Global Security Newswire

WASHINGTON -- A senior U.S. lawmaker this week introduced legislation that would extend the verification regime of the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty by six months (see GSN, Nov. 3).

The bill -- authored by Senate Foreign Relations Committee ranking member Richard Lugar (R-Ind.) - would, on a reciprocal basis, maintain "privileges and immunities" to Russian arms inspection teams that might come to the United States to carry out inspections permitted under the landmark 1991 treaty, which is set to expire in less than one month. If approved, the inspections would be authorized to continue through June 5 of next year.

"Since the START Treaty expires on Dec. 5, 2009, this will is necessary to continue the comprehensive verification regime that undergirds every existing U.S.-Russian treaty that deals with strategic arms control," according to a Lugar statement.

The treaty includes an "intrusive" verification regime that consists of a detailed data exchange, extensive notifications, 12 types of on-site inspection, and continuous monitoring activities intended to help verify that signatories comply with their obligations, according to the Federation of American Scientists.

An adviser to Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said recently that the two countries were likely to sign a successor to the agreement before next month's deadline (see GSN, Nov. 2). However, it is unclear when the U.S. Senate would ratify the new accord.

This summer, Medvedev and U.S. President Barack Obama agreed to cut their nations' respective deployed strategic nuclear arsenals to between 1,500 and 1,675 warheads (see GSN, July 6). That would be a sizable difference from the 2,200-warhead limit the states are required to meet within three years under the 2002 Moscow Treaty. They also approved to restrict deployed strategic delivery vehicles on each side to between 500 and 1,100.

"It had been my hope that the previous and current administrations would have made substantially more progress on ensuring the continuity of the START I verification system so that the legal authorities I am proposing today would not be necessary," Lugar said yesterday in a Senate floor speech. "But we have reached the point where both the United States and Russia must take steps to ensure the continuity of verification mechanisms."

He noted that most of the public discussion surrounding the potential successor treaty has focused on further reductions in strategic nuclear weapons, with little attention given to the verification arrangements such a follow-on agreement would entail. He added that "informally" both countries understand the new compact would rely on the existing START regime.

"For me, this will be the key determinant in assessing whether a follow-on agreement that comes before the Foreign Relations Committee and the Senate furthers the national interest," Lugar said. "For the moment, we know only the outlines of such an agreement."

Concerns about verification have been raised by Moscow's efforts to seek relief from provisions that allow the United States to monitor Russia's primary missile production facility at Votkinsk and to "prohibit encryption of missile telemetry," Jeffrey Lewis, head of the New America Foundation's Nuclear Strategy and Nonproliferation Initiative, said on his blog ArmsControlWonk.com.

"Basically because Russia is building new missiles (Topol-M and Bulava) while the United States is not, the monitoring measures burden only Russia," according to Lewis.

He called both concerns "rather short-sighted" because over time arms control provisions tend to offer both advantages and disadvantages for both sides.

In his floor speech, Lugar said skeptics have hinted that Russia might not be in total compliance with its obligations under the treaty while others have expressed opposition to the pact because no arms control agreement is 100-percent verifiable.

Such concerns "fail to appreciate how much information is provided through the exchange of data mandated by the treaty, on-site inspections, and national technical means," he said.

Lugar highlighted a fact sheet released this July by the U.S. State Department that said the United States had conducted more than 600 inspections in Belarus, Kazakhstan, Russia and Ukraine. The three former Soviet states outside of Russia had held nuclear weapons for a time following the collapse of the communist superpower; those weapons were later removed from their territory.

"The bottom line is that the United States is far safer as a result of those 600 START inspections than we would be without them," Lugar said.