Global Security Newswire

WASHINGTON -- Members of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee next week will take steps that could alter the successor agreement to the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty and potentially impact its chances for ratification, experts following the issue say (see GSN, July 26).

The panel, which has jurisdiction over the agreement, is expected in coming days to begin marking up the resolution of ratification that will accompany the pact to the Senate floor.

Senators would actually vote on that report, rather than on the treaty itself. The document typically includes the scope of the committee's months-long deliberations, including key questions that were raised during the proceedings.

The resolution is "almost the same concept as a conference report on a piece of legislation," Andy Fisher, spokesman for the panel's ranking Republican, Richard Lugar (Ind.), said in a telephone interview. "It's not the bill. The treaty stands alone as a treaty" while the resolution is more like "commentary" that encapsulates views offered during the hearing process.

The document is being drafted by Lugar and panel Chairman John Kerry (D-Mass.), Fisher told Global Security Newswire. The committee is expected to vote on the resolution before the August congressional recess. With 11 Democrats and eight Republicans on the committee, the measure is widely expected to pass, though the treaty's chances before the full Senate remain in question.

The committee can make a negative recommendation on the treaty but that is "rare," according to Fisher. The full Senate could still proceed with the ratification process if such a recommendation were made.

U.S. President Barack Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev in April signed a 10-year successor agreement to the 1991 START accord, which expired last December. The "New START" pact requires the former Cold War adversaries to cut their respective strategic arsenals to 1,550 deployed weapons, down from the maximum of 2,200 mandated by an earlier treaty. Both countries would also limit their deployed nuclear delivery platforms at 700, with another 100 permitted to be held in reserve.

The agreement must be approved by lawmakers in Moscow and Washington before entering into force. In the United States, the pact needs at least 67 votes in the Senate to achieve ratification.

That means the treaty would require bipartisan support, a goal that has been elusive for the White House. Republican lawmakers have enumerated a number of possible objections to the agreement since it was submitted for consideration in May, particularly that it might hinder the nation's plans for missile defense.

The arms agreement does not propose any binding curbs on such systems, though its preamble does note the connection between offensive and defensive weapons. Nonetheless, Moscow issued a unilateral statement before the treaty's signing declaring that it could pull out of the accord if Russian leaders determined their nuclear deterrent was threatened by any buildup of U.S. missile defenses.

The Obama administration could garner bipartisan support for the treaty by agreeing to place a reservation on the resolution of ratification that addresses the unilateral statement head-on, according to Steven Groves, a fellow at the Heritage Foundation.

"You can put a reservation in there saying, 'After review, the preamble language does not restrict in any way U.S. missile defense enhancements either qualitatively or quantitatively,'" Groves suggested during a panel discussion at the think tank last week. "Just completely turn their unilateral statement on its head and then when you go to exchange instruments of ratification with the Russians ... they either blink or they don't."

A reservation usually changes U.S. obligations without necessarily amending the text of the agreement, according to a Congressional Research Service report on the Senate's role on treaty ratification. The Senate could add any number of reservations to the treaty, though they would require Kremlin acceptance for the pact to take effect.

Employing that tactic would have a potentially larger impact on the ratification process than other options available to the committee and then to all Senate lawmakers. In addition to reservations, those include "understandings," interpretive statements that clarify or elaborate on provisions as lawmakers understand them but do not alter them; "declarations" that express the Senate's position or opinion on matters relating to issues raised by the treaty rather than specific provision; and "provisos" that are essentially agreements between Congress and the executive branch that fall outside the four corners of the treaty and often include conditions on implementing a treaty within the United States.

If and when the resolution of ratification reaches the chamber floor, any senator could also introduce an amendment to strike language from the agreement altogether.

Bush administration national security adviser Stephen Hadley in a June 10 hearing before the Foreign Relations Committee suggested senators use reservations or conditions to clear up "ambiguities" within the new agreement.

A reservation on missile defense would show Russia how dedicated the Obama administration is to the idea, despite Moscow's threats to withdraw from the treaty, Groves said in a follow-up interview.

"You have to balance whether you're willing to take that risk versus willing to subordinate our missile defenses to de facto Russian veto," he told GSN last week, adding that the idea of "fixing" the treaty's preamble language with an amendment that would strike it entirely has been discussed on Capitol Hill.

Groves said such a move likely would be made after the treaty reaches the full Senate floor.

Groves' suggestion "presumes that the preamble language is a problem. I fundamentally disagree with the idea that it is a problem," according to Arms Control Association head Daryl Kimball.

He noted that the 1996 "START II" agreement never entered into force because the Russian legislature used the pact as leverage to seek concessions from the United States on missile defense under the Antiballistic Missile Treaty.

"These more radical ideas need to be recognized for what they are: poison pills that are intended to kill the treaty," Kimball told GSN in a telephone interview last week. "It's naive to believe that the U.S. Senate strikes a provision from the treaty, or attaches a reservation that the Russians object to, that the Duma is going to recognize that version of the treaty."

Kimball said it was too early to tell what language members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee would incorporate into the ratification resolution.

"The process of developing the resolution of ratification and identifying what understandings might be necessary to win the support of a certain number of senators is still somewhere off in the future," he said. Kimball added: "The treaty should be approved without conditions."

Still, another arms control expert said he expects the committee and other senators to attach conditions and understandings to the new arms agreement.

"I would expect that the Senate would pass conditions to the treaty on missile defense, modernization, on compliance and maybe tactical nuclear weapons," Ploughshares Fund head Joseph Cirincione said last week, addressing other issues raised by Republican lawmakers. "You could all that and negotiate what the language between the majority and the minority and the administration."

The Senate's No. 2 Republican, Jon Kyl (Ariz.), has said he would not back the arms control agreement without an extended, deeply funded mandate to update the U.S. nuclear weapons complex. Meanwhile, some of his colleagues have expressed concerns that the treaty does not address Russia's tactical nuclear weapon advantage.

"I would expect that. That is normal practice and that should reassure the majority of senators," Cirincione said.

Fisher said last week he did not know if any Republican members planned to attach reservations or other language to the ratification resolution.

"Obviously, members of the committee are all making input on that in the drafting process, but if they're not happy with the drafting process obviously they could add amendments either in the committee or in the full Senate," he told GSN.

The view that Moscow's unilateral statement would have an impact on U.S. missile defense decisions has been "really knocked down in the course of our hearings," according to Fisher. "I think the resolution would reflect that. There would not be any problems in terms of the future with that. That is certainly something that would be expressed."