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U.S.-Russia I: Bush and Putin Sign Nuclear Treaty, Leave Details for Later By David Ruppe With fewer than 500 words, the treaty text lacks specific details about how the reductions would be achieved, a feature critics say is a major flaw, but which Bush administration officials say signals a positive trend in U.S.-Russian relations. Article I, the only substantive section of the five-article agreement, says: “Each party shall reduce and limit strategic nuclear warheads … so that by December 31, 2012 the aggregate number of such warheads does not exceed 1,700-2,200 for each party.” Treaty details, such as how to implement the agreement, have yet to be decided, and will be negotiated in the coming months, an administration official told Global Security Newswire today. “The treaty is essentially a statement of broad intent,” said Michael Anton, a National Security Council spokesman. “The verification stuff, all of that is going to go into the implementation agreement. These are essentially the details, the nitty-gritty and it’s being worked on, but it’s not done. It may take a little while,” Anton said. That lack of specificity is drawing criticism from arms control experts. “This treaty is toothless and almost pointless,” said Jon Wolfsthal, an associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Nonproliferation Project. “It does not define what it is it is trying to control. It does not have verification terms. It is almost impossible to violate this treaty,” he said, since it “does not define what types of nuclear warheads are being limited, does not define what is ‘deployed,’ and does not say how you count aggregate warheads.” “It is not an arms control treaty. It is essentially a signed political statement, confirming statements the presidents agreed to previously,” he said. Some see the agreement, however unspecific, as a positive step in U.S. Russian relations. “I would say this is a positive step,” says Jack Matlock, a former ambassador to Russia during the Clinton administration. “This obviously is the best we could get on both sides and it is a step forward, it moves things in the right direction.” Undecided Specifics As previously reported, the text of the signed “Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty,” released today by the White House, allows each country to dispose of warheads taken off the front lines in a manner it sees fit, which can include keeping them in storage and available for reintroduction into the force following a withdrawal from the treaty, as officials have said the United States will do. It does not require that any weapons be destroyed, either warheads or delivery platforms — aircraft, submarines and missiles — differing from the U.S.-Russian START agreements, which required that platforms be destroyed. The language also does not provide for any mechanism to verify that the required changes take place. The treaty, furthermore, specifically allows each country to determine for itself the composition and structure of its strategic offensive arms, which with respect to the United States, allows it to size to its choosing its “strategic triad” of submarine, aircraft and missile forces. Administration officials, who did not release the text until today, previously had described the agreement as three pages long, but a hard copy printed from the White House web site is only 1 1/2 pages. Mixed Reviews The NSC’s Anton says the lack of specificity of the agreement is a positive sign about the state of U.S.-Russian relations. “President Putin and President Bush trust each other enough to say OK, we can sign a three-page treaty with confidence [that] the spirit of it and the letter of it, that after 10 years we’ll be down to this level. We’ll stick to that and we’ll work out exactly how this works in every detail in the implementation agreement subsequent to signing,” Anton said. Bush described the treaty as “historic” at the joint signing at the Kremlin. “This treaty liquidates the Cold War legacy of nuclear hostility between our countries,” he said. An implication of the lack of specificity, said Carnegie’s Wolfsthal, is that “there is no way to violate a treaty that doesn’t define its terms. The United States today could say, ‘well, we’re deploying 1,700 to 2,200 warheads depending on how you count them.’” “It is a signed, essentially blank piece of paper,” he said. “We want to make sure these are clear reductions, and not just accounting reductions,” said Karl Inderfurth, a former senior State Department official during the Clinton administration and senior advisor to the Nuclear Threat Reduction Campaign. “It is clearly an important step in establishing this new strategic relationship between the United States and Russia, there’s no question about that,” he said, adding though, “It does not, as President Bush has suggested, liquidate the Cold War legacy of our nuclear relationship.” “We are not out of the nuclear woods yet with Russia” and because the United States will continue to have large numbers with many “on a state of high alert and our targeting plans still include Russia as the main focus of those plans. So we still have more work to do,” he said. U.S. officials have said each country has about 6,000 deployed strategic warheads. Russian Approval Putin offered strong support for the treaty text at the join press conference today, saying, “the fact that we agreed with President Bush regarding such detente, in such manner, this is a serious move ahead to ensure international security, which is a very good sign as regards the relationship between our two countries.” Another Russian official said at a Tuesday press conference that Moscow supports the treaty text because it requires no restrictions on the Russian arsenal. The treaty “is good for Russia because it places absolutely no restrictions on Russia. As distinct from all the previous accords in this sphere, there are no restrictions under the new treaty,” said Duma Committee for Defense Vice Chairman Alexei Arbatov. “It places no restrictions on Russia from the point of numbers, structure, or quality. It is absolutely unrelated to the strategic arms development program adopted by Russia,” he said. Arbatov did, however, identify some treaty flaws. “The quite long list of our proposals on limiting and cutting the U.S. forces was not accepted in any way,” he said. “Secondly, having agreed on ceilings, the parties did not quite specifically agree on how to count those ceilings. Again another unique aspect of the new treaty is that, unlike all the previous ones, it has no rules of ‘netting,’ no systems of verification and inspection, and no procedures for cuts and dismantling. These are the three main sections which in all the previous treaties used to occupy a huge place and literally fill volumes of articles and agreements that accompanied each treaty.” Critics Say Cuts Overstated Some arms control analysts say the administration has been overstating in a subtle way the implications of the agreement, by describing the changes that would be required by the treaty as arsenal reductions, although the language does not require eliminating any warheads. Bush said at the signing, for instance, the treaty would reduce “strategic nuclear warhead arsenals to the range of 1,700 to 2,200, the lowest level in decades.” “I think they are defining arsenal as what weapons are actually operationally deployed,” said Inderfurth, who disagrees with that definition. “If they are in our control, they are part of our arsenal. If placed in storage, but can be taken out again, they are clearly in our arsenal,” he said. “Any weapon that could be deployed or could be used is part of our arsenal. “I would think that reduction of arsenals, and the president used the terms arsenals, is a stronger term than simply removing warheads from operational deployment,” said Matlock. “I think this phrase is just one of the phrases that are going to give a lot of people problems as they examine this document and look at exactly what it means and what it requires of this country,” said Joseph Cirincione, director of Carnegie’s Nonproliferation Project.
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