Brian Bradley
NS&D Monitor
10/3/2014
Recent actions by Russia to ramp up its nuclear modernization program could serve as a major threat to the United States’ nuclear posture, Hudson Institute fellow William Schneider said this week. Speaking at an Oct. 1 event, Schneider said Moscow’s modernization plans stand in contrast to U.S. modernization efforts, which have moved slowly. At the end of the New START Treaty in 2021, “the U.S. will be much more soft in terms of the strategic balance and, indeed, the coupling of U.S. strategic nuclear power to the extended deterrent,” said Schneider, who served in the Reagan Administration as the Under Secretary of State for Security Assistance, Science and Technology. The treaty caps the strategic deployed stockpiles of both countries at 1,550 warheads.
Schneider added that Russia’s plans to replace old ballistic missile warheads with a new generation of smaller, lighter reentry vehicles, could give the country a leg up on the aging U.S. nuclear deterrent. “That’s an alarming prospect when combined with an increasingly aggressive posture,” Schneider said. “The study of the Russian military exercises where nuclear weapons are integrated in Russian military operations makes it clear that the kind of threats we had during the Cold War, of massive conventionally-armed Russian forces, is not the kind of threat that we’re going to face in the future if Russia turns actively belligerent.”
New START a Paradox?
Schneider said that New START also presents a paradox for U.S. nuclear policy and for worldwide nuclear disarmament, potentially creating a push for proliferation around the world. “The efforts that have been undertaken through the New START Treaty in particular to reduce or eliminate nuclear weapons and excise their role from international affairs has, in fact, created circumstances that will accelerate the nuclear proliferation problem rather than mitigate it,” he said.
While the agreement outlines arms reduction benchmarks for the U.S. and Russia, Schneider said U.S. allies have grown more skeptical about the credibility of this nation’s nuclear deterrent as officials have delayed the modernization of nuclear-class submarines, intercontinental ballistic missiles, bombers, the air-launched cruise missile and the nuclear command and control system for decades. “All of these things have to be taken more or less simultaneously, a feat that seems very difficult in the current fiscal environment, but nevertheless reflects this underlying paradox of the aspiration for nuclear abolition is in fact producing a much larger, much more dynamic and much more threatening environment for nuclear weapons, and the cumulative effect of all these developments suggests that we need some substantial change in the direction that we’ve undertaken with respect to our deterrent forces,” Schneider said.
Other Experts Downplay Russian Modernization
Other experts have downplayed Russian modernization efforts. Pavel Podvig, an affiliate at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation, told NS&D Monitor that Russia’s modernization announcement would probably equate to an accelerated deployment in the modernization of Russian nuclear arms, but not an increase. “I don’t think this will affect U.S. modernization plans—all this has been anticipated and the fact that Russia might deploy some systems a couple of years earlier than it planned to would not change anything,” Podvig wrote.
Hans Kristensen, director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists, wrote in a Sept. 26 email to NS&D Monitor that Russia’s modernization would translate to an increase in the percentage of new arms in its ICBM force. “As of now, new missiles make up about 35 percent of the ICBM force, and the goal is 97 percent by 2020,” Kristensen wrote. “But this is not the ‘build-up’ you often hear mentioned in news media and blogs. They exaggerate.”
Schneider Calls for Revisiting of Modernization Program
But Schneider said Putin’s words, coupled with actions like Russia’s abrogation of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, nuclear saber-rattling, annexation of Crimea, occupation of eastern Ukraine and recent exercises involving nuclear-capable Bear bombers in the North Atlantic, should compel U.S. nuclear readiness. “The expectation was in 2009, when they signed up to the New START premises, is that they were heading for nuclear abolition the way the U.S. was, and it’s clear that our aims now diverge,” Schneider said.
Schneider said he believes it’s clear Russia has no intentions to abolish nuclear weapons. “Indeed, not only are they increasing the number of nuclear weapons that they can deliver, but they are also making nuclear weapons part of their foreign policy,” he said. “… We’re going to be facing a nuclear-armed force that will be using nuclear weapons at a highly integrated fashion with its conventional forces, so all of these things converge on the need to revisit the nuclear modernization program. As you can see, because of the convergence of everything needing to be modernized at the same time—and not only the delivery systems and the nuclear weapons, but also the command and control—that it’s unaffordable at our current budgets, and as a result, the modernization program is stretched out over a period of two decades, and that’s probably not going to be acceptable to the Congress.”
