The United States and Russia plan to pursue additional reductions to their strategic and tactical nuclear arsenals after completing a deal to replace the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, the Wall Street Journal reported today (see GSN, June 30).
(Jul. 1) -
U.S. nuclear negotiator Rose Gottemoeller and her Russian counterpart Anatoly Antonov speak to reporters in April. Washington and Moscow could pursue further nuclear-weapon reductions once they prepare a successor to the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (Alberto Pizzoli/Getty Images).
A START follow-up pact is likely to require both nations to drop their arsenal of deployed strategic weapons below 1,700 warheads and the number of delivery vehicles below 1,600. The former Cold War rivals are now required by the 2002 Moscow Treaty to reduce their deployments to between 1,700 and 2,200 strategic weapons. The Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty expires in December, though it remains uncertain when its successor might be signed.
Moscow and Washington might need two to three years of talks on a further treaty, which would mandate restrictions on strategic and tactical nuclear weapons, along with stockpiled warheads.
The two nations are both believed to hold thousands of tactical and reserve warheads.
Enforcing limits on tactical, or "battlefield," nuclear weapons could prove difficult, though, because their numbers and locations are less throughly recorded and they are easier to transfer and conceal. "This is going to require a lot of creativity," said Richard Burt, the top U.S. negotiator in the original START talks of the early 1990s (Jonathan Weisman, Wall Street Journal, July 1).
Negotiations of the START successor agreement are moving forward faster than anticipated, a senior Russian official said today. Diplomats have held three rounds of talks to date.
"The degree of progress is beyond the expectations that existed when we started," Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said, according to Agence France-Presse.
Meanwhile, U.S. President Barack Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev had a "detailed" telephone discussion about their planned summit in Moscow next week, the Kremlin indicated yesterday.
"In particular, the presidents placed significant emphasis on the topic of reducing strategic nuclear weapons. They discussed various aspects of the nuclear weapons issue in light of the positions that have been reached by the two countries' negotiating teams," the Kremlin said in a statement.
"The two leaders agreed to instruct their negotiators to intensify efforts in order to reach concrete results," says the release (Agence France-Presse/Spacewar.com, July 1).
The Obama administration firmly supports nuclear-weapon reductions, said Bruce Blair, president of the World Security Institute.
"It is understood that it is in the mutual interests of the two countries. There won't be substantial opposition," Blair told the Xinhua News Agency.
The United States does not feel it must "rely on 10,000 nuclear weapons to protect itself from Iran or other small countries or future proliferators," he said, because its conventional military power is "more than sufficient to handle small proliferators."
However, Blair said the process could be tripped up by potential inclusion of Ukraine and Georgia in NATO -- which is "very provocative and unacceptable to Russia" -- and by possible deployment of U.S. missile defenses in Europe.
"Why allow a minor program like missile defense limit the bigger vision of elimination of nuclear weapons?" Blair said (Xinhua News Agency/Investors Business Daily, June 30).
The U.S. proposal to field missile defense elements in Poland and the Czech Republic is intended to give NATO nations a first-strike nuclear capability, former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev suggested yesterday. Moscow recently indicated it would not consider significant nuclear arsenal cuts unless Obama ruled out the Bush administration's missile shield plan.
"I think that those who say that this is done to create such a situation in which a first strike may be made are right," Gorbachev said yesterday (Interfax, June 30).
Russia's stance on the missile shield could make negotiating a START successor more difficult, warned Council on Foreign Relations analysts Stephen Sestanovich and Charles Ferguson.
“There can’t be an agreement unless there’s also a formal renunciation by the U.S of the missile defense plan. That’s rather unlikely to happen, and if the Russian[s] stick to that line, the chances of arms control are (slim),” the Talk Radio News Service quoted Sestanovich as saying.
"The (Obama) administration has a review of its missile defense policy on the way, and that makes it a little more difficult for them to reach any specific understandings with the Russian about this issue. They can’t offer certain kinds of assurances,” Ferguson said.
“What we are looking at is a much smaller, much more modest missile defense system" than what Russia perceives, he added. "There’s really no technical reasons for the Russians to be worried at this stage about missile defense as it is currently proposed” (Celia Canon, Talk Radio News Service, June 30).
U.S. political support for the missile shield might force the Obama administration to move forward with the project, but deploying the defenses would not necessarily threaten arms control talks, said Pavel Zolotaryov, deputy head of Russia's Institute of North American Studies (RIA Novosti, June 30).