On May 24 of this year, Presidents George Bush and
Vladimir Putin signed the “Moscow Treaty” on Strategic Offensive
Reductions. The treaty aims to reduce and limit strategic nuclear warheads
down to 1700-2200 by December 31, 2012. While this is a substantial
reduction, the new treaty has a number of lacunae and exemplifies the
prejudices of the Bush administration: that arms control
negotiations are worthless.
The Moscow treaty is the latest in a
set of treaties between the US and Russia dealing with strategic nuclear
weapons, namely those mounted on long range delivery vehicles that could
reach the other country from one’s own country. The first of these was the
Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT I) signed almost exactly 30 years
ago in May 1972, which capped US and Soviet intercontinental and submarine
launched ballistic missile forces. (For more details on these treaties see
http://www.armscontrol.org/)
SALT II, which followed SALT I, placed
further restrictions. However, it never entered into force because of the
Soviet invasion of Afghanistan though both countries promised to adhere to
its terms. While the SALT treaties allowed the establishment of some kind
of d�tente, they were by and large ineffectual in stopping the arms race.
In particular, because the SALT treaties did not address the number of
warheads possessed by each side, it allowed both sides to enlarge their
deployed forces by adding multiple warheads to their missiles.
The
first significant reductions of strategic nuclear arsenals came only with
the end of the cold war and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Signed in
July 1991, the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START I) required the
United States and the Soviet Union to reduce their deployed strategic
arsenals to 1,600 delivery vehicles (missiles or aircraft), carrying no
more than 6,000 warheads as counted using the agreement’s rules. The
agreement also required the destruction of excess delivery vehicles, which
was verified using on-site inspections, regular exchanges of information
and national technical means (i.e., satellites). START I reductions were
completed in December 2001 and the treaty will remain in force till
December 2009.
Before the Moscow treaty, START I was the most
comprehensive treaty dealing with strategic nuclear weapons that had
entered into force. While the Moscow treaty calls for a substantial
reduction in strategic nuclear warheads, it leaves much to be desired. The
fact that while the START I treaty with all its protocols ran to several
hundred pages, the new treaty is all of 3 pages is indicative of the
casualness with which the Bush administration has approached this
agreement.
The basic flaw in the treaty is that it does not define
“strategic nuclear warheads”. In other words, it is not clear what is
being counted towards the figure of 1700-2200. While a superficial or
naive reading of the treaty might suggest that this is the total number of
warheads possessed by each state, the Bush administration appears to be
counting only the number of operationally deployed warheads. If a warhead
were to be removed from a missile and kept in storage, then that is not
included.
Indeed reading this treaty in conjunction with the US
Nuclear Posture Review makes it clear that thousands of nuclear warheads
will be stored in various states of readiness. At the same time there are
no requirements for destroying either the delivery vehicles (as required
in START I) or the warheads themselves. The new treaty seems to allow the
US to use the delivery vehicles with conventional warheads — which, one
might add, can be quite destructive themselves because of the tremendous
advances in guidance and consequent accuracy. And since both the delivery
vehicles and the nuclear warheads exist, the US could rapidly reconstitute
its strategic nuclear missile force.
This “upload potential” has
been of great concern to Russia. Nevertheless, it appears that Russian
policy makers went along with the treaty for a variety of reasons. The
treaty allows the Russian elite to persist with the fa�ade that despite
its greatly reduced power, Russia is still an equal partner to the US when
it comes to nuclear treaties. Similarly the fact that the treaty is a
legally binding agreement allows Russia to salvage some pride in the face
of the unilateral US withdrawal from the Anti Ballistic Missile (ABM)
Treaty. And finally it appears that till the last moment Russian
negotiators were interested in getting some irreversibility or some
agreement on limiting the deployment of ballistic missile defenses —
however, none of this was forthcoming.
What then is the impact of
such a treaty on the already slow process of nuclear disarmament? First,
even 1700-2200 operationally deployed warheads are immensely destructive,
especially when it is in addition to the devastating conventional military
capabilities of Russia and especially the US. Seen this way, the
reductions are more in the nature of pruning down the grotesque excesses
of the Cold War era arms race to get a more manageable, useable
stockpile.
The more serious problem is that such agreements are
flaunted as proof of the US or Russian commitment to the elimination of
nuclear weapons. In the words of Jackie Cabasso of the Western States
Legal Foundation (http://www.wslfweb.org/), such reductions are “worse
than cosmetic”: they only serve to deceive people into believing that
nuclear weapons do not pose a danger any more. Such a delusion among the
people at large allows those in power to continue with the profitable
business of building destructive capabilities. They should be exposed and
challenged.
