The New START—A View from Washington

President Obama and President Medvedev will sign the new START agreement in Prague on April 8. The arms control treaty reduces the two powers’ deployed nuclear arms and could possibly signal progress in Obama’s goal of moving toward a world without nuclear weapons and strengthening ties between the United States and Russia.

In a new video Q&A, Matthew Rojansky analyzes the new START, evaluates the U.S.–Russia reset, and outlines what needs to happen for the treaty to be ratified. The treaty is a small first step and provides concrete and tangible progress in bilateral relations, says Rojansky. And it addresses the biggest existential threat the United States faces—Russia’s nuclear arsenal.

Also, watch Alexei Arbatov’s view from Moscow on the new START.
 

• What’s the history of the new START treaty?
   
• How significant is the new nuclear arms deal between Russia and the United States?
   
• Will the treaty impact U.S. national security?
   
• Why did negotiations last longer than originally anticipated?
   
• What does the treaty mean for the U.S.-Russian relationship? What is the status of the U.S.-Russia reset?
   
• What’s next? What is needed for the treaty to be ratified?

What’s the history of the new START treaty?

U.S.–Russian bilateral nuclear arms control dates back to the height of the Cold War. It began in the late 1950s and into the 1960s and 1970s. First we had first SALT I and then SALT II. We had the first START treaty in 1991 and we actually had two follow-on START treaties in the 1990s. The Russians pulled out of the final START treaty after the United States abrogated its side of the anti-missile defense treaty.

We also had the treaty of Moscow, that’s a 2002 treaty known as SORT. This was a much more top level, almost an executive agreement, between then Presidents Putin and Bush to enshrine what they had already done on a unilateral basis, which was to cut both sides’ arsenals.

The new START is really a return to the tradition of in-depth, bilateral arms control. Think about President Reagan’s phrase, “trust but verify.” Very detailed verification provisions—this is much more in line with what we’ve historically done than the post-Cold War model of SORT we saw early in the last decade.

The new START treaty has been necessary for some time because there was a time horizon on the previous START treaty. It expired on December 5, 2009. The Bush administration knew that they needed to get going on negotiating something new, but they didn’t get too far with the Russians. It was a bad time, obviously there was the Georgia crisis over the summer before the 2008 U.S. election—that really sent U.S.–Russian relations to a low point and this is tough stuff to do.

The Obama administration, as part of its broader both nuclear agenda and U.S.–Russia agenda, which includes this notion of a reset of the relationship, launched into these negotiations. The two presidents at their first meeting in London in the summer of 2009 essentially set up the framework for what the deal was going to look like. They followed that up in a subsequent meeting announcing some of the numbers, so it was broadly known for some time what the outlines of this deal would be, but what people had forgotten—because in fact it has been over a decade—is just how difficult it is to do in-depth, verified, transparent arms control in the way that we did it during the Cold War.

And that’s what has been so challenging with the process. It did drag on for something around a year. There were over ten full-on negotiating sessions between the U.S. and Russian teams. These involved bringing in some pretty heavy hitters, including the Secretary of State, National Security Advisor, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and numerous under secretaries and assistant secretaries have been involved. This has been a very complex process for both sides going on for a year now.

What we know at this point from the information that has come out of the White House about the treaty is that the numbers are going to be roughly a 30 percent reduction of deployed strategic warheads. We are going from 2200 as the top end under the SORT treaty in 2002 to 1550. On both sides there is going to be a combined limit of 800 launchers—this includes everything from an ICBM, a silo in the ground that launches a missile up into space, to submarine launched ballistic missiles, to strategic bombers.  

Interesting detail on strategic bombers, each bomber is going to be counted as one missile. So even if it is carrying multiple bombs, multiple warheads, multiple cruise missiles, the bomber itself will be counted as one. This is one of those intricacies, an artifact of the counting rules. That’s because we live in an era where strategic bombers don't do too much good in the nuclear deterrence context. They are too slow. By the time a strategic bomber gets across the ocean to where it needs to be, the conflict is over. Also, air defenses have advanced dramatically, so it’s a bit of a holdover.

In terms of the verification and transparency rules, we are going to see a lot of what existed under the START I regime in terms of delegations being sent over to actually physically observe and verify on the ground.    

There is also some of this self-reporting, the idea that telemetry data, which is information about what a missile launch looks like, is going to be released by both sides, I believe five times, and it's going to be at the discretion of each side when they release that data. The argument is we don’t really need that information anyway, we have other intelligence sources that allow us to figure out what is going on.  

We are in a different era in respect to the U.S.-Russia relationship, so more stringent requirements maybe weren’t necessary.

How significant is the new nuclear arms deal between Russia and the United States?

This is an important first step on several major policy goals for the Obama administration. The first policy goal is the U.S.–Russia relationship. The fact is that while we face many serious national security threats, the Russian nuclear arsenal is the single greatest existential threat, as such, that the United States faces. That doesn’t mean that the Russians are going to use nuclear weapons anytime soon or that they are going to intentionally give them to someone else who would use them.

But the simple fact that the existence of these thousands of weapons, many of which are deployed and aimed on hair trigger alert at American cities, is in and of itself an existential threat that we, as responsible decision makers, cannot ignore.

That’s why bilateral arms control is necessary. This ties into the second big reason that we recognized, very wisely on a bipartisan basis, that after the end of the Cold War, with the former Soviet Union disintegrating into post-Soviet independent states, there was a real risk of the massive Soviet weapons of mass destruction infrastructure—particularly their nuclear weapons, nuclear material, and nuclear know-how—falling into the wrong hands.

So, very wisely led by Senators Nunn and Lugar, Presidents Bush and Clinton, we made significant investments in helping the Russians lock down and secure their material as well as the other former Soviet states.

Here’s the problem—if you lose the core bilateral instrument controlling the Russian nuclear arsenal itself, it’s at the center of that broader universe of nuclear materials, nuclear expertise, and research facilities. All of which themselves pose potential dangers of proliferation, but if you lose the core instrument that ensures transparency—we know what they’re making, what they’re deploying, where they’re keeping things, how many they have, where they are aimed, when they use them, when they test them—if we don’t know those things, and we won’t know those things without a treaty, then it makes little sense to be doing this type of cooperative threat reduction around the margins.

This is a real justification of investment that we’ve been making for two decades.

The Russians responded to the U.S.–Russia reset by calling for an entire operating system. They obviously think that this is not just a matter of pressing a button and the United States understands that, too. It depends on delivering concrete progress.

Look at the START treaty as one more notch and there have been a few others. An example would be the U.S.–Russian agreement to allow transit of lethal force through Russian territory to be used in Afghanistan. That was a major accomplishment—that agreement is being operationalized now.

You add this new START deal to that and it starts to look like, rather than just being rhetoric, the U.S.-Russia reset is potentially real. But there is a long way to go.

These are two presidents—President Obama and President Medvedev—who understand how to work with their bureaucracies. They’ve set up a bilateral presidential commission which has over a dozen working groups dealing with everything ranging from energy, space, and science to counterterrorism. All of these areas have been moved toward a more normal relationship, the type of relationship that normal countries have in this world.  

We can cooperate in all of these areas. We are two large and important global powers and it only makes sense.

Will the treaty impact U.S. national security?

The treaty is designed from the standpoint of U.S. national security to lock down the single biggest threat to the United States on an existential level, which is the Russian nuclear arsenal. I think beyond that some concerns have been raised about what it doesn’t allow us to do that might make us safer. I don’t think these are big concerns.

For one thing, we are maintaining an arsenal that is many times greater than what we need for deterrence. That’s really the core purpose for nuclear weapons. Second, this treaty says nothing about tactical nuclear weapons. If anything, there is still a real threat out there from Russia’s tactical nuclear arsenal. The United States is not constrained in anyway in terms of its smaller tactical nuclear arsenal.

While the treaty does contain language about the interrelationship between strategic offensive and defensive capabilities—basically missile defense—U.S. officials have said consistently that it’s not a constraint on our ability to continue President Obama’s phased deployment of missile defense, particularly in southern Europe, to defend against a potential Iranian rogue missile launch.  

That’s really the big concern on the American side. The concern on the Russian side is that we might degrade their deterrent capability, but we are so far technically from a situation where that would be possible that this treaty doesn’t really muddy the waters.

Why did negotiations last longer than originally anticipated?

Some of the big issues that arose after the two presidents agreed on the basic outlines in terms of the numbers, launchers, warheads, etc. were about verification. What kind of information would be shared, when it would be shared, who would have access to it, and so on.

And really the challenge there is to bridge the gap between the original START agreement going back to the history of SALT and SALT II and the Reagan “trust but verify” era, where the onus was really on verify, not on trust. To the Bush-Putin relationship in 2002 when the SORT treaty really put the onus on trust. That was a three-page document that didn’t look anything like a traditional arms control treaty and yet it was a recognition that we are in a different era.

This is not a time when the United States and Russia are not fundamentally interested in a nuclear first-strike capability. It does us absolutely no good to contemplate that. The Russians have no interest in destroying the United States. On both sides the concern is solely defensive and deterrent. To the extent that’s the case, it does make sense to include a level of trust in our mutual intentions not to use these weapons.

In a lot of ways this treaty bridges that gap. It’s a twenty-first century treaty. The verification mechanisms are very modern, but they do draw on some of the lessons we have learned earlier when there was less trust between the two sides. There was less knowledge—Americans didn’t routinely travel to Russia.

So, if an arms control verification team was going to go to Russia, it wasn’t just the arms control part that was new to them—it was everything. It was being in Russia. It was the language, it was the culture, it was the nature of the society—we didn’t know anything about what was going on over there. Today, it is really just the arms control part. Both sides have made some concessions there, as is wont to happen in a negotiation.

We have a verification regime that makes a lot of sense. That’s what took a long time to do and that’s why we didn't see signature in the summer or the fall as President Obama was originally hoping.

What does the treaty mean for the U.S.-Russian relationship? What is the status of the U.S.-Russia reset?

The theory of the reset is to not only repair some of the damage that the U.S.–Russia relationship suffered in the late Bush administration, where we had conflicts over NATO expansion, missile defense, Georgia, the near-abroad of Russia. We had some very concrete disagreements, but we also stopped talking to each other.

The U.S.–Russia reset is about normalizing this relationship so that the United States and Russia are communicating about a broad range of issues. What START does for us is it demonstrates concrete, tangible progress.

That’s extremely important for Americans, particularly on Capitol Hill, to see that there is some real meat to this policy, it’s not just rhetoric. The president has taken a lot of heat on being all bark and no bite.

It’s important for the Russian side, too, to see that there are tangible, deliverable results that come from collaborating closely with the United States. The other very big example when it comes to national security is that the United States and Russia have a transit agreement that allows the United States to send lethal supplies to Afghanistan going through Russian air space, which is a very important addition to the capabilities that we have now.

What’s next? What is needed for the treaty to be ratified?

In terms of the treaty itself, it is essentially done. What needs to go up to Capitol Hill for ratification will be completed by the time of signature which means if they have any additional protocols, any additional interpretations of any minor details, everything is going to be signed, sealed, and delivered by April 8 in Prague when the two presidents attach their names to the document.

Then it will go up to Capitol Hill. There will be hearings, discussions, and debates about ratification. Assuming that ratification succeeds. It’s not a foregone conclusion, but it’s likely. There is bipartisan support for it. It’s in a long tradition of strong, overwhelming bipartisan support for arms control treaties between the United States and Russia. I think it will happen.

The Russians need to ratify it, as well. Then it will come into force. That will bring the 2002 treaty of Moscow out of force. And then the questions of the next steps depend on politics. A lot of folks who are strong supporters of arms control and disarmament have talked about this treaty being a small first step, but the next, next treaty being really where the onus is. Can the United States and Russia commit to making much greater cuts to our still bloated nuclear arsenals?

Can we bring in issues that we didn’t touch before like tactical nuclear weapons, battlefield weapons? There are literally thousands of these in the world that are not covered at all in the current START treaty. Most of them in the hands of the Russians and some in our hands as well.

Can we deal with the stockpile of nuclear weapons? This treaty says nothing about weapons that are stored in a stockpile. So even if you are reducing your deployed arsenal by 30 percent, does it make too big of a difference if you just move it to the garage and keep it under lock and key in the garage. You could always bring it back out again.

So the rest of the world that is watching the superpowers—the United States and former Soviet Union, now Russia—disarming these massive Cold War arsenals are asking more fundamental questions.

Does this mean that we are moving toward the promised reduction to zero in the non-proliferation treaty? President Obama and President Medvedev have both enunciated their goal of getting to zero nuclear weapons, so the world is watching to see whether they are sincere. That has yet to be seen.

There are three major challenges facing the United States and this administration in terms of next steps after START. The first is that those people who strongly supported the administration in bringing the START negotiations to a close and getting a signed treaty may not be totally satisfied with what they’ve got.

This is a small first step for a lot of folks who are strong supporters of arms control and disarmament. It’s not just the Americans in the left of the Democratic Party who would like to see a lot more nuclear weapons eliminated, it’s also our allies, partners, some of the aspiring nuclear states around the world that are sitting back and looking at the framework of the non-proliferation treaty which is a basic bargain that says that those countries who don’t have will agree not to acquire them, but those countries that do have them will take serious steps toward eliminating them.

We struck that deal 40 years ago and we’re pretty far from totally eliminating our nuclear arsenals and this, while it signals a commitment to doing so, numerically, it doesn't get us a lot closer. That’s a major challenge and it’s going to be a real political issue at the NPT review conference in May. 

Challenge number two is on the Russian side. The Russians are genuinely and seriously concerned about missile defense. Their watchword is parity. They want to be at equal capability with the United States both in terms of offensive weapons and to the extent that defensive capabilities limit the effectiveness of an offensive capability they’re going to compensate for that. So they've limited themselves to the same basic terms as the United States has in terms of offensive nuclear capability.

Their concern is that if we go ahead and erect a ballistic missile defense shield in Europe that could potentially compromise their ability to launch a strike against the United States, they might have to do something to compensate for that and that might include withdrawing from the START treaty. So that’s a real potential danger. Certainly the rhetoric around that when the Russian Duma considers ratification, potentially in response to a ratification fight in the U.S. Senate, could be quite negative. I would hate to see this treaty start to unravel before it’s even come into force.

The challenge that START faces in terms of the ratification in the U.S. Senate is there are strong signals from most of the president’s Democratic allies that they’re going to vote in favor. There is a long tradition of bipartisan support for arms control. This treaty fits into that tradition.

The ranking member on foreign relations, Senator Lugar, who by all accounts is the dean of arms control on the Republican side, has signaled his strong support. That means there will be bipartisan hearings in Senate Foreign Relations about this treaty. We’re set up for a good, robust, bipartisan conversation about the treaty. 

I think the treaty will get 67 votes. Here’s the challenge. In getting to 67 and getting as many votes as possible beyond 67, because you want to put a strong face forward, what are the compromises that will need to be made by the administration and treaty supporters in the Senate? Those compromises—be they about missile defense, be they about investments in the nuclear stockpile, potentially even making new nuclear weapons in the future to satisfy those who think we have to have new nuclear weapons in order to be secure—those  could potentially very significantly tie the administration’s hands and weaken it politically when it goes into the non-proliferation treaty review conference in May.