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Center for Defense Information
Weekly Defense Monitor
1779 Massachusetts Ave., NW * Washington, DC 20036
Volume 6, Issue #9
April 11, 2002
The Bush-Putin Nuclear Agreement:
Rhetoric vs. Reality
Ben Friedman, Research Assistant
bfriedman@cdi.org

A new American-Russian strategic arms control agreement will be unveiled in May. The treaty, if that is the appropriate word, will not be finalized until U.S. President George W. Bush arrives in Moscow in May for a summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin, but its outlines have emerged.

Codifying Bush and Putin's handshake agreement reached in November, the accord will replace the START II treaty, which, while ratified by both nations, has never entered in to force. The agreement will be accompanied by a political statement outlining areas where the two countries aim to cooperate in the future. Under this new agreement, the United States and Russia will reduce their arsenals of operationally deployed strategic weapons from 6,000 to 1,700-2,200 by 2012. Barring a late American capitulation, the agreement, like the START treaties, will not dictate how the weapons are dealt with after being taken off their delivery vehicles and will not deal with the thousands of small, shorter-range tactical nuclear weapons. The new agreement will differ from START I and II, however, by counting nuclear warheads themselves rather than attributing an agreed number of warheads to a delivery vehicle -- a plane or missile. Moreover, unlike START II, the agreement will likely allow Russia to retain multiple independent reentry vehicles, which outfit missiles with several warheads.

According to the lead U.S. negotiator, the undersecretary of state for arms control, John Bolton, the agreement will include a withdrawal provision, like most major treaties, but it also will allow either side to readjust the warhead ceiling in the face of a major shift in international circumstances. Thus, faced with a major threat such as a rapidly arming China, the United States could choose to hold onto more than 2,000 operationally deployed warheads without withdrawing.

According to Dr. Ivan Safranchuk of CDI Moscow, the agreement hinges on a simple quid pro quo: the Americans agree to make it subject to ratification -- more than the executive agreement the Bush administration initially wanted -- and the Russians agree to the U.S. counting rules for reductions, meaning that warheads taken off their delivery vehicles but kept nearby them in storage will not count towards the ceiling. Subjecting the treaty to ratification is important to the Russians because, symbolically, the arrangement mirrors the great power status they had in Cold War. Counting stored warheads is important to the Bush administration because it believes that having thousands of weapons in storage is essential for deterring other potential adversaries. The political declaration will discuss future cooperation on issues such as counter-terrorism, non-proliferation, and even missile defense.

The two documents will likely illustrate the gap between rhetoric and reality. While the two sides say their relationship is no longer based on mutually assured destruction, the reality of 2,000 operationally deployed warheads tells a different story. No contingency short of deterring a nuclear first strike justifies keeping that many nuclear weapons. Bearing in mind former Secretary of State George Schultz's principle that it is the capabilities, not the intentions, of other states that govern national security decisions, it is clear that though we are moving toward a day where U.S.-Russian relations are no longer based on the prospect of annihilation, we have not yet arrived there.

Bolton has said that getting the deal finished by May precludes discussion of what is to be done with the dismantled warheads. Yet surely something as essential as the security of thousands of nuclear weapons and their components should not be held hostage to political schedules. More likely, the treatment of the dismantled warheads is not being discussed because the Bush administration, fixated on the flexibility provided by a massive nuclear hedge force in storage, refuses to discuss the issue. That could be a dangerous error.

The potential for leakage from the massive Russian weapons complex was called the greatest threat to American national security by the Baker-Cutler Task Force on Nonproliferation Programs in Russia, a bipartisan commission of national security experts chaired by former Senator Howard Baker and former White House Counsel Lloyd Cutler. As their report made clear, operationally deployed strategic weapons are just the most visible part of a this vast nuclear infrastructure and, in the age of suicidal terrorists, just one component of nuclear security.

The Cooperative Threat Reduction (CTR) Program, also known as the Nunn-Lugar program, after the two senators that created it, former Sen. Sam Nunn, D-Ga., and Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind., provides funds and assistance to aid the security of the Russian nuclear infrastructure. The Bush administration recently announced that it would withhold funding for some CTR programs pending greater Russian compliance with the treaties banning biological and chemical weapons. A reduction in American funds for disarmament programs coupled with the possibility that the Russians will mimic the U.S. hedge force could further strain Russia's overburdened system of storage and dismantlement, possibility making it more vulnerable to terrorists.

The Russians have been asking the United States to agree to cuts on this order for the better part of a decade. With most of Moscow's ICBMs due to go out of service by the end of the decade and the nuclear submarine fleet too expensive to maintain, Russia has little choice but to reduce its arsenal substantially.

Ironically, by exerting its considerable leverage to get the Russians to agree to their counting standards, the United States may have missed two opportunities to stem weapons proliferation -- the opportunity to block the sales of nuclear and missile technology to rogue states and the opportunity to reduce the vulnerability of Russia's nuclear infrastructure to theft by terrorists or their agents. These negative potentialities can still be avoided by increasing pressure through other measures to stem proliferation on one hand and by increasing funding for the CTR program on the other. Short of that, these missed opportunities may undermine any gains in security this agreement provides. Bringing the full influence bought by nuclear reductions to bear on non-proliferation issues could do more for American security than any nuclear hedge.

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