Bargaining in Arms Control Negotiations: The Seabeds Denuclearization Treaty

This article analyzes the bargaining process in the Eighteen Nation Disarmament Conference/Conference of the Committee on Disarmament, in Geneva during 1969–70, on the issue of the Seabeds Denuclearization Treaty, which was opened for signature in 1971. A procedure called bargaining process analysis was employed to content analyze the interactions within this forum throughout four major phases of these negotiations. Limited support was given to several hypotheses about the effects of the bargaining process on the level of agreement. First, in several phases of these negotiations, the more the negotiating strategies were characterized as soft rather than as hard, the greater was the level of agreement relative to disagreement. Second, in several phases, the higher the ratio of task-oriented to affect-oriented behavior in bargaining style, the greater was the ratio of agreements to disagreements on issues under negotiation. Finally, the bargaining process analysis was able to describe several trends in these negotiations, especially the ability of the nuclear powers to reach relatively rapid agreement after initial differences, followed by much longer bargaining where differences between the nuclear and the nonnuclear states had to be resolved. This line of division may be increasingly characteristic of multilateral arms control negotiations and may be reflected in future negotiations in which nonnuclear states are important participants.