Interactions and Perceptions in the Test Ban Negotiations

Abstract

The Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963 represented the first major breakthrough in postwar arms control negotiations, and thus in some ways laid the foundation for a series of subsequent agreements (especially among the nuclear powers), which have become the primary concrete representations of the present superpower detente. Although many of these agreements may have had little substantive effect upon the arms race, they have at least been affected by and exerted a subsequent impact upon political relations between the communist bloc nations and those of the Western bloc. This article reports on an analysis of the negotiations among the United States, the Soviet Union, and the United Kingdom leading up to this test ban treaty. Specifically, it applies the two-step mediated stimulus-response model (S—r:s—R) to analyze these negotiations. This model predicts that negotiators' perceptions will be influenced by the behavior of other nations toward their country both outside and inside the negotiating forum, that these perceptions will then be converted into plans about their responses, and finally that these plans will become actualized in overt responses toward other nations, both within and outside negotiations. Several conclusions were reached. First, the perceptual variables generally had little significant impact in mediating between stimuli and responses, although they did appear to exert some influence in the case of Great Britain; in the other cases there was little congruence between changes in perceptions and in actual behaviors over time. Second, the behaviors of the three nuclear powers within the test ban negotiations were highly symmetrical over time; that is, each nation tended to change its responses roughly “in kind” with changes in the stimuli directed toward it from other actors both inside and outside negotiations. Third, there was substantial consistency between the interactions among actors inside and outside negotiations, suggesting that the negotiation process was in some ways a small-scale reflection of the general patterns of conflict and cooperation among the three nuclear powers in their overall interactions.