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U.S.-Russia I: U.S. Official Sees End to U.S.-Russian Nuclear Arms Control By David Ruppe “What this treaty represents may well be the last arms control treaty between Russia and the United States. And if it were, that’d be a big step forward,” said a senior administration official, who explained the administration’s approach to Russia while briefing reporters in Moscow Tuesday. The official said the two countries have “finished on strategic offensive weapons” and now can “move on” to focus discussions on the nonproliferation of weapons of mass destruction. The United States is particularly concerned about Russian compliance with the Biological Weapons Convention and the Chemical Weapons Convention, he said. The objectives of the proposed treaty, however, apparently fall well short of what Russia sought, leaving it interested in further strategic arms negotiations. Unlike previous strategic arms treaties, this agreement would require neither party to destroy any nuclear warheads or delivery systems, U.S. officials have said. Instead, it would require that warheads be removed from the “operationally deployed” force and leave it to each country to decide for itself what to do with the removed warheads. During the six-month negotiations, Russian officials publicly said they were seeking a binding agreement that would be verifiable and “irreversible,” which has been taken to mean that warheads would be destroyed so they could not readily be returned the operational force at a later date. Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov warned that reversible changes could result in another arms race (see GSN, March 12). Russian reaction to the latest agreement has been tepid, with Ivanov indicating Moscow wants to continue negotiations on issues that were the subject of negotiations but did not make it into the final accord. “This treaty provides for the establishment of a working group on the implementation of this treaty. Simultaneously, we will continue — we are conducting negotiations, and we will continue conducting negotiations – on other issues in other areas. The conclusion of this treaty does not mean that negotiations stop here,” Ivanov told a press briefing yesterday. Criticism and Support The U.S. official’s comments have drawn sharp criticism and some praise from Russian foreign policy and arms control experts. “One cannot declare the Cold War over as long as both sides have thousands and thousands of nuclear weapons,” said Thomas Graham, a former senior U.S. diplomat who was involved in negotiating every major international arms control and nonproliferation agreement of the past 30 years, and who now heads the Lawyers Alliance for World Security. Under the terms of the new deal, he said, the United States could be expected to have — in addition to the treaty-limited, operationally deployed strategic nuclear weapons — thousands more in reserve and in the inactive stockpile, and 1,000 tactical nuclear weapons. “As long as we have thousands, there’s no way to say that we’re not in fact targeting Russia, and that’s what the Cold War was all about. We don’t need thousands to target anybody else,” said Graham. Former U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union Jack Matlock, on the other hand, thinks the official’s statements reflect a good idea. “In the sense that you have to trade off in the Cold War fashion and look at these things in almost a zero-sum game, in that sense I think it is the end of arms control and it should be,” said Matlock. “The idea that you can only reduce through a bilateral agreement implies that the two sides are enemies and they’ve got to regulate it that way.” Matlock does not think it should be the end of treaties on armaments, and favors, perhaps, a treaty on missile defense. Matlock also says he favors much deeper reductions in strategic nuclear arms. He contends, however, that pursing lengthy, traditional arms control agreements can slow the arms reduction process. “A real opportunity was lost in the mid-1990s by not simply leapfrogging START II when it got stuck in the Duma and going to these lower levels,” he said. Graham, however, charges the administration has avoided pursuing traditional arms control agreements not to speed up reductions, but to avoid them. “The reason that at least this particular official wants to declare the process dead,” said Graham, “is because he’s not interested in nuclear arms control, he just wants to say, ‘OK, we’ve come this far, and that’s as far as we’re going to go,’ which isn’t that far.” The administration’s policy, as described in its January Nuclear Posture Review, not only suggests the administration does not want to make major nuclear reductions, Graham said, but “strongly suggests that [nuclear weapons] should have an expanded role … and there are even hints that maybe we should have new types of nuclear weapons, which would require nuclear testing” (see GSN, March 14). A Nontraditional Agreement With the negotiated agreement, the United States is seeking to avoid a traditional arms control agreement. “Don’t think of this as a Cold War arms control treaty, because it’s not,” said the senior U.S. official at the briefing. The proposed treaty would defy the traditional detail on requirements and verification mechanisms, totaling only 3 1/2 pages, according to U.S. officials, as opposed to the hundreds of pages in agreements such as the 700-page START I agreement. U.S. officials hope to avoid naming the treaty with an acronym, as with previous arms treaties. “We’re not going to have an acronym. No SALT, no START, no INF. We’re looking for something else,” the U.S. official said. Some New Thinking on Russia Some U.S. officials say the administration approach to the agreement, set for signature next week, reflects a new approach to U.S. relations with Russia. “It’s a different kind of treaty because we live in a different geostrategic environment and we have a different kind of relations with the Russians,” said the senior U.S. official. President George W. Bush, announcing the proposed treaty Monday, spoke of a new era in U.S.-Russian relations. “When I sign the treaty with President [Vladimir] Putin in Russia, it will begin the new era of U.S.-Russian relationships. And that's important. The new era will be a period of enhanced mutual security, economic security and improved relations.” NATO ministers reportedly reached agreement Tuesday in Reykjavik, Iceland, to create a new NATO-Russia Council that will permit Russia to sit with alliance members to formulate joint policy on terrorism and other shared threats and security issues (see GSN, May 15). Secretary of State Colin Powell was more cautious at the NATO summit Tuesday about the prospect of a major change in U.S.-Russian relations. Regarding the proposed council, Powell called it only “a step forward in bringing Russia closer to the West, and the West closer to Russia.” In October, 142 Republican and Democratic members of Congress, including many senior members, signed on to proposals prepared by Representative Curt Weldon (R-Pa.) and delivered to President Bush, calling for a new approach to U.S.-Russian relations that moves away from a focus on bilateral nuclear arms control toward engagement on a wide range of areas, from defense to health care, to law and the arts. “I want to change the basic nature of our relationship,” Weldon said Tuesday on a panel to discuss the new arms pact. “There’s always going to be a problem when our two presidents get together and their focus is only on just arms control agreements, or just the ABM Treaty, or just those issues that have particularly in the history of our relationship have divided us.” Yet Weldon, a senior House Armed Service Committee member, also declared a need for new negotiations with Russia on tactical nuclear weapons, saying Russia is believed to have more than 12,000 and that they pose a proliferation risk (see GSN, May 14). U.S. officials have said they do not intend to pursue an agreement on tactical nuclear weapons (see related GSN story, today). U.S. Has Rejected Traditional Arms Control John Holum, a former undersecretary of state for arms control and international security and former director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency during the Clinton administration, believes the Bush administration does not favor traditional arms control. “What the official is saying is reflective of the overall context … that the administration doesn’t like formal arms control, whether it’s multilateral or bilateral, and wants to get away from it,” Holum said. “It’s an overall policy view, rather than the difficulty of any particular negotiation, that is leading to an end to further work.”
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