Nuclear Arms Control After Moscow

The work plan has two parts: the Treaty of Moscow and the Joint Declaration on Strategic Stability. The treaty is the legally binding document, which is currently undergoing ratification in the U.S. Senate and Russian Duma.

The Declaration is a political document signed by the presidents, committing them to work together to flesh out extensive joint efforts in regional security, counterterrorism, economic cooperation, and nonproliferation. It is the most detailed statement to date on the substantive areas our two countries will build into a new, post-Cold War partnership.

The treaty Presidents Bush and Putin signed May 24 in Moscow is a straightforward, simple document. It requires the two sides to reduce strategic offensive nuclear forces to 1,700-2,200 by December 31, 2012. The START I agreement of July 1989 will continue in force and continue to be implemented, which means that the data exchanges, data updates, telemetry exchanges, inspections and related monitoring and verification measures called for will continue to occur and will parallel implementation of the new agreement. Thus, the Moscow Treaty's implementation is based on a foundation provided by the START I Verification Protocol. In other words, although the Moscow Treaty has no unique verification regime, it will be predictable in its implementation because both countries will continue implementing START I. This will continue until December 2009, when START I expires. By then, the two sides must either extend that treaty or negotiate a new arrangement – possibly a new treaty requiring further reductions.

The U.S. Senate has already begun formal ratification proceedings for the new treaty, but Russian treaty law requires several legal steps – such as a still-pending executive branch report on its impact on Russian strategic forces – before it can be submitted to the Duma.

In the course of its U.S. ratification process, several questions have arisen about the treaty. Some relate to verification issues; others are related to how reductions will be counted. The U.S. position is that it will count reductions in "operationally deployed warheads," defined as reentry vehicles on intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and their launchers, on submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) and their launchers on board submarines, and nuclear weapons on heavy bombers, or stored in weapons storage areas at those bomber bases.

The Russians, by contrast, have thus far insisted they will count reductions according to START I counting rules, where a missile tested with 10 warheads must always be counted as having 10 warheads.

The impact of this difference, if it continues, can be seen in how the two countries would count downloaded U.S. Trident II SLBMs. The United States would count the missile with the number of warheads it was carrying when it was downloaded – say, four warheads per missile. Russia would continue to insist that the missile be counted as having 10 warheads because that was the number it carried when it was tested. Russian insistence on this approach would prevent the United States from taking credit for reductions through the downloading of missiles. The Russians argue that if the launchers are not eliminated, downloaded missiles could readily be uploaded again and pose a new strategic threat to the Russian Federation.

At this juncture, U.S. experts are saying the United States will be keeping two sets of books in implementing START I and the Moscow Treaty. The START I books will maintain data according to the START I counting rules. The Moscow Treaty books, by contrast, will take account of reductions through downloading, conversion to conventional platforms, and other measures that may not have been foreseen in START I. The differences between the two sets of numbers should be readily apparent, indeed transparent, to the Russian side.

This issue could be resolved through additional transparency measures – for example, by allowing the Russian side to inspect the downloaded configuration of the Trident II missile. But at this point the Russians continue to say they do not want additional transparency measures of this kind, perhaps because they are concerned about reciprocal requirements for inspections being imposed on them.

Another transparency arena that Russia has thus far avoided involves warhead measures. Transparency into the storage and elimination of warheads has long been recognized as an important new stage to pursue in strategic arms reductions.

Historically, the Soviet Union and the United States relied on non-intrusive confidence-building and monitoring measures that did not require access into sensitive facilities. The earliest confidence-building arrangements, such as the 1963 Hot-Line Agreement, avoided direct and personal contact for remote arrangements – telegraph and teletype lines that could be used for communications between leaders during a crisis. Later agreements continued this tradition. The 1972 Incidents at Sea Agreement called for confidence-building measures such as exchanges of information and annual consultations, but no ship-board inspections. The 1972 Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT I) emphasized counting reductions in units that can be observed from afar, with national technical means such as satellites. Blowing up silos and cutting up submarines are examples.

This approach changed slowly as U.S. and Soviet relations improved toward the close of the Cold War. When the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty was negotiated in the late 1980s, for example, the two sides were able to consider on-site inspections, and even the permanent presence of monitors at missile production facilities. START I took such on-site inspections to a new level.

Because of these improvements in verification, the United States and Russia began to contemplate trying to monitor warheads as a way to gain further confidence in the status of each other’s strategic forces. Although launch vehicles were eliminated under earlier agreements, for example, the two countries could never fully verify what had happened to the warheads removed from them. Were they stored? Eliminated? Could they be re-deployed on new or refurbished launchers? This is the crux of the concern that the Russians have about the new agreement.

Presidents Clinton and Yeltsin agreed in the Helsinki Statement of March 1997 to pursue transparency measures affecting warheads in the next strategic arms reduction negotiations, to lead to START III – a treaty that died in the talking stage. Such measures could have involved warheads in storage, or warheads undergoing the process of being eliminated. Counting warheads in storage facilities would be much less sensitive than trying to follow warheads throughout their elimination process, as they move through sensitive facilities such as the Pantex Plant in Amarillo, Texas or the Zlataoust Plant in Russia. Neither country would want the other to gain access to sensitive warhead design information, therefore requiring all kinds of careful procedures and perhaps technologies, such as information barriers, to implement them.

Despite the presidential commitment at Helsinki, the Russians never agreed to such intrusive inspection measures during the preparatory discussions for START III. The United States apparently offered less sensitive measures involving warhead storage during the Moscow Treaty negotiations, but Russian negotiators asked that this be taken off the table as the talks reached endgame. The Russians said they could not get interagency bureaucratic agreement to such measure by the target signing date during the Moscow summit.

Warhead measures thus also remain on the agenda for additional discussions on transparency. These could be addressed in two different forums: the new high-level group chaired by the Ministers of Foreign Affairs and Defense (Colin Powell-Igor Ivanov, Donald Rumsfeld-Sergei Ivanov), or the new implementation group that comes into existence after ratification of the Moscow Treaty.

In the end, such measures will probably be more important to Russia than to the United States, because of our help in eliminating Russia’s strategic launch platforms through the Cooperative Threat Reduction or Nunn-Lugar program. U.S. and Russian companies have essentially an industrial partnership as they work together on contracts to eliminate Russian systems such as submarines and bombers. This "natural transparency" has developed extensively in recent years, but because it flows from a U.S. assistance program in Russia, it does not extend reciprocally to Russian industrial presence in U.S. facilities.