate an anti-foundationalist position (note that this does not mean without historically, culturally-based foundations) then this thesis contributes to the literature that some have termed postmodern. Moreover this thesis contributes to discourse analysis in terms of the notion of 'reading' or construing meaning from concrete artefacts as a fundamentally textual practice.

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