Immediately after the end of the Cold War, the international community quickly took advantage of its new opportunities for action and concluded a whole series of arms control agreements in a short period of time. This posed significant challenges for Switzerland. The framework conditions for its own actions, known from the Cold War era, had to be questioned and adjusted, and repositioned within the new, rapidly changing international landscape of arms control. However, Switzerland remained largely stuck in the familiar, passive patterns of behavior from past decades during the first half of the 1990s. While international arms control lost momentum in the mid-1990s and has since been entangled in blockades, Switzerland began to profile itself internationally through a quantitative and qualitative expansion of its engagement. Why did this development of Swiss arms control policy largely run counter to that of international arms control? This contemporary historical study analyzes and explains the background.