Russian analysts in Washington predict that strategic arms control cooperation could be the key to strengthening U.S. bilateral ties with Russia, the Washington Times reported yesterday (see GSN, March 9).
“Arms control is the area where the United States and Russia have the longest history of cooperation, and it is the easiest place to renew the bilateral relationship," experts Andrew Kuchins and Anders Aslund write in an upcoming book on relations between the two former Cold War foes.
Reaching a new agreement to succeed the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty topped the agenda of a high-profile meeting between U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov last week in Geneva. The pact, which restricts deployment of nuclear warheads and delivery vehicles, is set to expire in December (Nicholas Kralev, Washington Times, March 12).
"We will do everything to have this agreement reached," Lavrov said. "This treaty, the present treaty, has become obsolete" (U.S. State Department release, March 6).
Rose Gottemoeller, who is expected to be appointed assistant secretary of state for arms control, co-authored an article last year calling for a START successor to be an “enhanced” version of the Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty, a 2002 agreement that required Moscow and Washington to make deep arsenal cuts but without any monitoring or verification.
“For the Russian side, the major goal would be to maintain a semblance of parity with the United States, while addressing the basic problem with SORT -- the lack of acceptable counting rules and corresponding verification procedures,” the article states. “For the U.S. side, the major goal would be to maintain sufficient transparency with respect to Russian strategic nuclear forces, while making sure that force cuts would not be too expensive for the United States."
Under the 2002 treaty, both countries must decrease their deployed strategic nuclear warheads to fewer than 2,200 each, a limit that both nations have reached, according to Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association.
The White House has not yet declared any specific goals for negotiating a START successor, but U.S. and Russian officials told the Times that President Barack Obama and Russian President Dmitri Medvedev are expected to hold a summit this summer to discuss terms for the new treaty.
There are a number of obstacles to the nations' goal of further nuclear reductions, such as the U.S. desire to include only "operationally deployed" warheads in the count and the Russian intent that all strategic weapons should be addressed, the Times reported (Kralev, Washington Times).