The U.S. Senate should reject the new START treaty. It has no upside for the United States, is shot through with flaws, and will limit our defenses. The treaty represents international relations as gesture, and is based on President Obama’s naïve belief that if we are seen as limiting ourselves, other nations will more readily join us in persuading rogue states to abandon their nuclear ambitions.
The treaty is advertised as a 30 percent cut in Russian and American warheads, down to 1,550 on each side. This is spin. Under the 2002 Bush-Putin Treaty of Moscow, Russia and the United States agreed to cut their arsenals to a range of 2,200 to 1,700 warheads each. The new START treaty is a cut of only 150 warheads from the low end of that range, and even this cut is illusory (read on).
The treaty reduces the number of permitted deployed delivery vehicles — missiles, bombers, and submarines — to 700, about half the previous level. This is just as meaningless. The Russians are already beneath this number. The aging of their arsenal, coupled with economic constraints, means that they couldn’t go higher, new START treaty or no.
On the terms Democrats invoked to critique the Treaty of Moscow, Obama’s START treaty is sorely lacking. They pointed out that it only limited deployed weapons and didn’t destroy stockpiles — neither does the new START. They (quite reasonably) complained that it didn’t affect Russia’s advantage in tactical nuclear weapons — neither does the new START. Of course, Joe Biden and John Kerry, who leveled all these criticisms at the Treaty of Moscow, won’t return to them now. Such is the course of partisan hypocrisy. But it does not change the fact that there are serious flaws in the new START.
Arms-controls mavens who have combed through it carefully report astonishing gaps. The treaty doesn’t identify or define — and therefore doesn’t limit — entire categories of potential strategic nuclear weapons, including rail-mobile ICBMs, ICBMs on surface ships, air-launched ICBMs, and long-range sea-launched nuclear cruise missiles. These were all covered by language in the previous START treaty; that language is missing in the new START. The Russians have openly discussed pursuing some of these now uncounted and uncontrolled weapons systems.
For decades, it’s been arms-control dogma that the practice of “MIRVing,” or putting multiple warheads on one launcher, is destabilizing. By removing the old START limits on the number of warheads per missile, while at the same time capping the number of launchers, the new treaty actually encourages MIRVing; and the Russians are moving in that direction. Also, the new treaty counts a bomber as one weapon, no matter how many warheads are loaded on it. This rule happens to suit Moscow’s needs precisely as it seeks to maintain its warhead numbers while lowering its number of launchers; indeed, the Russian press already is reporting that under the new treaty Russia actually will retain 2,100 strategic nuclear warheads — hundreds above the supposed new START limit.
The new treaty weakens — in some areas, guts — the verification procedures that existed in the prior START treaty. Once, the Obama administration insisted we needed to get a successor to START before it expired on Dec. 5, 2009, precisely to preserve its verification regime. Somewhere around the negotiating table, though, the administration lost its sense of urgency. Under the new agreement, John Bolton writes in the latest issue of National Review, we will “lose important START requirements for on-site inspections, telemetry exchanges, and production monitoring.”
Worst of all, the treaty will constitute a limit on our missile defenses. In Article V, it prohibits the conversion of ICBM launchers for use in missile defense. The five silos we have already converted at Vandenberg are grandfathered. But as Keith Payne of Missouri State University points out, this prohibition could nonetheless prove harmful if, in a crisis, we need to convert additional silos quickly for interceptors.
The Russians are placing great weight on the treaty’s preamble. It notes “the interrelationship between strategic offensive arms and strategic defensive arms,” and says that this interrelationship will “become more important as strategic nuclear arms are reduced” — as they are now. Prior to the signing of the treaty, Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, said “linkage to missile defense is clearly spelled out in the accord and is legally binding.” The treaty’s preamble also says that “current strategic defensive arms do not undermine” stability. This language will create real trouble for future additions to our strategic defensive capabilities.
The Russians clearly want to leverage START into a new de facto ABM treaty. Russian president Dmitry Medvedev says the treaty “can be viable only provided there are no quantitative or qualitative increases in ABM capabilities” — i.e. none at all. Given how invested the Obama administration is in the treaty and how little it cares about strategic missile defense, this Russian tactic will surely work.
It’s hard to see what U.S. interest is served by any of this. Defenders of the treaty say it pushes the “reset” button with the Russians. It’s true that Cold War–style arms agreements make the Russians feel important. But we shouldn’t expect any moderation of their behavior or attitudes to follow from this. They will cooperate with us exactly to the extent they think it serves their national interest, no more, no less. Anyone who thinks they will support “crippling sanctions” against Iran as a consequence of this treaty has spent far too long in Foggy Bottom.
The treaty is also said to demonstrate our commitment to “get to zero” in nuclear weapons and thus exercise subtle moral suasion over proliferators such as Iran. This is profoundly foolish. The Iranians aren’t seeking a nuclear weapon in response to the size or configuration of our nuclear arsenal. We could eliminate all our nuclear weapons tomorrow and the Iranians would still want a nuclear weapon to enhance their power in the region and as a deterrent against our overwhelming conventional capability. Both the Iranians and the North Koreans have publicly laughed up their sleeves at the notion the treaty will influence them.
There is simply no compelling rationale for this treaty, and it places much at risk. If the Obama administration thinks we need fewer warheads, it can cut them. If it thought START verification provisions were essential, it could have sought a one- or two-year extension. Instead, in its desperation for this parchment accomplishment, it has signed a sloppy treaty that we may well regret. If the Senate votes No, we’ll hear public howls of outrage from the Russians. But in private they’ll probably be astonished by our ability to calculate our interests.