With the advent of planetary warmaking, security strategy has been based on the militarization of the commons — the ocean depths, the atmosphere and orbital space. With the enclosure of the planet by warmaking systems, security itself has become indivisible, a commons in its own right. Common security has ceased being utopian and unnecessary and become both possible and necessary.
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The arms control process has stimulated weapons innovation by encouraging the search for new “bargaining chips” to be traded off at the next round of negotiations.
Less able to express itself with quantitative growth, the military turned with renewed vigor to qualitative growth and to areas of weapons technology beyond the existing restraining treaties. Superpower arms control to date is like treating an infection with just enough antibiotics to make the grosser symptoms disappear, soothing the patient’s worries, but driving the remaining, now strengthened contagions into more vital, less accessible organs.
