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Moscow Times
March 18, 2002
Clinging to Outdated Dogmas
By Ivan Safranchuk
Ivan Safranchuk, director of the Center for Defense Information's Moscow office,
contributed this comment to The Moscow Times.
The results of Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov's trip last week to the United States represent significant progress when compared to his public pronouncements prior to departure for Washington. On the eve of his visit, Ivanov expressed doubts about the prospects of a new nuclear arms reduction treaty being worked out in time for the May summit meeting between Presidents George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin. However, just a few days later at a joint press conference with U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, he was already expressing confidence that a treaty would be signed by the two presidents.
The positive tone of the visit and the arms control talks was not affected by leaks in the past two weeks of U.S. contingency plans to use nuclear weapons against a number of countries -- including Russia -- contained in the Pentagon's still-classified Nuclear Posture Review.
Ivanov, in contrast to many other Russian officials and politicians, did not seem particularly surprised by the leaked documents, and this is entirely understandable as it is pretty clear that the Defense Ministry has similar plans. Indeed the Cold War operational and contingency plans of Russia, the United States and NATO have only undergone minor revisions in the past decade.
For the respective governments, the most pressing task is to keep these plans out of the public domain rather than to revise them significantly. This might explain why Rumsfeld and Ivanov seemed so united on the issue of leaks.
Mutual understanding prevailed over any discontent that may have been caused by the substance of the leaked documents. In any case, Russia should have been pleased to learn that the number of U.S. nuclear weapons targets on its territory is set to decline drastically over the next decade -- in line with the Nuclear Posture Review's downgrading of Russia as a threat.
Ivanov and Rumsfeld stressed at their joint press conference that Bush and Putin want to sign a new nuclear arms reduction treaty and that they will do so. However, for many arms control experts the rationale and logic behind a new treaty are far from clear.
The three main issues between Russia and the United States in the field of nuclear arms reduction are: the status of any treaty document, the rules for counting (including the so-called shelving of nuclear warheads) and issues of verification and transparency.
So far, the two sides have only reached understanding on the first issue; it seems to have been agreed that the presidents will sign a "legally binding document." This sounds good until you get into the details of what constitutes a legally binding document. The Putin administration would like it to be a full treaty subject to ratification by the Senate on the U.S. side, and the State Duma and Federation Council on the Russian side.
The U.S. administration would prefer an executive agreement that would not be subject to ratification by the Senate. Russia's problem in this regard is that according to the 1994 Law on Ratification of International Treaties, any document dealing with national security and arms reductions must be ratified by the Duma.
The Russian side is hardly likely to agree to a treaty that it must ratify fully, while the United States is under no such obligation.
However, the indications are that a compromise has already been reached on this particular issue: The United States will agree to the Russian interpretation of what is "legally binding" (in any case the Bush administration should not have too much trouble in getting such a document ratified) and in exchange Russia will accept U.S. counting rules, based on the Pentagon Nuclear Posture Review's definition of what constitutes an operationally deployed nuclear warhead. This would mean that Russia will also put in storage rather than dismantle some of its missiles and warheads. Under such a compromise, verification measures would presumably be in line with START I and II procedures, with some omissions in recognition of the fact that many of the measures are either ineffective or excessive.
A number of comments made during Ivanov's trip strongly suggest that this is to be the basic framework for compromise.
However, putting the formalities aside, the question that needs to be asked is: What exactly is the purpose of Russia and the United States signing such a treaty? The United States seems simply to be acquiescing in Russia's and domestic arms control advocates' demands for a legally binding treaty. Russia, the driving force behind the new treaty, is having difficulty explaining the rationale behind it, except for to trot out the old line about arms control being the cornerstone of international stability. This traditional arms control mantra has already been thoroughly undermined by Russia's muted response to the United States giving notice of its withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.
Treaty negotiators are trying to develop a long-term document without having a clear-cut rationale. As Rumsfeld put it, "The two presidents have agreed that they would like to have something that would go beyond their two presidencies. ... So some sort of a document of that type is certainly a likelihood." However given the new political realities, traditional arms control talks -- particularly bilateral ones -- seem to be largely abstract exercises that bring to mind Hermann Hesse's "Glass Bead Game."
Russia's tactics in these talks prove that it still adheres to a traditional arms control approach, based heavily on parity (or nuclear balance) thinking. Due to the huge imbalance in capabilities -- including nuclear arsenals -- between the United States and Russia, this approach can only result in further unilateral concessions by Russia, which were initiated in the 1990s by the signing of the two START treaties.
Putin's team cannot fail to understand this. Clinging to this approach, therefore, can only be interpreted as the failure of Cold War veterans on both sides to go beyond the legacy of the Cold War -- in spite of the promising statements coming out of Moscow and Washington.
Following on from downgrading each other as threats in internal documents, Russia and the United States should have abandoned traditional arms control talks in favor of developing new bilateral accords, based primarily on building mutual confidence that their still huge nuclear arsenals are not intended for use against each other.
However, with the deadline set for May and with overwhelming expectations that a new arms reduction treaty will be signed, U.S. and Russian negotiators are under a great deal of pressure to produce something.
Given the underlying rationale, the treaty they produce is unlikely to be the first treaty marking a new era in U.S.-Russian relations and much more likely to be the last treaty of the Cold War era.
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