Elements of Possible Russian Position Detailed and Concern About U.S. Prompt Global Strike Capability Voiced

On July 3, 2007, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov issued a joint statement that addressed the issue of replacing the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START I), which expires in December 2009. According to the statement, “The Ministers discussed development of a post-START arrangement to provide continuity and predictability regarding strategic offensive forces” and agreed to “continue these discussions with a view toward early results.” [1]

Moscow welcomed the statement, which came a year after Russian President Vladimir Putin proposed negotiations to replace START I. [2] The document was seen as a success for Russian diplomacy after a period of disenchantment with Washington’s apparent unwillingness to tackle the issue seriously. Speaking at a press-conference in Guatemala on the heels of his meeting in Kennebunkport, Maine, with U.S. President George W. Bush, Putin said he was satisfied with the breakthrough. [3] Commenting to the press, Sergey Rogov, the director of the Moscow-based Institute of U.S. and Canada Studies, underscored the importance of the understanding, declaring that the parties managed to “prevent sliding toward a new Cold War.” [4]

It remains to be seen whether the promise of the July 3 Joint Statement will be realized. Russian experts and some officials openly complain that the current U.S. administration seems unwilling to entertain a new treaty – a position that was reflected in Putin’s complaint last year about “stagnation” of Russia-American arms control efforts. Rogov noted in the interview referenced above that the chances of concluding the new agreement before George W. Bush leaves office were “50-50.”

“START-Light” to Replace START I
There have been relatively few indications of how Moscow conceptualizes the new treaty it is seeking. Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergey Kislyak said that it should not “precisely follow the spirit and the letter of START I.” The goal of consultations with the United States, he said, was to “determine which positive elements of the existing treaty could be used in the future. This does not mean that we must preserve the treaty in the form it exists today, since many of its provisions have already been implemented.” He specifically pointed out that Moscow wanted to retain START I’s confidence building and data exchange provisions and sought to make strategic nuclear arms reduction “an uninterrupted process.” [5]

Commenting in mid-July, the deputy head of the Main Directorate for International Military Cooperation of the Ministry of Defense, Lieutenant-General Yevgeni Buzhinski, was somewhat more specific. [6] He said that START I was a “difficult to implement, cumbersome, and very expensive” document and should be replaced with something “simpler and lighter,” but that key elements of the existing treaty should still be preserved. Specifically, a new agreement, he said, should, like START I, limit both the number of warheads deployed on strategic delivery vehicles and the number of delivery vehicles themselves.

Another element Buzhinski singled out for inclusion in any new bilateral strategic arms agreement was the obligation “that strategic offensive nuclear forces [should be deployed] only in national territories.” START I contained a similar clause. If the relevant provision of the previous treaty is preserved, it would not require a change in the existing deployment pattern of U.S. strategic forces, including the right to the “temporary stationing” of heavy bombers outside U.S. national territory. Russia’s goal seems to be to prevent the United States from permanently basing its strategic weapons, in particular heavy bombers, near Russian territory, for example, on the territory of new NATO members. Thus, although Russia has opposed the continued deployment of U.S. non-strategic weapons outside U.S. territory – a subject external to the START discussions – it is not objecting to the existing deployment pattern of U.S. strategic forces.

Likely Warhead Accounting Controversy
Accounting rules for a “START-light” treaty are likely to become a controversial issue. Under START I, each strategic delivery vehicle is assigned a certain number of warheads (usually the maximum number tested) to count against the limits established by the treaty. There are also special accounting rules for heavy bomber armaments: air-launched cruise missiles (ALCMs) are counted at half the maximum number that each type of heavy bomber can carry, while short-range weapons (bombs and short-range attack missiles) are counted as just one warhead, irrespective of the actual number carried. The heavy bomber counting rules were to have changed under the 1993 START II Treaty to “real accounting,” but that agreement never entered into force. (Russia declared it null and void in 2002, the day after the United States withdrew from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.)

The 2002 Moscow Treaty (also known as the Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty or SORT) offered a fundamentally different approach to accounting. Instead of limiting the maximum or near-maximum load of strategic delivery vehicles, it employed the principle of declaring the actual number of deployed warheads. The principle embodied in SORT allows for deep reductions through the process of “downloading,” i.e., the removal of some warheads from delivery vehicles without eliminating the latter, so that each missile or heavy bomber carries less than the full complement of warheads or other armaments.

The principle of downloading has been a concern for Russia since it was first utilized, on a more limited scale, in START II. Because a large fraction of Russia’s strategic forces consist of ballistic missiles that are nearing the end of their service lives and must be retired and because the bulk of new ICBMs (land-based strategic missiles) that Russia plans to deploy will be single-warhead Topol-Ms, Russia’s downloading capability will be minimal. In fact, it is widely anticipated that even with the full load of warheads, including new multiple-warhead land- and sea-based missiles, Russian strategic forces will, by the middle of the next decade, remain well under the 2,200 limit established by SORT. The United States, in contrast, will be able to implement reductions primarily through downloading – which will also give it a significant “uploading” capability, i.e., the ability to return warheads to delivery vehicles to quickly increase the size of its deployed forces. [7]

It is thus likely that during START I replacement negotiations Russia will seek to address the U.S. uploading capability in one way or another. If Russia cannot eliminate this imbalance completely, it may try at least to prevent unannounced U.S. uploading. Speaking in Munich in the spring of 2007, Putin raised the possibility of destroying excess warheads instead of “placing aside a couple of hundred superfluous nuclear warheads for a rainy day.” [8] It is also possible that Russia could revive a proposal it previously tabled regarding elimination of missile platforms capable of carrying the original, higher number of warheads.

Two well-informed and well-connected Russian experts, retired General Vasili Lata and retired General Midykhan Vildanov, recently characterized rules of accounting as the central issue that would define the future of the U.S.-Russian strategic balance. [9] They called for a return to the START I principle of limiting the maximum (or near-maximum) capacity of delivery vehicles, thus eliminating the possibility of uploading.

The same experts also mentioned another potential accounting problem that might arise at the new negotiations – the declared intention of the United States to deploy conventional warheads on some strategic delivery vehicles. Lata and Vildanov wrote: “This concerns ‘MX’ ICBMs and their silo launchers, four ‘Ohio’-class SSBNs, which are being retrofitted to carry cruise missiles, and also B-1B bombers, which have been switched to ‘non-nuclear’ status.” [10] The Russian experts want all these systems to be counted as though they were equipped with nuclear weapons – the approach practiced under START I, but not under SORT.

The differences in the U.S. and the Russian approaches to the key provisions of the future START I replacement were underscored by a curious difference in the language of the Rice-Lavrov joint statement mentioned above. While the English text referred to “strategic offensive reductions,” harking back to the 2002 Moscow Treaty (SORT), the Russian language spoke about “strategic offensive arms reductions,” the language of START. It is unclear how this difference crept into the language of the joint statement, whose text is supposed to have exactly the same meaning in both languages. The discrepancy could point to very different approaches: it appears that the United States favors building on SORT, while Russia apparently wants a return to START principles. [11]

While Russia is likely to insist that most of START I’s accounting rules be retained, it will almost certainly want to remove the ban on increasing the number of warheads on existing types of ballistic missiles. Specifically, it has been reported that the Russian military intends to deploy three warheads on some Topol-M ICBMs (which will initially carry a single warhead), a change that would be prohibited under START I. [12] It remains to be seen whether the need to modify this rule will be somewhat alleviated by Russia’s development of a new multi-warhead ICBM known as RS-24, whose first test was conducted on May 29, 2007. [13] However, because development of the RS-24 is likely to take considerable time and because the rate of missile production in Russia has been very low in the recent years, it appears that Moscow will likely seek the right to increase the number of warheads on Topol-M ICBMs, irrespective of the development of the RS-24.

Russian Proposals on Verification
In the mid-July interview referenced above, Lieutenant-General Buzhinski also emphasized that the future treaty “must provide for a verification mechanism [and] data exchange.” [14]

The Russian side has been unhappy about the absence of verification provisions in the Moscow Treaty. These concerns are probably related to Russia’s inability to verify U.S. downloading/uploading activities, but apparently also reflect a broader understanding of the benefits of transparency. The Putin government’s vocal defense of verification represents a radical departure from the Soviet pattern of resisting on-site verification and detailed data exchanges. The new approach, which began under Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, has apparently become strongly institutionalized in the relevant Russian governmental agencies and the military.

One important element of the Russian position on verification is the insistence on complete
equality of rights. For example, retired Lieutenant-General Gennadi Yevstafiev, a former official of
the Foreign Intelligence Service and a participant in START I and the Conventional Forces in
Europe Treaty negotiations, charged that under the present U.S. administration, the United States has tried to make verification one-sided, so that the United States could verify what Russia is doing, but not vice versa. [15] Retired Colonel-General Viktor Yesin, the former chief of the Main Staff of the Strategic Rocket Forces, expressed his concern that the United States might try to utilize activities conducted under the Cooperative Threat Reduction (CTR) program to monitor Russian strategic forces and avoid a formal verification mechanism, an approach that would effectively block any verification of U.S. strategic forces by Russia. [16] Under the CTR program, the United States, among other activities, is assisting Russia to destroy strategic offensive arms being eliminated under START I, but Russia has no comparable activities in the United States.

At the same time, the Russian position does not foresee a simple continuation of START I procedures. Russian officials apparently favor a simplified version of the highly complex rules of the original treaty. [17] Among likely elements of the Russian position are relaxation of rules for short-notice inspections and perhaps a radical reduction in the number of allowable short-notice inspections. These inspections could be replaced with “visits” – inspections with advanced warning and without tight deadlines for notifications, transportation of inspection groups to the inspection site, etc., which should be less expensive and less taxing for inspected facilities.

In addition, Russia will probably insist on a very significant relaxation of treaty provisions covering mobile ICBMs, which only Russia possesses. Officers of the Strategic Rocket Forces are unhappy about what they consider an excessively restrictive and one-sided verification regime covering these assets. [18] In particular, they would like to ban inspections during maneuvers (“exercise dispersals,” in START I terminology), as well as a number of other restrictions. [19]

START III Revisited?
Many elements of the possible Russian position on START I replacement bring to mind the proposals made in 2000 for START III – a U.S.-Russian endeavor that never got off the ground. The draft START III Treaty, submitted by Moscow in June 2000 in response to American proposals made in January of that year, also provided for a “light” version of START I and included a simplified verification regime and relaxed provisions governing accounting of and restrictions on mobile ICBMs, among other modifications. For a number of years, the Russian government has been trying to chart a middle course between what it clearly regards as the excessive level of detail and restrictiveness of START I and the equally excessive permissiveness of SORT. The START I replacement may represent yet another attempt to achieve the elusive goals first broached during the START III discussions.

Reaction to Cartwright Testimony
Debate among Russian experts on the START I replacement talks took an unusual turn following the testimony of General James Cartwright, Commander of the U.S. Strategic Command, at hearings on July 31, 2007, to consider his nomination as Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Cartwright has advocated U.S. development of a “prompt global strike capability,” which would rely in part on conventionally-armed ICBMs and submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs), as a means of rapidly attacking time-sensitive targets, such as weapons of mass destruction caches or terrorist leaders. In questions submitted prior to his hearing, Cartwright was asked, “Does the [Bush] Administration’s decision not to extend the START Treaty have any impact on development of a prompt global strike capability?” In response, Cartwright said that this decision “will provide greater flexibility to pursue prompt strike solutions, while simultaneously seeking to preserve appropriate confidence building measures.” [20]

In Moscow, Cartwright’s statement was interpreted as a sign that “American generals did not want to extend START I” and had intentionally contradicted the official policy of the Bush Administration (despite the fact that the Bush Administration’s policy is not to pursue extension). [21] Cartwright was said to be signaling that the United States “did not want to restrict itself with any [arms control] limitations whatsoever” and was seeking to “develop a disarming first strike capability that, together with the missile defense system that is being created now, could help avoid Moscow’s response strike.” [22]

These comments in the Russian media seriously misinterpreted Cartwright’s statement. Neither the United States nor Russia intends to extend START I; the principal question is whether negotiations on a replacement treaty – or on a less formal arrangement apparently favored by the United States – will be successful. Indeed, Cartwright’s testimony did not contain any criticism of the Rice-Lavrov joint statement or any indication regarding the U.S. position at these talks.

Russian criticism of Cartwright’s comments was motivated principally by concerns over the concept of a U.S. prompt global strike capability, which, as noted, includes, among other options, equipping strategic delivery vehicles with conventional warheads. Russian military and civilian experts have expressed serious concern that the launch of such weapons could be misinterpreted as an attack on Russia. General Yesin has warned, for example, that the entire system of advance notifications of launches of strategic missiles (he said, notifications are normally sent several months in advance of the launch date) could crumble because long-range ballistic missiles with conventional warheads could be launched without such warning. More importantly, Yesin stressed, “If the flight trajectory will be near our territory or, God forbid, over our territory, a response strike by our nuclear forces would be unavoidable.” He continued that while it might be possible to assign conventionally armed U.S. ICBMs to specific, geographically distinct silo launchers and to verify such deployments – measures that would enable Russia to determine whether a missile had been fired from a conventional or a nuclear launch site – such an approach would be completely unworkable for submarine-launched missiles, since Russia would have no way of knowing whether a missile had been fired from a conventional or nuclear launch tube. [23] Vladimir Yevseev, a senior research associate at the Institute of World Economy and International Relations (IMEMO), expressed the further concern that, rather than limiting prompt global strike capabilities for attacks on rogue states or terrorists, the United States planned to use conventionally-armed strategic weapons for strikes against Russian strategic nuclear forces, in particular silo missile launchers and command and control centers. [24]

Russian concerns with regard to American plans to equip some strategic delivery vehicles with conventional warheads are not new. [25] The unusually sharp reaction to General Cartwright’s testimony, including the misinterpretation of his words, however, apparently reflects the fear that the United States might abandon arms reduction efforts altogether or seek to limit them to the Moscow Treaty, which is widely considered in Russia to be of little value as an arms control measure. Anatoli Khramchikhin, Chief of the Analytical Department at the Institute of Political and Military Analysis, in Moscow, admitted that “Russia cannot counteract [a possible U.S. decision to break out of arms control treaty limitations] except with another episode of hysterics.” He noted that because Russia is unable to deploy as many strategic weapons as the United States, Washington has little incentive to accept limitations on its own strategic forces. “The only thing that could prevent the United States from leaving START is the domestic political struggle within the United States, itself,” he stated. While the next U.S. president might modify the arms control policies pursued by the Bush Administration, in the end, “the fate of START will be decided by Washington single-handedly...The size of American strategic forces will be limited by U.S. wishes, while the size of Russian strategic forces will be limited by Russian capabilities.” [26]

Nikolai Sokov – Monterey Institute James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies