Posted on: December 23rd, 2010 by Ernie Regehr
It was genuinely a landmark moment yesterday (December 22) when the US Senate voted of 71 to 26 to ratify the New START Treaty. Of course, in the ponderously slow path toward nuclear disarmament no single success is ever enough – and the same goes for this one. But without this ratification there would have been little hope for further progress, at least in the near term, in taking up the other key measures awaiting attention on the long and onerous disarmament agenda .
The New START Treaty, as the now US-ratified US-Russia agreement is known, will reduce deployed strategic nuclear warheads down to 1,550 on each side – a total of 3,100 deployed strategic warheads.
And the next big challenge? There are many and among them is the need to get working on that bigger nuclear number – 22,000.
That is roughly the total number of nuclear warheads worldwide. In other words, only about 15 per cent of the weapons in global arsenals are covered by the Treaty. START puts a ceiling on the number of strategic or long-range warheads that are actually deployed – it doesn’t address non-strategic (short-range or battlefield nuclear weapons) deployed by the US and Russia; it doesn’t address the warheads that are in storage; and it obviously doesn’t address the warheads held by other nuclear powers (since it is a bilateral US-Russia Treaty only).
Besides its deployed strategic warheads, the US has roughly an additional 500 non-strategic warheads deployed, another 2,500 warheads are held in reserve and available for deployment, and about 4,200 are in storage and awaiting dismantlement – about 250 to 400 weapons are dismantled each year. Russia has another 2,000 deployed non-strategic warheads and about 7,300 warheads in reserve and waiting to be dismantled. Roughly another 1,000 warheads are held by the other states with nuclear weapons (the UK, France, China each maintain between 150 and 400 warheads; and India, Pakistan, and Israel collectively have another 300).
Reducing those numbers will take further US-Russia negotiations and serious attention to regional conflicts in North East Asia, South Asia, and the Middle East.
There are two other major global nuclear Treaties that are pending and on the arms control priority list.
The first is the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, which has been agreed to since 1996 and signed by all the major nuclear weapon states. The United States and China still have to ratify it, and President Barack Obama has said ratification is a priority – not a sentiment likely to be shared by most Republicans coming into the US Congress in 2011. Israel has signed but not ratified it. India, North Korea, and Pakistan have yet to sign it.
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The second major Treaty is yet to be negotiated – a global agreement to halt all further production of fissile materials for weapons purposes. It has long been on the global arms control agenda but has been held hostage to a dysfunctional Conference on Disarmament, the Geneva-based disarmament forum that is mandated to host the negotiations.
But START ratification by the US Senate is a celebration-worthy achievement (now it’s the Russians’ turn). US civil society organizations had a huge hand in getting this done. Joined by a broad range of political leaders and security professionals, civil society led a compelling coalition of the willing. As one of the leading organizations, the Arms Control Association put it after the vote: “New START advocates include a range of supporters from the Air Force Association to the Arms Control Association, from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops to the National Assn. of Evangelicals, from retired generals to the U.S. Conference of Mayors, plus a long list of former Secretaries of State, former Secretaries of Defense, former national security advisers, former presidents, and all major U.S. allies urging approval of the treaty this year.”[i]
It turned out be an effective community of support for White House and Congressional champions of the Treaty.
Now civil society will mark the accomplishment and then turn attention to the next items on the nuclear disarmament agenda.
eregehr@uwaterloo.ca
Notes
[i] Daryl Kimball press statement — http://www.armscontrol.org.
Posted on: November 6th, 2010 by Ernie Regehr
In his post-election press conference, President Barak Obama acknowledged – in the context of recalling health care reform – that getting things done in Washington can be “an ugly mess when it comes to process.” True to form, the effort to get the new US-Russia nuclear arms deal through the US Senate has accumulated a string of unsavoury compromises, but successful ratification will be well worth the mess.
The current US Senate has one brief session left before the newly-elected one takes over in January, so it has one last chance to keep the nuclear disarmament momentum going by ratifying the US-Russia Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (referred to as New START). A two-thirds majority is required, which means garnering the support of at least some Republicans and Blue Dog Democrats, and that won’t happen without some heavy horse trading that has already gone from messy to odious.
The standard objections to New START are threefold: inadequate verification of Russian compliance, limits on future US ballistic missile defence (BMD) prerogatives, and concerns about the reliability of remaining warheads in the US arsenal. On the first two there aren’t really any further deals to be made.
Verification of the Treaty is reciprocal, it largely follows earlier START models of inspections, and if ratification fails there will be no verification of any kind, and no US inspections of Russian nuclear facilities. The 2002 Moscow Treaty (the Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty – SORT) promised to reduce US and Russian arsenals to no more than 2,200 deployed warheads each by 2012, but without any verification provisions there is no guarantee of compliance.
On ballistic missile defence, New START prevents both the US and Russia from using existing missile silos for BMD interceptor launchers. But, as a recent editorial in Air Force Magazine pointed out, the US Missile Defence Agency has no intention or interest in doing that, and, furthermore, BMD advocates have been given assurances that the treaty in no way restricts future missile defense programs or capabilities.[i]
On those two issues, Senators will either be persuaded or not; Washington isn’t in a position to unilaterally change verification or BMD references, even if it now wanted to. On the third, the question of warhead “reliability,” there has already been plenty of controversial compromise.
Indeed, compromise has come rather more easily to the Obama Administration than one dared to hope, in part because the worriers about warhead reliability include his own Defense Secretary, Robert Gates. Before the 2008 election he argued that arsenal reductions could not be accepted without allowing either tests on remaining stocks or building new warheads to replace existing ones.
In the election campaign, then Senator Obama rejected both of those options – arguing that the reliability of a reduced arsenal could be assured without warhead testing or replacing existing warheads with new ones.[ii] That was and is certainly the overwhelming view in the scientific arms control community, and President Obama has remained firm. But warhead “replacement” has been traded for warhead “modernization” (replacement of some components) and a major infusion of new money into the US nuclear weapons establishment.
The Obama Administration is spending at least 10 per cent more than the George W. Bush Administration did to extend the life of existing strategic nuclear warheads and to expand and modernize the nuclear weapons infrastructure (but it’s worth noting that the same infrastructure also supports arms control and non-proliferation capacity). In the decade of 2010-2020 the bill for the nuclear weapons maintenance system will come to more than $80 billion.[iii] Another $100 billion will go to maintaining their missile and bomber delivery systems.[iv]
The path to a world without nuclear weapons should not have to go through an expanded US nuclear weapons infrastructure, but to be fair, President Obama’s compromises have not betrayed his election campaign promises or his 2009 Prague speech. In both cases he insisted that while the commitment to a world without nuclear weapons is firm, as long as other states still have nuclear weapons the United States will maintain a nuclear deterrent arsenal.
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It is the kind of messiness that should not obscure the extraordinary achievement that New START ratification would represent. For without real and treaty-compelled reductions in the nuclear arsenals of the major powers, without a legally binding commitment to prohibit both warhead testing and the production of fissile materials for weapons, the struggle to keep nuclear weapons out of the arsenals of smaller powers will fail. Not immediately, but inevitably.
Achieving major cuts in nuclear arsenals and legal blocks to further weapons development involves some messy compromises – and that still doesn’t guarantee that they’re going to get it done. But we can be sure of one thing, if the New START and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty are not ratified, things will get a whole lot uglier.
(Published as “Nuclear disarmament can be a messy business,” The Record, Waterloo Region, 9 November 2010)
eregehr@uwaterloo.ca
Notes
[i] Adam J. Hebert, “Arms Control, On Schedule.” Air Force Magazine, October 2010. http://www.airforce-magazine.com/MagazineArchive/Pages/2010/October%202010/1010edit.aspx.
[ii] See Disarming Conflict post, 5 January 009. http://disarmingconflict.ca/2009/01/05/complication-and-compromise-on-obama%e2%80%99s-ctbt-action/
[iii] “The New START Treaty – Maintaining a Strong Nuclear Deterrent,” n.d., US State Department New START Fact Sheets. http://www.state.gov/t/avc/newstart/c39906.htm.
[iv] “The New START Treaty – Maintaining a Strong Nuclear Deterrent,” n.d., US State Department New START Fact Sheets. http://www.state.gov/t/avc/newstart/c39906.htm.
