The third arms-control milestone was the adoption by the U.S. and Russia of a pact scrapping long-range nuclear missiles. Russia’s nuclear arsenal had surpassed America’s in 1978 (when the U.S. level fell below 23,000), and it peaked at around 45,000 weapons in 1986. The end of the Cold War made deep arms reductions possible. Bush Sr. negotiated the first Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) with Gorbachev in 1991. At the time the superpowers had 12,000 deployed strategic nuclear weapons. The treaty cut the total to 6,000, but Bush also unilaterally reduced America’s 6,000 tactical nuclear weapons to 500.
Bush Sr. and Gorbachev’s successor, Boris Yeltsin, signed the START II (De-MIRVing) Treaty in 1993, to replace multiple-warhead missiles with single-warhead missiles. The Senate ratified it 87 to 4 three years later, but—in a case of the Russians practicing linkage—the Duma (parliament) delayed it, protesting the enlargement of NATO into Eastern Europe and the American interventions in Kosovo and Iraq. Though the Duma finally ratified the treaty in 2000, it attached conditions on missile defense that the George W. Bush administration could not accept, and the treaty never came into force.
In 2002, George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin negotiated the steepest weapons cut yet, slashing deployed strategic weapons to 2,200, in a treaty known as Strategic Offensive Reduction Treaty (SORT, or the Moscow Treaty). In the same year Bush exercised America’s legal right to exit the 1972 ABM Treaty upon six months’ notice, a step Moscow did not protest.
President Obama came into office determined to go for nuclear zero sooner rather than later, based upon his belief that all countries have a genuine common interest in abolishing nuclear weapons. But in pushing this goal he has been speeding through yellow caution signals.
In April 2010 he signed the New START Treaty, which cut American nuclear weapons while permitting the Russians to increase theirs, since they were already below the treaty levels—despite the fact that they could not maintain their existing weapons. Further, Russia’s rail-mobile missiles (shuttled around Russia’s vast rural interior) did not count towards treaty limits. Verification was more limited than under START: Russia was required to decrypt telemetry information—radio signals with missile flight data, immensely valuable for understanding how a missile performs in actual flight—for only five missile tests. Thus Russia can conceal data on its newest missiles, about which we know least, by revealing decrypted information only for obsolete models about which we already know a great deal.
In his eagerness to “reset” relations with Russia, Obama threw away all the negotiating leverage that would have enabled him to extract concessions from an economically strapped Moscow. U.S. negotiators allowed treaty preamble language relinking missile defense to offensive deployment—in other words, Russia could assert that U.S. deployment of missile defense negates Russia’s offensive missiles, and thus impairs Russian deterrence. Washington says this language does not legally bind; Moscow says it does. (Russia also objects to the limited missile defense deployments slated for Eastern Europe.) This in practical terms means an unenforceable standoff on missile defense.
Officials selected exclusively by the U.S. and Russia make up the Bilateral Consultative Commission in charge of adjudication. This legal arrangement yielded serial stalemates under SALT I a generation ago, and figures to produce more of the same this time around. The United States is in the odd position of having a legal right dependent upon Russia’s acceptance of guilt. The U.S. has, in effect, the right to sue—but can win only if its adversary admits liability.
In a landmark 1961 article, “After Detection, What?,” nuclear and arms-control strategist Fred C. Ikle, later to become the third-ranking defense official in the Reagan administration, presciently warned that detecting an arms agreement violation is only the beginning:
If the violator resumes testing, the injured country will do likewise; if the violator reoccupies his part of a neutralized zone, the other will move back into his; and if the violator rearms, his opponent will rearm to the same extent.
The problem of deterring violations has often been oversimplified by assuming that a detected evasion would automatically be taken care of by the cancellation of the agreement and the application of such “restorative measures.” But three conditions have to be met if “restorative measures” by themselves are to be an adequate deterrent:
(1) The potential violator must fear the risk of being detected.
(2) He must also fear that a detected violation will cause an unwanted response by the injured country.
(3) He must not expect a violation to bring him an irrevocable advantage that would outweigh whatever gain he derives from abiding by the agreement.
No one effectively sanctioned Soviet violations of Cold War arms pacts. (Circumventing on-site inspection can be easy—as Paul Nitze discussed with a Soviet negotiator in 1969, it takes only six hours to place a warhead on a Russian ICBM.) Enforcing the New START Treaty will run up against the same real-world hurdles that allowed Cold War violations to occur.
The Senate ratified New START in December 2010, but—in contrast to the SORT Treaty, devoid of missile defense language—attached strict conditions. New START as ratified separated missile defense from limits on offensive systems and committed the administration both to fully implement planned missile defense deployments and also to modernize America’s aging nuclear arsenal—regardless of Russian offensive missile deployment.
Such ratification conditions have the same legal effect on the Russians, said former Reagan-era arms-control and international law expert Eugene Rostow, as “a letter from my mother.”
The Political and Principled Limits of Arms Control
ARMS-CONTROL HISTORY gives us common sense political insights about what deals can be negotiated, with whom, and under what circumstances.
1. If an arms treaty is perceived as sound, it will command huge ratification majorities. The 1987 INF, 1991 START I, and 2002 SORT treaties all commanded over 90 ratifying votes—the 2002 vote was 95–0. The SALT I accord won 88 Senate votes. Treaties that got into trouble were those regarded as poor bargains by many senators: unratified SALT II in 1979 and New START in 2010, whose 71–26 vote garnered only 13 of 46 Republicans.
2. The circumstances in which leaders present arms treaties affect how people perceive them. A broad bipartisan consensus that the time had come to find common ground with America’s superpower adversary greeted SALT I, whereas SALT II met a deeply divided public. The INF Treaty and the arms treaties of the Bush Sr., Clinton, and Bush Jr. administrations came when public support was broad, whereas most Republicans sharply opposed New START, and the public—focused on the economy—barely noticed it.