Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe
| Signed | 19 November 1990 |
|---|---|
| Location | Paris, France |
| Effective | July 17, 1992 |
| Condition | Ratification by NATO and Warsaw Pact member countries |
| Expiry | 26 April 2007 |
| Signatories |
The original Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE) was negotiated and concluded during the last years of the Cold War and established comprehensive limits on key categories of conventional military equipment in Europe (from the Atlantic to the Urals) and mandated the destruction of excess weaponry. The treaty proposed equal limits for the two "groups of states-parties", the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the Warsaw Pact. In 2007, Russia "suspended" its participation in the treaty, and on 10 March 2015, citing NATO's de facto breach of the Treaty, Russia formally announced it was "completely" halting its participation in it as of the next day.
In 1972, US president Richard Nixon and Soviet General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev reached a compromise agreement to hold separate political and military negotiations. The Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) would deal with political issues, and Mutual and Balanced Force Reductions (MBFR) with military issues. The CSCE resulted in 1975 in 35 nations signing the concluding document: the Helsinki Final Act. Negotiations for MBFR were stalled by the USSR in 1979 because of NATO's decision to deploy new intermediate-range nuclear weapons in Europe. In 1986, Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev proposed in the context of MBFR negotiations to reduce ground and air forces, and to include conventional and nuclear weapons from the Atlantic to the Urals. This proposal was later that year formalized during a Warsaw Treaty meeting. NATO's North Atlantic Council of foreign ministers issued the Brussels Declaration on Conventional Arms Control, which called for two distinct sets of negotiations: one to build on the Confidence and Security-Building Measures (CSBM) results of the Stockholm Conference and the other to establish conventional stability in Europe through negotiations on conventional arms control from the Atlantic to the Urals (ATTU). In 1987, the Stockholm Document entered into force and provided for the first time for a negotiated right to conduct on-site inspections of military forces in the field.
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