Alissa Tabirian
NS&D Monitor
7/31/2015
Expanding the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty to include countries in Europe and Asia will offset power imbalances and encourage Russia’s compliance, two experts said Monday at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). “Right now the INF Treaty issue is a diplomatic issue between the United States and Russia, but if the Russians are going to proceed to develop a new intermediate-range missile, that’s not going to be a direct threat to the United States,” said Steven Pifer, director of the Arms Control and Nonproliferation Initiative at the Brookings Institution. The threat is greater for much of Europe, China, and Japan, he said, so “the objective here should be to take this bilateralism between Washington and Moscow, and make it a multilateral problem for the Russians.”
The 1987 INF Treaty required the United States and then-Soviet Union to eliminate any ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles with ranges of 500 to 5,500 kilometers. In a June 5 report, the Obama administration said Russia since last year has been in violation of its treaty obligation “not to possess, produce, or flight-test” these ground-launched cruise missiles, although it has not provided details of the circumstances. Russia also alleged last year that the United States is violating the treaty by deploying certain launch systems, testing target missiles, and developing armed drones. Paul Schwartz, senior associate of the Russia and Eurasia Program at CSIS, said “some fear that the collapse of the INF Treaty . . . might even lead to a collapse of the arms control regime in general” and “drive the U.S. and Russia into a costly arms race.”
Schwartz said that despite there being “a good chance” of Russian engagement with the treaty over time, “[Russians] may very well just elect to unilaterally withdraw . . . in the near term.” He added that Russia is more likely to comply “with agreements where they have more parity with the U.S.” with regard to the number and type of weapons allowable. Moscow is now “concerned about an imbalance,” primarily with NATO and the U.S., which could be addressed by arms control efforts that include other countries such as China, he said. “Arms control here would mean potentially expanding and multilateralizing the INF Treaty to bring in some of these new powers, and that’s an approach that the U.S. and Russia are both on board with, at least in principle,” Schwartz said.
Pifer said one way to address this noncompliance, in addition to “economic and military measures,” is for the U.S. to share threat information “not just with European allies and Asian allies, but other countries such as China” that would be at greater risk from intermediate-range missiles from Russia. The ultimate goal for the U.S. is “to bring Russia back into full compliance with the treaty,” Pifer said. “Failing that, if the Russians continue with the violation, the goal is to ensure that Russia achieves no significant military advantage as a result of the violation,” he said.
Another strategy, “something that the administration has not done yet,” Pifer said, is to call a meeting of the INF Special Verification Commission (SVC). The SVC, a compliance resolution mechanism created by Article XIII of the treaty, has not been convened since the U.S.-Russian allegations of treaty noncompliance, which Pifer said is the result of officials regarding it as a technical body rather than a political entity. “But I would still argue that it is a bit odd that the body that was set up by the treaty for addressing compliance questions has not yet met,” he said. Pifer added that “unfortunately at this point I don’t see serious evidence that the Russians want to find a way forward” through the commission.
