Source: Carnegie
When George Bush and Boris Yeltsin signed START II in the snows of Moscow in January 1993, Yeltsin called it "the treaty of hope." It was the most sweeping arms reduction pact in history, slashing in half the number of deployed nuclear missiles and bombers and eliminating the most dangerous and destabilizing weapons of the Cold War, the multiple-warhead land-based missiles. Into the dustbin of history would go both American MX missiles and Soviet SS-18s, each armed with ten warheads, each warhead 20-30 times the power of the Hiroshima bomb. The tilt of the treaty in favor of the United States didn’t worry Yeltsin. That was the old agenda; Russia and America were now to be partners in rebuilding Russia and integrating it into the economic prosperity of the West. Markets, not missiles, were the new currency of global power.
Almost six years later, President Bill Clinton and Yeltsin will politely ignore the pact at their Moscow summit this week. The treaty and the process are dying. We took nuclear reductions for granted. The Clinton Administration dithered away its first two years without submitting the treaty for Senate ratification. Then, hard-line Republican conservatives used their new control of Congress to oppose ratification until wiser leadership prevailed in January 1996.
By then, NATO enlargement, proposals for national missile defense, Balkan disputes and dashed economic expectations had soured the US-Russian relationship. Forces hostile to Yeltsin controlled the Duma and there, too, ratification of a treaty that seemed in everyone’s interest became perpetually enmeshed in political struggles, government re-shuffles and budget bargaining. Now, the Russian economic panic and Yeltsin’s weakness threaten to disintegrate the step-by-step nuclear reduction process begun by Richard Nixon and accelerated by Ronald Reagan and George Bush.
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We don’t know how much time we have to destroy, lock-up, or remove the weapons we have spent decades fearing and billions defending against.
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The Nuclear Stakes in Russia’s Crisis
Russia is not Indonesia. A political and economic collapse would means much more than depressed stock prices. Russia still has over 20,000 nuclear weapons scattered over 90 sites, including 6,250 deployed long-range missile and bomber weapons. Thousands of these systems are still on hair-trigger alert, ready to launch at the United States in 15 minutes. Russia’s nuclear command and control is deteriorating as budget cuts prevent maintenance and replacement of key systems. Nuclear scientists are seriously underpaid and increasingly desperate. While Vice-President Al Gore was in Russia this July, thousands of scientists at the "nuclear city" of Arzamas-16 went on strike protesting months without pay. The institute there employs 20,000 people¾ twice the number at the comparable US Los Alamos laboratory ¾ yet has one-twentieth the budget. The danger is that well-financed programs in Iran, Iraq, or even in the mountains of Afghanistan, might buy the services of these experts. If coupled with plutonium stolen or bought from the 715 tons of nuclear material stored in and near Russia (enough for 40,000 weapons), the world could wake up to a new nuclear-weapon power sooner than almost anyone imagines.
Alexander Lebed, the retired general and now governor of the Krasnoyarsk region foreshadowed another dangerous possibility last month. He wrote then-Prime Minister Kiriyenko saying he was considering taking control of the nuclear weapons stationed in his province. Referring to the back pay owed the troops guarding the weapons, he said, "We could feed the formation and become a headache for the world community along with India and Pakistan."
Nuclear Solutions
First priority, of course, goes to resolving the overall economic and political crisis. But even with both beleaguered presidents fighting daily battles with their opposition-controlled legislatures, there are still steps that could avert the worst case scenarios.
- First, President Clinton could leapfrog, but not abandon, START II. By finalizing the next step in the reduction process—a quick START III agreement—and setting the goal at 1000 deployed strategic systems, (half the 2,000 to 2,500 ceiling he set at the Helsinki summit in 1997), he and Yeltsin would eliminate most of the Duma arguments against the pact, and get rid of many more Russian weapons while political conditions still make this possible. Both treaties could then be ratified in tandem. Ironically, Communist participation in a new Russian cabinet might help assure Duma ratification, if Clinton encourages the new administration to make it a priority.
- Second, we need senior leadership dedicated to policy towards Russia, with the budgets to back them up. The Nunn-Lugar program provides $400 million a year to help secure poorly guarded nuclear materials and destroy nuclear missiles, bombers and subs under the existing agreements. This program could easily be doubled or tripled, including new aid to generate civilian work for nuclear city scientists (one of the few programs likely to be accelerated at the summit).
- Third, and at the very least, the U.S. and Russia could begin to stand down their deployed nuclear systems to reduce the chance of accidental or inadvertent launch. Hundreds or thousands of the systems could be taken off high alert without compromising the ability of either power to quickly use a nuclear weapon in the remote chance that it would want to do so.
We must start approaching the nuclear problems with the urgency they deserve. Russia is the largest warehouse in the world of nuclear weapons, materials and expertise. We don’t know how much time we have to destroy, lock-up or remove the weapons we spent decades fearing and billions of dollars defending against. The current crisis is an ominous sign that the window may be closing.
Joseph Cirincione is the Director of the Non-Proliferation Project at the Carnegie Endowment.
