When US President Barack Obama and Russian Dmitry Medvedev meet for the first time tomorrow, a big part of “pressing the reset button” will be to rescue the two countries’ dying arms control treaty and prevent a return to Cold War nuclear rivalry.
The “reset,” Washington’s image for redefining future US-Russian relations, covers a tangle of issues. Critical among them is the replacement of one of the most important Cold War deals limiting the world’s two largest nuclear arsenals — the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START).
START expires on Dec. 5, and at their London summit, Obama and Medvedev are expected to announce talks on a new pact, whose outcome will color relations between the US and Russia for years to come.
But with an array of military and political issues to untangle, “the process will be very difficult,” said Anton Khlopkov, director of the Moscow-based Center for Energy and Security Studies.
Signed in 1991 by then presidents Mikhail Gorbachev and George H.W. Bush, the 700-page START resulted in the largest nuclear reductions in history. Essential to that was a mechanism that allowed the two sides to inspect and verify each other’s arsenals.
“If one thing or another isn’t done, then we’ll end up in a legal vacuum and we won’t know anything about the condition of [each other’s] nuclear forces,” said retired Major General Vladimir Dvorkin, a former arms control expert with the Russian defense ministry.
According to the US State Department, as of last July — the most recent official data available — Russia had about 4,100 warheads available for use on missiles based on land, on submarines and on long-range bombers. The US had around 5,950. That includes warheads in storage — a major point of disagreement.
The talks are the first major arms control negotiations since 1997, when then presidents Boris Yeltsin and Bill Clinton made a new push to reach a START successor treaty that US and Russian lawmakers would ratify.
That effort, however, was tied up for years by lawmakers in both countries and START II ultimately fell apart.
Instead the two powers produced the 2002 Treaty of Moscow, a page-long document committing them to slash their warheads to between 1,700 and 2,200 in number. But it’s considered far weaker than START.
With just eight months remaining before START expires, both Medvedev and Obama have signaled a desire to reach a new deal.
Experts say the two nuclear giants could easily agree to cuts below 1,700 warheads, if not further.
But a thicket of technical disputes, differing interpretations and lingering grievances make it unlikely that a negotiators will reach a comprehensive successor to START before the deadline, analysts say. More likely is that START will just be renewed or the two sides will reach an informal agreement that keeps some sort of arms control framework in place.
“I am not at all sure that the Kremlin actually wants to see the negotiations conclude quickly,” military commentator Alexander Golts wrote in a recent column, arguing that Moscow will use the talks to boost its battered prestige as an equal negotiating partner with Washington.
However, Hans Kristensen, a researcher with the Federation for American Scientists in Washington, says both sides have good reason to want a deal.
“The Russians have every interest in landing some sort of agreement here,” he said. “And the US needs to cement a better relationship with Russians and turn this ship around.”
Washington is looking to increase the number of strategic missiles it tips with non-nuclear warheads — for example, submarine-launched missiles that could be used to take out terrorist bases. Moscow argues that it would have no way of knowing whether such a submarine-launched missile is nuclear or not.
Russia, meanwhile, is developing the RS-24, a new type of missile that can carry multiple warheads. Washington says it’s just an upgrade of an existing model, a violation of START.
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