Bloomberg: Don’t let Putin blow up new START

Bloomberg has published an article saying that bringing Russia back into compliance with the last remaining nuclear arms control treaty is essential to US security. Caliber.Az reprints the article.

Last week, President Joe Biden’s administration issued a pointed warning: Russia is failing to comply with the terms of the New START agreement, the last remaining arms-control treaty between the world’s two biggest nuclear powers. Given Vladimir Putin’s record of nuclear threats and disregard for international law, Biden can have no illusions about Russia’s willingness to abide by negotiated limits on the size of its nuclear arsenal. In order to preserve the treaty, the US should make clear what Russia stands to lose by abandoning it.

Signed in 2010, the New START treaty limits both the number of long-range nuclear warheads each side can deploy and the vehicles used to deliver them. To verify compliance, each country agreed to 18 on-site inspections per year conducted by officials from the other. Even amid worsening bilateral relations, the work of disarmament quietly continued: In the treaty’s first decade, inspectors carried out more than 300 visits to nuclear bases and support facilities. Since 2018, the US and Russia have both come under New START’s cap of 1,550 deployable strategic nuclear warheads — a 30% reduction from 2002 levels and nearly 75% lower than at the end of the Cold War.

That progress is now in jeopardy. According to the US, Russia is refusing to submit to any on-site nuclear inspections, which were suspended at the start of the pandemic. The Kremlin also pulled out of a scheduled meeting last November to discuss implementation of the accord.

The State Department says that Russia’s intransigence is a matter of “serious concern,” but not yet a formal violation of the treaty. It should hardly come as a surprise: With the US and its allies engaged in a proxy war against Russian forces in Ukraine, there’s little incentive for Putin to give teams of US inspectors access to some of his country’s most sensitive military installations. In public statements, Russia has suggested that its future compliance with New START will be conditioned on the West’s halting its support for Ukraine and rolling back the post-Cold War expansion of NATO.

The Biden administration should push back. It should insist that any attempt to use arms control to extract concessions on Ukraine is a non-starter, while pressing Russian officials to commit to a timetable for resuming reciprocal inspections. This should come in the form of carrots and sticks. The US should remind the Kremlin that the provisions of New START benefit Russia as much as the US, by enabling Russian inspectors to verify that US efforts to modernize its nuclear arsenal aren’t undermining Russia’s strategic deterrent. Remaining in compliance with the treaty also allows Russia to avoid pouring resources into maintaining thousands of outdated long-range nuclear weapons that have no bearing on the outcome of the war in Ukraine.

Biden should be just as clear about the costs Russia faces if it walks away from New START. Regardless of how the conflict in Ukraine ends, the US should withhold restoring diplomatic and economic relations with Russia until Putin agrees to comply with the agreements he’s previously made. If he persists with nuclear gamesmanship and continues to block implementation of the treaty, the US should respond in kind — by continuing regular nuclear exercises, accelerating the deployment of more advanced nuclear bombs in Europe, and bolstering the missile-defense capabilities of NATO allies. 

At the same time, Biden needs to make a more forceful case for why nuclear arms control remains vital to America’s security. Republican lawmakers have called on the Pentagon to “prepare for a future where Russia may deploy large numbers of warheads” that exceed the New START limits. While continuing to invest in its existing arsenal, the US should abide by New START’s cap on nuclear warheads and resist building costly new nuclear weapons systems that the military doesn’t need. Demonstrating the US’s commitment to upholding arms-control agreements should encourage Russia to resume cooperation on New START, bolster nonproliferation goals and help to persuade China to eventually accept limits on its own nuclear buildup.

Arms-control agreements haven’t eliminated the danger of nuclear war, but they’ve greatly reduced it. Failing to sustain those efforts would undermine decades of progress toward disarmament and make the world a more dangerous place.