Arbatov finished the war as chief of staff of the 17th Guards mortar regiment and was awarded the Order of the Red Star in 1943.

[4] He worked as a journalist and commentator on foreign affairs between 1953 and 1963 at Kommunist and the English language publication The New Times.

As an adviser to five General Secretaries of the Communist Party, Arbatov was a frequent participant in arms control negotiations conducted between the US and USSR.

Sergey Rogov, who succeeded him in 1995 as director of the Institute for US and Canadian Studies called Arbatov someone who "was probably willing more than anybody else to stick his neck out" to mitigate the influence of anti-American hard liners in the Soviet regime, though "he knew pretty well what were the red lines that he could not cross publicly, and he was very cautious about it".

Arbatov recognized that the Soviet Union had lost the Cold War, but insisted that the United States had suffered too by losing "The Enemy", a main adversary consisting of one country on which to concentrate efforts.

[8] He was survived by his wife, Svetlana, as well as by his son Aleksei, who also became involved with arms control issues and became a Duma member.