Global Security Newswire

WASHINGTON -- When President Obama sends New START to the Senate in early May in hopes of ratification this year, its arrival will stimulate brain synapses and muscle memories that have atrophied since the end of the Cold War (see GSN, April 27).

Only about a quarter of today's senators were serving when the chamber ratified the START I pact in 1991. The last major arms control battle on Capitol Hill, over the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, ended in a bitterly fought Senate rejection of the agreement in October 1999. Now, a new generation of lawmakers will have to immerse themselves in the carefully reasoned insanity of "mutually assured destruction," as well as the tedious minutiae of missile telemetry, verification protocols, and the tangled linkages between strategic offensive and defensive weapons.

"Like a lot of people, I'm sick to death of the micro issues involved in arms control treaties, but we're all going to be dragged back kicking and screaming into that discussion, because we're in a new era where the threat is no longer a U.S.-Russian arms race but rather nuclear terrorism," said Richard Burt, a former ambassador and the chief U.S. negotiator of START I. "So we really do need to think about arms control in new ways."

At a recent gathering of senior Russian and American officials at the Atlantic Council in Washington, it was clear that thinking anew about arms control first requires thinking differently about the U.S.-Russian relationship. The Bush administration's relations with Moscow were strained by the latter's objections to NATO expansion and a planned U.S. missile defense system in Eastern Europe, and they hit a nadir after Russia's 2008 military intervention in neighboring Georgia.

"One of the interesting paradoxes of this debate is that if you look at how the world has changed since START was originally signed in 1991, there was much greater optimism surrounding U.S.-Russian relations back then. If you listen to my old friend [Senator] John McCain (R-Ariz.) talk about Russia today, you'd think from his rhetoric that we were back in the Brezhnev era," Burt said, referring to former Communist Party chief Leonid Brezhnev who led the USSR in the 1970s. "So as we debate ratification of New START, I hope we focus on how this treaty can have a positive influence on the broader U.S.-Russian relationship. Ironically, one of the potential dangers of this debate is that it throws us back into an old Cold War mind-set."

Sergey Kislyak, Russia's ambassador to the United States, believes that the mind-set never entirely disappeared, given that each country has maintained massive nuclear weapons arsenals targeted at the other's major cities and on hair-trigger alert. "In the past, our talks on arms control were a way to manage hostile relations, whereas today we are discussing it as a way to manage the nuclear arsenals that we inherited as part of the Cold War legacy," he told the Atlantic Council audience. "Even though the Cold War is long over, nuclear deterrence remains a part of the strategic culture in both Russia and the United States."

Arms Control Momentum

The New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty is a purposely designed modest step, reducing U.S. and Russian strategic nuclear arsenals to 30 percent below the maximum allowed under the 2002 Moscow Treaty (down to 1,550 warheads and 800 delivery systems). The treaty is nonetheless a critical link in the Obama administration's ambitious nonproliferation agenda and the president's vision of a world ultimately free of nuclear weapons. Other key milestones include the Pentagon's recently unveiled Nuclear Posture Review, last month's nuclear security summit in Washington, this month's Nonproliferation Treaty review conference in New York City, and a promised resubmission of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty to the Senate for ratification, probably next year.

To maintain momentum for securing and reducing global stockpiles of nuclear materials and weapons, the administration has put New START on a fast-track schedule for ratification in 2010. According to administration and Senate officials, the White House will submit the treaty to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in early May, with hearings expected to spill over into June. Talks have begun with Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) about fitting floor debate and an eventual vote into a crowded summer docket that also includes a confirmation vote on a Supreme Court nominee before Congress breaks in October for the midterm elections.

"We'd really like to get New START ratified this year, meaning we have to start sooner rather than later. Because once we get into election season, and possibly a lame-duck session of Congress, everything becomes unpredictable," said Ellen Tauscher, undersecretary of State for arms control and international security, speaking at the Atlantic Council. "We can't bank on the idea that we get more than one chance at this."

The Senate approved the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (1987), START I (1991), and the Moscow Treaty (2002) with overwhelming majorities, she noted, and New START was designed as an interim step in reclaiming bipartisan support for nuclear arms reductions. "We view this treaty not as an end state but rather the beginning of what we hope will be a move away from 'mutually assured destruction' and toward 'mutually assured stability.' But that kind of dramatic change is not something you can turn on like a light switch. It has to happen over time."

Arms Control Skeptic

To acquire the 67 votes needed for ratification, the administration may have to overcome the skepticism of Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.), who led the opposition to the test-ban treaty in 1999. As the minority whip, Kyl is likely to lead those conservatives who instinctively view arms control pacts as unwelcome encroachments on U.S. sovereignty and military power.

Kyl, speaking at an April 20 breakfast of the National Defense University Foundation, previewed his concerns about New START. The Obama administration's agreement to cut delivery systems to 800 launchers, he said, may be too low. U.S. negotiators, in his words, also "dramatically watered down" the verification standards of the recently expired START I, at the Russians' insistence and against Kyl's advice. In addition, he said, they agreed to language linking strategic offensive and defensive systems and acceded to a unilateral Russian vow to withdraw from the treaty if a U.S. missile defense system threatened to tip the strategic balance.

"More important to me, the Obama administration negotiators were disingenuous at best in the way they described the wording on missile defense, and some would go further than 'disingenuous' to describe what they did," asserted Kyl, who along with Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) flew to Geneva to monitor the negotiations. "And what did we get out of the Russians in return? They will go down to levels [of nuclear arms] they were heading toward anyway. They tied one hand behind our back on missile defense, and we did nothing to address the Russian advantage in tactical nuclear weapons. So we're going to have a very robust debate on whether or not the United States is better off with this treaty. Personally, I'm not sure the treaty is worth what we give up."

Missile Defense And Modernization

In preparing to send New START to the Senate, the administration has walked a fine line between characterizing it at home as a "modest" step in sync with decades of nuclear arms reduction agreements, and playing it up internationally as another major down payment on the disarmament commitment that all five declared nuclear powers (China, France, Great Britain, Russia, and the United States) made in the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. The White House saw re-energizing that commitment as an important step toward a successful review conference this month, at which the president hopes to win pledges to reform and strengthen the treaty's verification regime.

To tout New START's pedigree as just the latest in a long line of such agreements, the administration has enlisted prominent Cold Warriors from both political parties, including former Defense Secretary William Perry, former Sen. Sam Nunn, former Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger and George Shultz, and former national security adviser Brent Scowcroft.

"There are detractors who will say New START goes too far or not far enough, but to me it's a necessary step to get us back on track toward the architecture of nuclear arms control that started back in the [Lyndon B.] Johnson administration," Scowcroft declared at the Atlantic Council. If the treaty had proposed more dramatic reductions, to a limit of 1,000 warheads or less, he noted, negotiations could have taken years and ended with less chance of Senate ratification. "The first priority was nailing down the verification and accounting rules that expired with START I last December, because without them you lose all the ground that we covered before," he said. "I also think that months of negotiations leading up to the signing of New START gradually worked out a lot of the hostility that had built up in the U.S.-Russian relationship."

Largely at the insistence of Russian officials worried about the U.S. missile defense system, the preamble to the treaty recognizes "the interrelationship between strategic offensive arms and strategic defensive arms [and] that this interrelationship will become more important as strategic nuclear arms are reduced." Administration officials emphasize that New START affects only strategic offensive arms, and that it specifically does not constrain the U.S. missile defense system now in development. A unilateral Russian statement that Moscow might withdraw from the treaty if missile defenses become a threat to its strategic deterrent, they note, is legally nonbinding. Most treaties also allow for such an "opt-out" by a disgruntled party.

"The Soviets made similar unilateral statements about missile defenses in START in terms of our continued commitment to the Antiballistic Missile Treaty, but the Bush administration pulled out of the ABM Treaty in 2002 and START was unaffected," a knowledgeable administration source noted. "President Obama has also made clear in his comments and budget that he is committed to deploying an effective missile defense system. So I think we have a pretty good argument to make on missile defense, and though I'm paid to worry, I feel pretty good about the prospects that the Senate will eventually ratify New START."

A Hard Bargain

Arms control advocates fret that skeptics will try to resurrect a "reliable replacement warhead" program -- for which Congress has twice zeroed out funding -- in exchange for Republican votes for New START. To assuage concerns about modernization of the nuclear arsenal, the Pentagon's recently unveiled Nuclear Posture Review commits an additional $5 billion for upgrades in the nuclear weapons infrastructure.

In recent comments, however, Kyl indicated that the revision was not enough.

"What I find truly alarming about the Nuclear Posture Review is that it claims to support a 'safe, secure, and effective' nuclear arsenal, but at the same time it imposes unnecessarily strict tests in terms of extending the life of warheads that may need components replaced," Kyl said on April 20. "So I am not yet convinced that ratifying this treaty is in the best interests of the United States, and I know it won't be unless the administration commits to a robust and adequately resourced modernization program for our nuclear deterrent."

George Perkovich, the director of the nuclear policy program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said in a recent interview, "I think Senator Kyl and some other Republicans have played a very good hand of poker by already getting the pot sweetened enormously with $5 billion extra to modernize the nuclear weapons complex." He cautioned, "Even if the administration wins ratification of New START, if they overpay to win Republican votes they will have fewer chips in their pile when it comes to ratifying the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which will be a much tougher game."

But Obama is known as a pretty good poker player, patient and methodical. In sweeping up big pots in a series of nonproliferation showdowns in the past month -- the Nuclear Posture Review, New START, the nuclear security summit -- the president has displayed a winning streak. In unveiling the posture review, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, a lifelong Republican, dropped his earlier support for a replacement nuclear warhead, for instance, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff embraced the principles of no new nuclear weapons, missions, or tests. Meanwhile, in the Senate, New START will be shepherded by John Kerry, D-Mass., chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, and ranking member Richard Lugar, R-Ind., a strong supporter and one of the most trusted voices on nuclear nonproliferation issues in either party.

"A lot of people haven't noticed, but the U.S. military has now lined up firmly behind the Obama administration's nonproliferation agenda, with its emphasis on conventional military forces and movement away from expensive nuclear weapons that were never going to be used anyway," Joseph Cirincione, a longtime arms control advocate and the president of the Ploughshares Fund, said in an interview. "I think New START will be ratified because it's essentially a middle-of-the-road treaty. The secret of Obama's success, however, is that he's built a new centrist consensus behind sharp reductions and eventual elimination of nuclear weapons. Most national security experts are now in the middle of that road with him, which is a dramatic shift from where we all were just 10 years ago."

Mindful that START II bounced around the Russian parliament and the U.S. Senate for years during the 1990s and was eventually abandoned, Moscow has requested that the ratification process proceed simultaneously in both countries to avoid humiliation if one side ultimately rejects the treaty. That nervousness speaks to the high stakes for officials in both nations.

"Sometimes I regret that the Russian parliament no longer functions like the old Supreme Soviet, because I've already heard voices in the Duma [lower house] accusing me personally of betraying the motherland and giving too much away to the Americans," said Mikhail Margelov, chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Russian Federation Council, the legislature's upper house. "What I would most like to see now is a normal, stable, pragmatic relationship between our two countries that no longer requires periodic 'resets.' To get there, however, both capitals have to deliver on ratification of New START. That will send an important signal that this treaty is not just an agreement between two governments, but also an agreement supported by both of our peoples."