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Arctic Yearbook 2014
contribution to the lowering of military tensions and the reduction of false threat perceptions in
Europe (e.g. Lachowski & Rotfeld, 2001: 323; IFSH, 2005: 5). At the end of the Cold War, four
major international treaties and agreements containing CSBMs and other measures of Conventional
Arms Control (CAC) emerged on the basis of the Helsinki Final Act and within the framework of
the Organization on Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) (ibid.: 19 ff.). These treaties and
arrangements are the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE Treaty), the Vienna
Document (VD),1 the Treaty on Open Skies (OS) and the Global Exchange of Military Information
(GEMI).
Early research in the field tried to evaluate the potential of these measures to sufficiently lower
military tensions in East-West relations (e.g. Larrabee & Stobbe 1983; Ben-Horin et al. 1986;
Borawski 1986; Berg & Rotfeld 1986) or analyzed them from a regime-theoretical perspective (e.g.
Rittberger et al. 1990; Niemtzow 1996; Krupnick 1998; Schmidt 2004). In addition, several studies
focused on new potential areas of application taking the measures of the OSCE as source of
inspiration (Nathan 1994; Levite & Landau 1997; Self & Tatsumi 2000; Urgell 2005; Robinson 2010;
IFSH 2011). The Arctic, and its constantly melting environment, has so far received little attention
within this discussion.
One of the first comparable initiatives for the Arctic dates back to Mikhail Gorbachev’s so called
‘Murmansk Initiatives’ in 1987 (Åtland 2008: 290 ff.). Besides the proposal of a Nuclear-WeaponFree Zone (NWFZ), these initiatives also included proposals on the reduction of the amount and
size of major naval exercises, their mutual notification including the invitation of observers as well as
the defining of “‘No-go zones’ for naval vessels and anti-submarine warfare (ASW)” (ibid.: 294 ff.).
Even though the milita