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Russia Violating Nuclear Treaty, U.S. Says By David Francis WASHINGTON — Russia has prevented U.S. inspectors from examining ICBMs to ensure that Moscow is meeting treaty obligations to reduce its nuclear missiles, according to a U.S. State Department review of international disarmament pacts released last week (see GSN, Sept. 7). This and other concerns about Russian compliance with the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty are outlined in the congressionally mandated “Adherence to and Compliance with Arms Control, Nonproliferation, and Disarmament Agreements and Commitments” report. The State Department found Russia to be in violation of several treaty provisions, although steps have been taken to correct some of these problems, according to the report. The report, which covers the two-year period ending in December 2004, says Russia has prevented the United States from inspecting nuclear warhead re-entry vehicles to ensure that Moscow is accurately representing the number of warheads it deploys. The report also finds that Russia has not declared some road-mobile ICBM launchers after they leave production facilities and has moved the launchers to areas more than 60 miles away from the production facility, a violation of the treaty. The report does not specify whether the launchers are carrying missiles. Finally, Russia has stopped U.S. inspectors from examining launch canisters to determine if any are carrying a missile, and failed to share required telemetry information following ICBM tests, according to the report. All of these actions are violations of the START Treaty, the report says. The treaty, signed in 1991 by the United States and the Soviet Union, aims to reduce the number of strategic weapons deployed in each country. Following the fall of the Soviet Union, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine agreed to transfer all nuclear warheads in their territory to Russia and to destroy any nuclear delivery vehicles according to the terms of the treaty. The State Department attributes Russia’s noncompliance to differing interpretations of the treaty. “A number of these issues, some of which originated as early as the first year of treaty implementation, highlight the different interpretations of the parties about how to implement the complex inspection and verification provisions of the START Treaty,” the report says. For example, along with blocking inspection of identified warhead re-entry vehicles, Russia has not allowed the United States to examine covered objects so that the United States is satisfied that the objects are not re-entry vehicles. Russian personnel have instead used radiation detectors to prove the items are not carrying nuclear ICBMs, according to the report. Progress has been made in correcting some of these problems. The United States and Russia has come to an interim agreement in which Russia has allowed inspections of road-mobile ICBM launchers during construction and before they were moved to restricted areas. The United States finds this solution acceptable and considers the issue closed, according to the report. Russia and the United States have come to a similar arrangement in regards to examining launch canisters. While details of the agreement have not been revealed, the report said the issue has been addressed with the compromise. The telemetry issue, however, remains open. “The United States has raised several concerns regarding Russia’s failure to provide all treaty-required telemetry materials for some START-accountable flight tests in violation” of the treaty, the report said without providing details of the transgressions. Russia’s Foreign Ministry rejected the report’s findings, RIA Novosti reported. “Those are not new accusations,” the Foreign Ministry said last week in a statement. “The Russian Foreign Ministry has had to comment on similar points in other ‘research papers’ that put Russia in a group of countries violating nonproliferation agreements without providing any evidence many times before.” Wade Boese, research director at the Arms Control Association, concurred that the State Department’s findings are not new. “It doesn’t differ much from previous reports,” Boese said. “These are long-standing issues we’ve had with the Russian implementation of START.” “They list relatively minor things,” he continued. “Clearly they’re below the [ICBM] limits.” The treaty required Russia and the United States to deploy fewer than 1,600 nuclear delivery vehicles and 6,000 warheads by December 2001. Russia is now estimated to have 3,814 strategic nuclear warheads, including 2,270 on ICBMs, 672 deployed on submarines and 872 that could be delivered by bombers, according to a Natural Resources Defense Council estimate. Boese said he was surprised that such minor verification infractions are listed in the report considering the Bush administration has no plans to extend verification requirements past the treaty’s expiration in 2009. As additional reductions required by the 2002 U.S.-Russian Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty are not required to be completed until the end of 2012, Russia will be able to operate without inspections for three years, according to Boese. The SORT pact requires the United States and Russia to reduce the number of their deployed nuclear weapons to below 2,200 by the end of 2012, but the pact has no verification measures. Boese pointed to the State Department’s Annual Report on SORT as evidence of the apparent discrepancy in the administration’s stance on verification. The report praised “transparency into Russia’s implementation of its reductions” and said “the strategic relationship between the United States and Russia is expected to result in increasing openness over the lifetime of the [SORT].” The same document says, “The administration has not yet considered the question of extending all or part of the START Treaty beyond its scheduled expiration of 2009.” Boese said he doesn’t understand why the State Department would include such minor START infractions if the administration has not yet determined whether to extend it and is praising Russia’s openness. After the 2009 expiration, the START Treaty is essentially “a gentleman’s agreement,” Boese said. “There’s no verification mechanism.”
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