The Russian Federation appeared this week to support an unconditional and immediate extension of the New START nuclear arms-control treaty with the United States in the next three weeks or so, according to an official translation on the Kremlin’s website.
“Russia is ready to immediately, as soon as possible, right before the end of this year, without any preconditions, extend the START-3 treaty,” Russian President Vladimir Putin said during a Thursday meeting in Moscow, the transcript says.
“So that there would be no further double, triple interpretation regarding our position, I say this officially,” Putin added.
Russia calls New START, which took effect in 2011, START-3. The treaty, negotiated by the Barack Obama administration, will lapse after February 2, 2021, unless the U.S. and Russian presidents agree to extend it for five years into 2026. If the treaty’s hard caps on deployed weapons were lifted, it could affect the National Nuclear Security Administration’s workload, insofar as Congress could legalize force postures and new weapon configurations that might compete with existing modernization plans for funding.
The Donald Trump administration had not officially responded to Putin’s apparent offer at deadline Friday for Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor. Trump himself, during a meeting of NATO heads of state in London this week, repeated his longstanding preference for a new nuclear arms-control deal that constrains the arsenals of the U.S., Russia, and China.
China, holding a much smaller nuclear arsenal that either the U.S. or Russia, has said it will not joint a New START successor treaty.
On Wednesday in Washington, a day before Moscow publicly dangled a clean New START extension, one Republican lawmaker added his voice to the chorus urging Trump to keep the treaty.
While “New START is not perfect,” Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas) said during a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing on the treaty, “[w]e need to ensure that New START is extended in a responsible matter.”
McCaul, the committee’s ranking member, handily won re-election in 2018 to represent a congressional district Trump carried by nearly 10 percentage points in 2016.
McCaul hailed New START’s mandatory inspections and verification measures, with which the U.S. State Department has said Moscow has complied, and without which the department has warned the U.S. would know less about the only nuclear arsenal that rivals its own in destructive power.
“I find that very instructive here today,” McCaul said.
Signed by then-U.S. President Barack Obama and then-Russian President Dmitry Medvedev in 2010, New START limits the United States and Russia to deploying no more than 1,550 warheads across 700 intercontinental ballistic missiles, submarine-launched ballistic missiles, and heavy bombers. The countries may possess no more than 800 strategic delivery systems, under the pact.
China has around 300 nuclear warheads and 255 launchers, most of which have intercontinental range, according to estimates from the Federation of American Scientists, a Washington-based nonprofit organization that tracks nuclear weapons globally.
Aside from not including China, the Trump administration has criticized the Obama-era treaty for not limiting Russia’s use of tactical and so-called exotic nuclear weapons. The former refers to weapons intended mainly for battlefield use, the latter to devices such as the nuclear-powered, nuclear-armed autonomous undersea vehicle and the nuclear-powered cruise missile Russia has said it is developing.
McCaul did nod at the concerns Trump and other Republicans have raised, but the lawmaker also said he values the insight New START gives the U.S. into Russia’s deployed strategic nuclear forces — those carrying weapons powerful enough to essentially destroy an adversary’s population, economy, and ability to wage war.
In congressional testimony this week, another Trump official repeated the president’s preference for a trilateral treaty to succeed New START. Chris Ford, assistant secretary for international security and nonproliferation, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Tuesday that he would support a New START extension if the extended treaty also constrained China’s nuclear arsenal.
Critics of Trump’s approach to New START negotiations say the administration’s goal of including China in a follow-on treaty is at best imperiling the good-enough in pursuit of the unattainable perfect. At worst, critics say, the approach is intended to sabotage any possibility of extending the deal, as only Trump and Putin can do.
