Abstract
When it comes to reducing the threat posed by nuclear weapons, less is not more. Less is less. Less verification, less cooperative inspection, less warhead and launcher destruction, and less accountability mean less security.
He so-called moscow treaty, which will allegedly reduce U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals, does not even rise to the level of what the legal profession would call a “legally cognizable” obligation–that is, an agreement with binding, self-evident, reciprocal obligations. Whatever the treaty's immediate political value to Presidents Vladimir Putin and George W. Bush, it is a sham, a “memorandum of conversation” masquerading as a treaty.
Unfortunately, the agreement's legal deficiencies are only the surface manifestation of a much deeper problem. The administration is abandoning binding, verified nuclear arms control agreements as a tool of American diplomacy, systematically replacing cooperative approaches to security, based on verified mutual or multilateral arms prohibitions and constraints, with unilateral military preparedness and preemptive strike planning.
We saw this problem first with the president's rejection of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, an agreement that Russia and all our allies have ratified. Then came the unilateral U.S. withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty. And now this–the jettisoning of predictability, verifia-bility, irreversibility, and mutual accountability as objectives in our nuclear relationship with Russia, in favor of increased unilateral flexibility for the U.S. nuclear force posture–which of course translates into increased flexibility for Russia's nuclear forces as well.
It's a stunningly bad tradeoff. And as a consequence of the administration's misplaced priorities, the Moscow Treaty imposes no limitation whatsoever on the current or future size of U.S. and Russian nuclear forces and warhead stockpiles. Nor does it require improvements in cooperative monitoring and secure storage for tens of thousands of non-deployed Russian warheads, warhead components, and stocks of nuclear weapon-usable materials.
All categories of nuclear warheads and delivery systems are left uncontrolled, including tactical nuclear systems. Even the treaty's sole purported limit, on the number of “operationally deployed strategic warheads,” turns out to be hollow, a public relations stunt that expires the moment it enters into force.
The agreement fails to require the destruction of a single Russian or U.S. missile silo, strategic bomber, submarine, missile, warhead, or nuclear warhead component. It does nothing to move Russia or the United States down the road toward deep, verified nuclear force reductions, verified warhead elimination, or eventual nuclear disarmament. And it very clearly does not fulfill the U.S. obligation under Article VI of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) to engage in “good faith” negotiations on “effective measures” relating to nuclear disarmament.
The treaty is clearly not an “effective measure” within the meaning of the NPT, and even a cursory reading of the administration's Nuclear Posture Review is enough to illustrate that it was not undertaken as a “good faith” step toward nuclear disarmament.
One would have thought that, after September 11, reducing nuclear proliferation risks from Russia would have leapt to the forefront of the Bush administration's nuclear arms control agenda. But achieving meaningful verified controls on Russia's nuclear arsenal requires extensive American reciprocity, and despite all the talk about a new U.S. Russian partnership, the administration remains transfixed by the possibilities inherent in the unilateral use of U.S. global nuclear strike capabilities to deter and combat proliferation.
This new element in the Bush nuclear posture–planning the use of weapons of mass destruction to preempt their possible acquisition and use by other nations–wreaks havoc with longstanding U.S. nuclear nonproliferation obligations and assurances. Even worse, if not swiftly repudiated, this posture will tend to legitimize cross-border preemptive strikes on suspect nuclear, chemical, and biological facilities as a morally acceptable strategy for “national defense.” It is hard to believe that the nation that endured the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor would sink so low in its own moral estimation as to advocate nuclear preemption as an acceptable strategy for containing the threat of weapons of mass destruction.
But this is the direction that the Bush administration is headed, and the “flexibility” required to implement this intimidating nuclear posture is amply reflected in the vacuity of the Moscow Treaty. When called upon to explain the rationale for the thousands of nuclear weapons the Bush administration plans to continue to deploy under the treaty, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld testified that “the U.S. nuclear arsenal… helps us dissuade the emergence of potential or would-be peer competitors by underscoring the futility of trying to sprint toward parity with us.”
The most salient problems with the Moscow Treaty include:
The effective date of the treaty's only constraint–a reduction to 2,200 deployed warheads in 10 years time–precisely coincides with the treaty's expiration.
The treaty lacks verification and inspection provisions of any kind. Unless the Senate intervenes, it will permit larger strategic nuclear arsenals, over a longer period of time, than those contemplated in the agreed Helsinki framework for START III, and much larger arsenals than would have ensued from serious, good faith arms-reduction negotiations between the parties.
Under the Moscow Treaty, America's and other nations' nuclear security will remain in the hands of Vladimir Putin and his successors, unmediated by any firm, long-term treaty obligations to reduce, monitor, secure, or destroy Russia's nuclear arms.
The treaty lacks interim reduction milestones for assessing compliance.
It contains no agreed definition or common understanding of what is being reduced.
It does not require the elimination of a single missile silo, submarine, missile, bomber, nuclear warhead, or bomb, and it also permits the unlimited production of new nuclear warheads of all types, unlimited deployment of new tactical nuclear weapon systems, and (after START expires in 2009) unlimited production and deployment of new strategic delivery systems. The Moscow agreement erodes the very concept of negotiated binding arms control treaties as a means of reducing the nuclear threat and enhancing international security.
The treaty has an exceedingly permissive withdrawal clause. In place of a six months' advance notice of withdrawal and an explanation of the extraordinary events that require it to withdraw, each party may simply “exercise its national sovereignty” and withdraw upon three months' written notice.
Of course, withdrawal is hardly a major issue for a treaty that is so poorly constructed that it arguably has no cognizable legal obligation, but it sets a poor precedent, reinforcing the broader message that the United States no longer takes arms control obligations seriously.
To reiterate, the Moscow agreement is a two-and-half page memo, referencing vague unilateral statements by the two leaders, a statement missing everything one would rightfully expect in an arms control treaty, and it is self-nullifying to boot.
We have to ask ourselves why anyone would consciously and deliberately choose to draft a treaty in this manner. Is this Undersecretary of State John Bolton's idea of an inside joke–one more opportunity to get his digs in against the proponents of negotiated arms control agreements and the rule of law in the international sphere? If so, it's too cute by half.
What the administration has done with this treaty demeans the treaty-making process, and makes this nation look foolish before the community of nations. I feel a deep sense of discouragement that the executive branch can't summon the political will to do a better job, using the preventive tools of diplomacy and cooperative verification to reduce the threats of nuclear proliferation and terrorism. I suspect that many more Americans are similarly discouraged by what is taking place.
Between bouts of self-congratulation for producing this miniscule treaty, and its frequent swipes at negotiated arms control agreements, the administration is missing the larger point. Since the Gorbachev era, nuclear arms control and nonproliferation concerns have essentially merged. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and others continue to use “Cold War arms control” as a whipping boy, as though they've only just discovered that the issue of fine-tuning the nuclear strategic balance is no longer relevant.
When it comes to reducing the threat posed by nuclear weapons, less is not more. Less is less. Less verification, less cooperative inspection, less warhead and launcher destruction, and less accountability mean less security.
The administration seems to be interested only in ratcheting up the rhetoric, and the weapons, to deal with the proliferation problem after weapons and materials have fallen into the wrong hands, rather than dealing with the problem at the source, by building bilateral and multilateral elimination-and-control regimes that make it more difficult for bad actors to get their hands on weapons of mass destruction.
As for Putin, he is, as we all know, a cool customer who has no track record or particular interest in nuclear arms control. But one thing he does know is that it is economically untenable for Russia to compete militarily with the United States, so he has wisely opted out of the nuclear parity-superiority game, leaving the Bush administration to arms race with itself–which it is, regrettably, doing.
In light of the budding U.S.-Russian security partnership, as well as the dearth of other potentially hostile nuclear forces that are remotely commensurate with those of the United States, the Bush administration's projected nuclear stockpile levels for the coming decade and beyond–10,500 total weapons, of which 3,000-4,600 are “operationally deployed”–are clearly excessive. A durable, verifiable framework for long-term strategic stability and cooperation among the nuclear powers is needed now to buttress global security against the multiple threats of nuclear proliferation, international terrorism, and resurgent nuclear arms competition.
To ensure that the treaty contributes to the early evolution of such a framework, and that the United States and Russia continue to fulfill their obligations under Article VI of the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the Senate should attach binding conditions to its resolution of ratification. These conditions should shape U.S. unilateral reductions under the treaty, in both deployed and reserve weapons, which are deeper, more timely, and more predictable and transparent than those now planned, and the Senate should seek to elicit reciprocal Russian transparency and restraint as the price for making these initiatives permanent.
The resolution of ratification should establish an interim ceiling of 3,500 weapons for the total U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile in Defense Department custody–a two-thirds reduction from the current level that would complement the treaty's putative two-thirds reduction in “operationally deployed strategic forces”–and direct the president to submit annually an updated nuclear weapons retirement plan to achieve this level five years sooner–by the end of 2007, rather than December 31, 2012. The Senate's resolution should set the level of operationally deployed strategic weapons at the low end of the range previously announced by the two presidents–1,700 rather than 2,200–and likewise reach this level five years sooner, by December 30, 2007.
Rather than allowing the president's national security team to reiterate the ostensible obstacles involved, the Senate should direct the president to budget the sums required to achieve an accelerated warhead retirement and dismantlement rate, and examine the use of the Nevada Test Site's huge, virtually new, highly secure, and significantly underutilized Device Assembly Facility to meet this objective.
The treaty does not provide for the mutual transparency needed to cooperatively verify compliance and effectively assist Russia in applying the highest levels of security, accounting, and control to the storage of its nuclear warheads, nuclear warhead components, and weapons-usable fissile materials. The resolution of ratification should direct the president to rectify this deficiency by negotiating supplemental reciprocal monitoring arrangements in conjunction with an expanded and significantly accelerated Cooperative Threat Reduction (“Nunn-Lugar”) program. •