In addition, innovative concepts for war prevention, forged during major conflicts ranging from World War I through the Cold War, offer new, powerful tools to help prevent war. These include confidence-building measures, transparency and information exchange, mutual constraints on force deployments and activities, negotiated reductions in standing forces, and restrictions on arms production and trade. Equally important are constructive new measures for peacekeeping: pre-conflict early warning and action, including diplomatic intervention, mediation, judicial processes, and preventive deployment of armed force; and post-conflict armed and unarmed peacekeeping, peace-building, and occasionally peace enforcement. Another innovation is the trend toward linking international loans to limits on military spending.
Thus far, these useful approaches to preventing war have been applied separately and incompletely; none has been fully successful, and none is likely to be so if they remain separate projects, unconnected by a larger framework. In the 1960s, the United States and the Soviet Union proposed plans for general and complete disarmament combined with improved UN peacekeeping; but these plans were shelved in favor of separate programs for partial arms limits and reductions. For nuclear arms, this approach has worked, even if slowly, because the many issues into which nuclear arms control has been divided-testing, bilateral reductions, nonproliferation, ending production of fissile material, and disposing of fissile material-are all supported by a strong public rejection of nuclear weapons. For conventional forces, in contrast, the disaggregation of disarmament into separate projects has fragmented public and government interest, dividing support among many worthwhile measures, such as limits on arms transfers or cuts in military spending. Peacekeeping has been completely separated from efforts to reduce conflict through arms control; and the only areas of some success-the Treaty on Conventional Forces in Europe, the ban on antipersonnel land mines, and new efforts to regulate small arms-have been exceptional in generating broad popular support.
Now, instead of striving for peace in fragments, it is time to bring together these diverse approaches-conventional force reductions, limits on arms production and trade, cuts in military spending, measures to stop proliferation and build confidence, training for peaceful conflict resolution, and means for peace-building, peacekeeping, and peace enforcement-in a unified program to prevent war, and to incorporate this program in a treaty structure that assures its widespread, enduring implementation.
A comprehensive approach is needed to be effective and to mobilize sustained public pressure for new policies. Such an approach will strengthen existing peacemaking and arms control programs by building a broader coalition of interested publics and government officials to support them. Equally important, a comprehensive effort to prevent war and reduce conventional forces will strengthen efforts to eliminate nuclear arms by creating a degree of international stability conducive to abolition. In fact, one major goal of this program is to support efforts to abolish nuclear weapons, and we believe the success of this program is essential to that goal. But nuclear and conventional reductions need not be tightly linked: each can proceed at its own pace.
A Phased Program of Change
To succeed in mobilizing broad support, a program of action to prevent deadly conflict should meet several criteria: it should be careful not to inadvertently increase some risks of war while reducing others; it should engage and strengthen commitment to nonviolent conflict resolution; it should offer substantial economic benefits; and it should include means of overcoming domestic resistance to change rooted in inertia, ignorance, and vested interests.
The phased program which follows seeks to meet these criteria. Militarily, it proposes a series of gradual changes, carefully designed not to create new situations of uncertainty in which the risk of war might rise. Morally, it underscores commitment to the rule of law and peaceful dispute resolution in international as well as domestic affairs in two ways: by limiting the accepted uses of armed force to deterring and defending against aggression, genocide, and other forms of mass violence, and by replacing the use of national armed forces in what may be arbitrary, self-interested ways with UN and regional forces for peace-enforcement in a non-partisan fashion.
Economically, this program should bring major savings to both the potential victims of armed conflict and the potential donors of emergency relief and reconstruction aid. In addition, by cutting the world's largest conventional armed forces and major weapon systems-which consume 95 percent of world military spending-the program should release enormous resources for non-military uses. In the case of the United States, which accounts for one-third of world military spending, initial cuts in conventional forces and weaponry could save over $75 billion per year (out of the current $250 billion annual military budget), and longer-term reductions could save more than $150 billion per year. Other countries should save comparable proportions of their current military budgets. After an initial period of transition and conversion, these savings could be directed to a combination of domestic tax cuts and health and education programs and international debt relief and development aid.
With respect to potential internal obstacles to change-employment in defense-dependent communities, profits in arms industries, the careers of senior military officers, and so on-a gradual process of change will enable a smooth transition to non-military employment and production. It will mobilize local as well as national support by ending local "boom-and-bust" cycles of funding for arms production, strengthening economic growth, and releasing a large fraction of government spending for other needs.
Many of the procedures and institutions proposed for Phase I already exist in partial or rudimentary form. Thus, Global Action to Prevent War will not be starting from a zero, but building on a number of positive recent developments.
Phase I: First Treaty to Reduce Armed Conflict, TRAC I, 5-10 year duration
Phase I has two main goals: first, to reduce the frequency of genocide, ethnic conflict, civil wars, and border wars by strengthening the international institutions for preventing and ending organized armed violence; and, second, to begin to address the longer-term risks of major international war by starting negotiations on global cuts in conventional arms holdings, production, and trade, and by instituting a freeze on and greater transparency on these elements of military power. There are several reasons for the initial focus on internal wars: they are the main source of bloodshed today; measures to prevent such wars, though well known, are severely underdeveloped; and strengthening these measures will help develop confidence in the ability of the international community to prevent all types of armed violence.
Phase I provides for an initial Treaty to Reduce Armed Conflict (TRAC I), in which participating nations promise to work to reduce organized armed conflict by significantly enhancing means of conflict prevention and resolution and by limiting the size and uses of national armed forces.
Many steps to strengthen global and regional conflict prevention, peacekeeping, and peace enforcement capabilities, most under way in rudimentary form, are urgently needed to prevent and end civil wars, genocide, and other large-scale internal violence (see sidebar). Progress on these measures will let the Security Council, the Secretary-General, and the regional security organizations play a pro-active role in preventing armed conflict. The UN and its regional counterparts will be expected to act quickly to advise and warn governments encountering particularly difficult political and economic problems, and to assure that the UN Human Rights Commission and regional commissions play an active role in easing ethnic and minority frictions.
As the UN's role in preventing war grows, it will be necessary to reform the Security Council, making it more representative of the international community by expanding its membership, and more likely to undertake decisive, impartial action by restricting the use of the veto. For fuller accountability, the President of the General Assembly will have a seat on the Security Council, allowing him to report Assembly views to the Council and vice versa.
In addition to these steps aimed at preventing armed conflict within nations, TRAC I participants will take four steps to begin to reduce the longer-term risks of major war between nations:
l Begin talks on global reductions in armaments, and freeze or reduce key elements of military power while the talks are under way (or for at least 10 years);
l Support the talks by providing full transparency (open, publicly available information) regarding their own current and planned future armed forces, military personnel and spending, and arms production and trade;
l Apply further confidence-building measures, including constraints on force activities, in all bilateral relationships that have the potential to lead to war; and
Establish a coordinating committee to oversee treaty implementation and verification, patterned on the verification arrangements for the Treaty on Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE).
Phase II: Second Treaty to Reduce Armed Conflict, TRAC II, 5-10 year duration
While continuing to strengthen the means available to the international community for preventing and ending genocide and smaller wars, Phase II will focus on steps to reduce the risks of major regional or global war. A second Treaty to Reduce Armed Conflict, TRAC II, will make substantial global and regional cuts in key elements of military power (force components, inventories of major weapon systems, military personnel, and spending), and place limits on arms production and trade.
Aiming ultimately at low levels of national armaments in all parts of the world, TRAC II will make proportionately larger cuts in countries with larger armed forces. For example, countries with aggregate inventories of major weapons 1 numbering over 10,000 (the USA, Russia, China) might reduce their forces by one-third, while those with inventories totaling 1,000-10,000 would cut by one-quarter, and those with inventories under 1,000 by 15 percent. 2
These global cuts will be supplemented by additional confidence-building arms limits and reductions in areas plagued by long-standing regional conflicts. Obligatory cuts in arms production and trade will accompany the global and regional cuts in forces. Since arms acquisition during reductions will be minimal, there will be more than proportionate cuts in production and trade and in arms industries. Reduced armaments will be destroyed unless they can be used to replace permitted but unserviceable weapons, thereby avoiding the production of replacement systems.