WASHINGTON — The Barack Obama administration’s National Nuclear Security Administration leadership duo whipped the Donald Trump administration here Wednesday to immediately extend the New START nuclear arms control treaty with Russia and forget, for now, about modifying the pact.
The bilateral treaty, which limits Moscow and Washington to 1,550 deployed strategic nuclear warheads and 700 fielded delivery systems, will expire on Feb. 5, 2021, unless the presidents of the United States and the Russian Federation agree to extend it through Feb. 5, 2026.
The Trump administration has said it wants to either expand New START to include curbs on China’s nuclear arsenal and Russia’s nonstrategic warheads, or replace the accord with a new multilateral deal that does the same. China, which analysts estimate has far fewer nuclear weapons than the U.S. and Russia, has said it will not join any nuclear arms control treaty.
“It’s certainly a worthy goal and worthy objective from an arms control perspective to have the Chinese involved, but I think it’s going to take a lot longer than a year-and-a-half that’s left before the expiration of New START,” retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Frank Klotz, who led the NNSA from April 2014 to January 2018, said during a question-and-answer session after a breakfast speech hosted by the Air Force Association’s Mitchell Institute.
China has just under 300 nuclear warheads, the nonprofit Federation of American Scientists estimated last year. The United States and Russia were each fielding in the neighborhood of 1,400 warheads on long-range delivery vehicles as of March 1, according to the latest numbers from the U.S. State Department.
“If you try to reopen and renegotiate the New START treaty in the time you have left, I think the chances of that happening are small to nil,” Klotz’s former top deputy at the NNSA, Madelyn Creedon, said during the same breakfast. “There’s not enough time. Look how long it took even to negotiate and ratify New START, which on its face was a fairly simple treaty and was still terribly contested” in the U.S. Senate.
White House national security adviser John Bolton, an avowed opponent of arms control agreements, has said the Trump administration is “unlikely” to extend New START.
The House and Senate this session have come up with very different takes on the treaty.
The GOP-controlled Senate in June passed a 2020 National Defense Authorization Act that would direct the Defense Department to study threats posed by Russian and Chinese nuclear weapons not covered by the treaty. The bill passed easily with strong bipartisan support.
In the House, a Democrat-authored 2020 National Defense Authorization Act would direct the Pentagon to study how leaving New START could harm the United States. The bill passed the Democrat-controlled chamber Thursday on an essentially partisan vote of 220-197.
Russian officials from President Vladimir Putin on down have said they favor extending New START, provided Washington indulges Moscow’s technical concerns about certain modifications that rendered some U.S. submarine missile tubes and heavy bombers incapable of carrying nuclear weapons.
The Kremlin says the modifications could be reversible; the U.S. has said it will not allow Russia to inspect the modifications closely, and some analysts and nuke-watchers in the U.S. have said New START does not require the modifications to be irreversible.
