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U.S.-Russia: Key Senators Support Treaty but Air Significant Concerns By David Ruppe “You know, it’s … a little like my car breaking down in the desert 20 miles from out of town,” Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Joseph Biden (D-Del.) said, during the second set of hearings on the treaty. “Someone comes along and says, ‘Hey, look, I can give you a ride for four miles.’” “This [treaty] gets us four miles closer, or whatever, so I’m for it. But I hope it’s not the end of the ride,” Biden said. Security Questions As Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Richard Myers appeared before the committee, Senators Biden and Richard Lugar (R-Ind.) separately questioned whether the treaty would improve U.S. security. Biden said he observed a “born again” outlook among Pentagon military thinkers and questioned why they would support a treaty based on newly found trust in Moscow when Russia appears to be failing to live up to other treaty commitments. Lugar said the benefits of the treaty might only be achieved if the United States put more money into the Cooperative Threat Reduction program, which he helped create, so that it could eliminate Russian warheads taken out of operation. “Without United States assistance provided by the Pentagon through the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction program, I believe it’s likely that the benefits of the treaty will be postponed and perhaps never realized,” Lugar said. He further expressed an interest in a “technical briefing to the Congress” of “the risks to our countries, Russia and the United States, of not doing anything with these nuclear weapons.” Rumsfeld offered that “simply because those weapons exist does not make them dangerous. It’s the security of those weapons until they are destroyed that becomes the critical element.” “I generally agree with that,” Lugar replied, “although I’m just querying the problem that even the reality of the weapons, quite apart from their security, is a problem. That is, they may be secure, but they might have an accident — may destruct.” Lugar said the United States should increase its budget for guarding or eliminating any weapons Russia might choose to destroy as a result of the treaty. Rumsfeld Refutes Powell At the hearing Rumsfeld pulled back from testimony by Secretary of State Colin Powell that the United States would destroy all but 4,600 deployed and un-deployed warheads. “We have not come to a conclusion as to the numbers that would be appropriate to not be destroyed, that are not currently deployed on offensive strategic nuclear weapons,” he said. Nongovernmental analysts estimate the current arsenal includes more than 6,000 warheads (see GSN, July 10). “I think the number 4,600 was a fallout of a theoretical number that you might be able to upload on the platforms that you might have, depending if you make a certain set of assumptions as to what you would do between now and 10 years from now,” Rumsfeld said. “Those would only be assumptions. Therefore, I think that we ought not to get 4,600 chipped into concrete,” he said. Trust, But Don’t Verify The central concern that Biden expressed is whether the Bush administration might be placing undue trust in Russia to abide by the terms of the treaty, which would require each party to have a maximum of 2,200 strategic nuclear warheads operationally deployed on one day — Dec. 31, 2012. He said the United States in the early 1990s unilaterally reduced its tactical nuclear weapon deployments with the expectation that Russia would do the same, but it did not (see GSN, May 16). Biden further noted the administration’s refusal to certify to Congress this year that Moscow is committed to complying with other arms control agreements. Such certification is needed to free up additional CTR money for reducing chemical weapons in Russia (see GSN, May 9). “Where’s all this trust?” Biden asked Rumsfeld. “I mean, you trust them to have a three-page treaty instead of a 700-page treaty, but you don’t trust them enough to allow us to destroy … up to 2 million chemical-tipped artillery shells. You confuse me.” “If you don’t think they’re committed to comply with all relevant arms control agreements today, how in the hell could you sign an agreement with them that is based on so much trust in the future?” Biden said. Rumsfeld replied that the treaty is not rooted in trust. He said the United States would have made the reductions with or without the treaty, based on a military assessment that 1,700 to 2,200 deployed warheads would still be “the kind of capability that this country will need for deterrence and defense.” In his prepared testimony, however, Rumsfeld spoke at length about how the treaty — and the determination to cut the warheads regardless of whether a treaty was signed — was made possible by an emerging U.S.-Russian relationship based on “friendship and cooperation.” “We’re working together to reduce deployed offensive nuclear weapons, weapons that are a legacy of the past and which are no longer needed when Russia and the U.S. are basing our relationship on one of increasing friendship and cooperation, rather than a fear of mutual annihilation,” Rumsfeld said. “These proposed reductions are a reflection of our new relationship. When President Reagan spoke to the students at Moscow State University in 1988, he told them nations do not distrust each other because they are armed; they are armed because they distrust each other. And clearly, we do not distrust each other the way the U.S. and Soviet Union once did,” he said. U.S. officials had decided they did not need to include measures for verifying compliance with the treaty because of the new sense of trust, Rumsfeld said. The United States is cutting its arms not “because we signed the treaty in Moscow, but because the fundamental transformation in the relationship with Russia means that we do not need so many deployed weapons. Russia has made a similar calculation,” he said. “That’s also why we saw no need to include detailed verification measures in the treaty.” Rumsfeld and Myers also said U.S. officials had pushed hard for a verification regime for the treaty, but key Russian officials had objected. Rumsfeld said the two parties plan to resume discussions of extending the START I verification procedures past 2009 at the first meeting of a new Russian-American strategic security consultation arrangement scheduled for September. The secretary noted, however, that the treaty does not require destroying any weapons. It would enable either side to rapidly redeploy its warheads three months after notifying Moscow it would withdraw from the treaty. That might conceivably be needed, he said, only with “the sudden emergence of a hostile peer competitor on a par with the old Soviet Union.” More Changed Thinking on MIRVs Biden asked Gen. Myers whether he was comfortable with the fact that the treaty and Russia’s related renunciation of the unratified START II agreement would allow Russia to retain its ICBMs with multiple warheads (see GSN, June 14). Myers said senior military leaders have discussed the issue and there is no concern. U.S. officials in the early 1990s, including then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Powell, had described Russia’s MIRVed missiles as the most destabilizing threat to U.S. security. Because MIRVs would inherently be the focus of a first strike, there is an incentive for Russia to keep them on hair-trigger alert so that it might use — not lose — them. Eliminating Russian MIRVs was once “one of the holy grails” of the Defense Department, Biden said, noting years of concerns about the inadequacy of Russia’s early warning system, which could lead it to inaccurately conclude that the country is under attack. “I think our conclusion was that it really doesn’t matter,” Myers said, “that we are very comfortable with the range of warheads of 1,700 to 2,200 that was decided upon — that we’re comfortable with our capability to defend this nation.” For further information, see: U.S.-Russia Nuclear Reduction Treaty Text (U.S. State Department) U.S. State Department Fact Sheet on Moscow Treaty START I Text and Associated Documents (U.S. Defense Department) START II Text and Associated Documents (U.S. Defense Department)
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