Five years after entry into force of the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, it is clear that what was hoped to be the beginning of a new set of major U.S.-Russian nuclear arms control treaties will instead be the first and last under the Obama administration.
President Barack Obama early in his tenure laid out an ambitious nonproliferation agenda intended to encompass multiple bilateral and multilateral treaties. While the end result remains contentious – many arms control advocates arguing the U.S. did not go far enough in cutting its massive nuclear arsenal, others charging Obama weakened the nation’s security – State Department officials say the administration’s success in nuclear security extends well beyond New START. And they, along with independent experts, say time has not necessarily run out for some final moves before the president leaves office in just over 11 months.
“He’s a human being, he’s going to get greedy” for additional accomplishments to top off his two terms, said Jeffrey Lewis, director of the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies’ East Asia Nonproliferation Program. “I think he’ll succumb to that like every president, so maybe some of this will be on his agenda.”
A State Department official said the administration has made clear it intends to “run through the tape. We’re not going to slow down or sit on the sidelines. We’re going to be looking for opportunities to make progress, and we’re going to do so.” While the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said he could not discuss specifics of future planning, he said Obama’s proposal from a June 2013 speech in Berlin – that the United States could reduce U.S. deployed strategic weapons by up to one-third without weakening its deterrent – was still on the table.
“We’re willing to pursue further discussions with other governments, including Russia, as to ways we might make progress on the president’s agenda,” the official said.
With less than a year to go and facing the GOP-led Congress and heightened tensions with Russia, any new arms control treaty seems highly doubtful. But Obama has repeatedly demonstrated his willingness to work around Congress to achieve policy ends. There are a number of options at his disposal, issue observers said; whether he uses them will be known no later than Jan. 20, 2017.
Large Ambitions
Just months after taking office, Obama gave a highly touted address in Prague in which he spoke of a world without nuclear weapons. Toward that admittedly far-off day, the president said the then-planned U.S.-Russian new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty “will set the stage for further cuts, and we will seek to include all nuclear weapons states in this endeavor.” He also pledged to quickly and assertively seek U.S. ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, as well as to push forward a long-moribund global treaty halting production of fissile material for use in nuclear arms.
Obama and then-Russian President Dmitry Medvedev in 2010 signed New START, which commits their nations by February 2018 to hold no more than 700 deployed ICBMs, submarine-launched ballistic missiles, and heavy bombers; 1,500 fielded strategic warheads; and 800 deployed and nondeployed long-range launchers. The U.S. Senate followed with a strong show of support for ratification that year, a 71-26 vote that included support from more than a dozen GOP lawmakers. The treaty took effect on Feb. 5, 2011; as of the latest numbers from the State Department, Moscow is well under the deployed delivery system cap at 526 and Washington has dipped just under the warhead limit at 1,538, but the governments are otherwise still working to bring their numbers in line with the treaty mandate. Both sides expect to do so ahead of the deadline, the State Department official said.
“I’m proud to report as one of the lead negotiators of the New START Treaty that the hard work put in by the dedicated professionals on both the U.S. and Russian delegations was time well spent,” Rose Gottemoeller, U.S. undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, said in a prepared statement to NS&D Monitor. “The Treaty has proven its worth and worked as advertised over its first five years of implementation despite the downturn in bilateral relations.”
Lewis characterized New START as an “OK” beginning that was hemmed in because Obama came into office with less than a year before the original START deal expired. The need to quickly enact a successor treaty meant concessions were made in areas such as verification, he said.
“It was good for what it was … but the failure was in just stopping there,” Lewis added in a telephone interview.
Others were less enthusiastic. National Institute for Public Policy Senior Analyst Mark Schneider in a December lecture called New START the worst arms control treaty in three decades, saying it has left the United States ill-prepared to deal with Russia’s nuclear forces restructuring and aggression. He and others also argue that Russia could exploit loopholes in the document – for example, New START counts one bomber as a single nuclear weapon, though the aircraft can hold multiple bombs – to push its actual numbers higher than those laid out in the treaty.
Years after New START, Gottemoeller and other administration officials were still discussing the next steps in U.S.-Russian and global nuclear arms control. But the White House’s greatest ambitions did not come to pass –the Kremlin could not be lured into another round of talks, a State Department effort to inform lawmakers and the American public about the benefits of the CTBT has not transformed into a full-blown ratification campaign, and the fissile materials cutoff treaty remains mired in the U.N. Conference on Disarmament.
The obstacles between Russia and the United States “have been numerous and mostly originate with Russia,” according to Kingston Reif, director for disarmament and threat reduction policy at the Arms Control Association. “Russia’s insistence on linking any further reductions to resolution of its concerns over US missile defense in Europe, advanced conventional weapons, and third party nuclear arsenals (such as China, France, and the UK); the deterioration of relations between the two countries in the wake of Russia’s aggression against Ukraine; the great (and in some disturbing respects increasing) value that Russia places on its nuclear arsenal; the return of Vladimir Putin to the presidency; Russia’s apparent satisfaction with arms control status quo (at least until New START is set to expire in 2021); and Russia’s violation of the INF treaty.”
Russia under Putin has made clear its disinterest in further nuclear arms reductions, Schneider said. “They got everything they wanted with New START and they don’t want to make more reductions,” he said in a telephone interview.
It’s possible Washington has quietly offered proposals to the Putin government, only to have them rebuffed, Lewis said.
The State Department official characterized New START as significant achievement on its own, curbing the nations’ strategic weaponry and ensuring insight into each other’s arsenals through 180 inspections to date and more than 10,300 notifications on matters such as the status, location, and movement of nuclear forces. This has been particularly crucial as the bilateral relationship has deteriorated, the official said. He noted that even as Moscow and Washington have traded accusations of breaching the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, they have not retreated from their obligations under New START.
The treaty verification regime offers insight into Russia’s day-to-day strategic forces operations, which is key for stability to avoid misunderstandings or “worst-case analysis” in a downtown in the bilateral relationship, the State Department official said. “Understanding what you are seeing contributes to stability.”
The treaty should also be seen a component of broader achievements in nuclear security, the State Department says. The official listed several examples: the Nuclear Security Summit process, in which participating nations have made a host of commitments to reduce the danger of nuclear terrorism and secure sensitive materials; the multilateral negotiations that resulted in Iran rolling back its nuclear program; and most recently initiation of the International Partnership for Nuclear Disarmament Verification, in which nuclear-armed nations and non-nuclear states collaborate to strengthen monitoring of nuclear disarmament.
“Although not everything in the Prague agenda was accomplished, I think we are making progress towards those things that have not been achieved,” the State Department official said.
Just this month Gottemoeller said she was still working to educate the American public regarding the value of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, the Albuquerque Journal reported.
What’s Next?
The Senate would have to approve ratification for the U.S. to join the CTBT, something it proved unwilling to do in 1999 by a largely party-line vote of 51-48. While the treaty’s proponents say that improvements in nuclear blast detection technology and other advances should resolve the issues that scuttled U.S. ratification nearly 17 years ago, GOP lawmakers have appeared unconvinced.
The United States is among a number of nations that must ratify the treaty before it can enter into force. In the meantime, the government has an informal moratorium on nuclear explosive testing, using the Stockpile Stewardship Program to sustain the nuclear arsenal.
Lewis, though, pointed to a 2012 Carnegie Endowment for International Peace report for examples of measures that could be taken without assent from Capitol Hill to reduce nuclear dangers. These include:
- Yearly U.S. declarations to Russia on its missile defense plans, among other information-sharing add-ons;
- A pledge by Washington not to target Russian or Chinese nuclear forces with conventional military power; and
- Resuming data exchanges on sea-launched cruise missiles.
Reif said, even in the absence of a functioning CTBT, the United States could reinforce the global norm against nuclear weapons testing via a U.N. resolution. He also urged “common sense and cost-effective” pullbacks from the current projected $350 billion, decade-long U.S. plan for strategic forces operations. The administration should also initiate a global dialogue on nuclear restraint and disarmament, Reif said.
“Obama should call for other nuclear-armed states to freeze the overall size of their stockpiles as the United States and Russia reduce theirs. He should signal support for a new, UN-mandated ‘open-ended working group’ on disarmament, and/or a series of expert- and political-level multilateral nuclear disarmament summits involving nuclear-armed and non-nuclear-weapon states,” he said.
When it comes to Russia, a follow-up deal on strategic and tactical nuclear forces (the latter an aspect the administration hoped to wrap into follow-on negotiations) would likely be precipitated only by the nation’s economic collapse or the U.S. scrapping New START to pressure the Kremlin to returning to the table, Schneider argued: “But the administration won’t do it.”
“They’re still living in a fairy-tale world about that one,” he said. “As long as [the Russians] believe that there’s no penalty for violating agreements, they’re not going to be put under any pressure to do it … they’re just not going to do anything.”
