Stop Rushing START

How to fight nuclear proliferation without waiting on Moscow.

By Henry Sokolski
Monday, January 25, 2010

Sometimes, coming late is just as bad as not arriving. Consider the Obama administration’s effort this week to conclude a Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) with Moscow.

Begun in April of 2009, negotiations were supposed to produce a treaty before early December. Now the White House will be lucky if it can get something signed in time for the Senate to ratify it before the 2010 elections, and the treaty could easily get hung up in partisan debate. Because this risks undermining the administration’s initiative to reduce nuclear threats, the White House would be wise to initiate a complementary set of arms-control measures that don’t depend on the Russian government or Senate ratification for success.

The odds of START’s being ratified before November’s elections are hardly on the rise. The next round of negotiations begins today in Geneva. Whether they will settle how much Russian offensive-missile information the U.S. should be able to access and how much U.S. missile-defense information Russia should get is unclear. Then there are the START annexes — the detailed descriptions of the nuclear systems to be dismantled, their locations, and how their disposal will be verified. When asked how long these might take to negotiate, a senior White House official observed that the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) annexes took 18 months to finalize. One would like to think that it would not take that long with START, but it could take several months — possibly enough time to make ratification this year iffy.

Finally, there is the matter of Senate ratification itself. The first START agreement, signed July 31, 1991, took 430 days to ratify. Ratification of George W. Bush’s Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty (SORT), which was only three pages long and had the clear backing of the Republican Senate majority, required more than nine months. Even Senate ratification of the INF Treaty, which also enjoyed majority Republican backing and was largely uncontroversial, took a full five months. Certainly, if START and its annexes are not sent to the Senate before early May, its ratification could easily go past this November’s elections.

As it is, 41 Senators (all 40 Republicans plus one independent, Sen. Joe Lieberman) have warned President Obama that they are in no mood to approve START unless the White House supports a “significant” nuclear-weapons-modernization program. The Defense Department’s Nuclear Posture Review, which details U.S. nuclear-weapons requirements for Congress every five years, was due in December. The administration is divided and has asked for two extensions; the review is now due in March and may be delayed again. Complicating matters even further, Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin is pushing to link missile defenses with offensive missiles in START, a potential killer provision for most pro-missile-defense Republicans.

Taken together, these developments spell trouble. Late this spring, President Obama will host an international summit in Washington to promote nuclear security (i.e., greater physical protection of nuclear weapons and nuclear-weapons-usable materials globally). Also, in May, the U.N. will host the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty Review Conference, which will consider President Obama’s list of nonproliferation ideas that he presented last September to the U.N. Security Council. Without Russian backing and clear progress on U.S.-Russian nuclear agreements, several key administration officials fear, neither of these events is likely to produce much in the way of results.

One idea senior officials are pushing — to “show progress” with Moscow on nuclear matters while START is stalled and before these international meetings are held — is to resubmit the U.S.-Russian civilian-nuclear-cooperation agreement that George W. Bush withdrew from Congress after Russia invaded Georgia. Since this nuclear agreement can be defeated only with a majority vote in both houses, its approval would pretty much be a slam dunk. However, resubmitting this agreement, which would allow for the export to Russia of U.S.-controlled civilian nuclear hardware and fuels, won’t be cost-free: At a minimum, it’s sure to revive earlier congressional complaints about Russia’s continued assistance to Iran’s missile and nuclear-weapons programs. Bringing it into force could easily sour Senate sentiment regarding START.

This worry has led some Obama-administration officials to consider playing an even riskier gambit to “show progress” — forcing the Senate to vote on the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty before even submitting START. The odds of this agreement’s mustering the necessary 67 votes, though, seem much more remote than the chances of any START agreement.

What, then, should President Obama do?

First, stop rushing START. The U.S. and Russia have already lived without START verification procedures for nearly two months; the world will not collapse if we live without them for several months more. More important, Russia is planning to demobilize several hundred of its nuclear warheads mounted on aging missiles, with or without a START follow-up agreement. The Russians also are encountering difficulties in developing their next-generation missile. As a consequence, we can easily afford to take the time to get START right.

Second, the White House should diversify its arms-control portfolio to address nuclear threats outside of Russia. Moscow’s deployed nuclear capabilities may be important, but they have declined steadily since 1985. Also, the chances for war are small and declining in Europe. Meanwhile, as Secretary of Defense Gates recently pointed out, those chances in Asia — in China, Pakistan, and India — are on the rise.

One near-term worry is the continuing nuclear competition between India and Pakistan. Islamabad just announced its intention to respond to what it described as India’s “massive” nuclear buildup. India, meanwhile, is publicly debating the merits of resuming nuclear testing. All of this could produce knock-on effects with China. Rather than whistle past this problem set, it would be in everyone’s interest to engage China, India, and Pakistan to jointly reaffirm their national moratoriums against nuclear testing.

It also would be useful to get these states to follow the U.S.-Russian example of publicly declaring that they will no longer make uranium or plutonium fuels for bombs. China privately claims it is not engaged in such production. The U.S. and Russia ought to get it to say so publicly, then use this declaration to persuade India and Pakistan to do likewise. Also, it would make sense to get these states and Japan (which has quietly separated enough plutonium domestically to make between 1,000 and 2,000 nuclear weapons) to do as the U.S. and Russia have: declare some portion of their current civilian or military stockpiles to be in excess of what they need, and dispose of this material.

Finally, to bolster America’s image at the NPT Review Conference and the upcoming nuclear-security summit in Washington, the White House should pay less attention to what Moscow wants and more to what Congress clearly supports: restricting the civilian use and export of nuclear-weapons-usable uranium. A key goal of April’s nuclear-security summit is to end such use and commerce, and the House recently passed legislation that would do just that for the U.S. Unfortunately, the White House has yet to do anything to secure passage of this legislation in the Senate.

Similarly, Republicans and Democrats in the House and Senate have backed legislation encouraging the president finally to implement a critical, neglected provision of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Act of 1978, which would discourage the further spread of nuclear technology by creating a cadre of energy experts to work with developing nations on safer, more economical, non-nuclear ways to generate power. Here, again, the White House has chosen to ignore Congress and the law, although it could implement this provision, if it chose to do so, overnight.

The point here is to get started on these ideas now, instead of holding our breath waiting upon Moscow or START.