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US Department of Defense,
December 2000 |
Strengthening Transatlantic Security: A U.S. Strategy for the 21st Century |
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CHAPTER IV: BUILDING BLOCKS OF A TRANSATLANTIC SECURITY BEYOND NATO (...) Arms Control The United States and its NATO Allies will continue to have a shared interest in arms control regimes that enhance security and stability at the lowest possible level of forces consistent with preserving Alliance capabilities for collective defense and other security-building missions. Among the arms control regimes applicable specifically to European ter-ritory, none is more central than the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE). Signed in November 1990 by the 16 members of NATO and 6 members of the Warsaw Pact, the CFE Treaty estab-lished equal East-West (i.e., “bloc-to-bloc”) limits on five key categories of conventional armaments—battle tanks, armored combat vehicles, artillery pieces, combat aircraft, and attack helicopters. This approach was appropriate at the time, since it eliminated the Warsaw Pact’s longstanding and destabilizing numerical superiority in armor and artillery. With the collapse of the Warsaw Pact and break-up of the Soviet Union, those former Soviet states in the area covered by the Treaty (Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals) acceded to the CFE Treaty, which now covers 30 Treaty Parties. The CFE Treaty’s accomplishments to date are remarkable.
More than 70,000 pieces of Treaty-Limited Equipment have been destroyed,
more than 3,500 intrusive on-site inspections have been conducted, and
those inspections—along with the CFE Treaty’s detailed reporting requirements—have
provided unprecedented transparency and pre-dictability of military forces
in Europe. In addition to the CFE Treaty, the United States will continue actively to support full implementation of, and compliance with, other arms control and Confidence Building Measures (CBM) regimes that help to build security and stability in Europe. These include: - The Vienna Document, updated at the 1999 OSCE Summit in Istanbul,
which builds trust and enhances stability among OSCE members through various
measures, such as inspections of military units, base visits, observation
of exercises, and notifications of military deployments.
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