President Donald Trump’s chief arms control envoy last week acknowledged the possibility that the 2010 New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) could be extended, but he added, “only under select circumstances.”  He then put down conditions that, if adhered to, will ensure the Trump administration does not extend the treaty.

New START and Extension

New START limits the United States and Russia each to no more than 700 deployed strategic missiles and bombers and no more than 1,550 deployed strategic warheads.  It expires by its terms on February 5, 2021 but can be extended for up to five years.  The Trump administration has adamantly refused to do that.

From the perspective of U.S. national security interests, extending New START is a no-brainer.  As confirmed by the State Department’s annual report, Russia is complying with the treaty’s limits.  Extension would keep Russian strategic forces constrained until 2026.  It would also ensure the continued flow of information about those forces produced by the treaty’s data exchanges, notifications, on-site inspections and other verification measures.

And extension would not force a single change in U.S. plans to modernize its strategic forces, as those plans were designed to fit within New START’s limits.

Russian officials, including Vladimir Putin, have raised New START extension since the first days of the Trump administration.  In 2017, Trump administration officials deferred on the issue, saying they would consider extension after (1) completion of a nuclear posture review and (2) seeing whether Russia met the treaty’s limits, which took full effect in February 2018.

Russia fully met the limits in February 2018.  At about the same time, the administration issued its nuclear posture review.  Yet, more than two years later, New START extension remains an open question.

On June 24, Amb. Marshall Billingslea, the president arms control envoy, briefed the press on his meeting with his Russian counterpart two days before in Vienna.  Asked about extending New START, Amb. Billingslea—never a fan of the treaty or, it seems, any arms control treaty—left the option open.  However, he described three conditions that will block extension.

China

Amb. Billingslea’s first condition focused on China, which he claimed had “an obligation to negotiate with [the United States] and Russia.”  Beijing certainly does not see it that way—saying no, no and again no—citing the huge disparity between the size of the Chinese nuclear arsenal and those of the United States and Russia.  China has less than one-tenth the number of nuclear warheads of each of the two nuclear superpowers.

To be sure, including China in the nuclear arms control process is desirable.  But Beijing will not join a negotiation aimed at a trilateral agreement.  What would such an agreement look like?  Neither Washington nor Moscow would agree to reduce to China’s level (about 300 nuclear warheads).  Nothing suggests either would agree to legitimize a Chinese build-up to match their levels (about 4,000 each).  Beijing presumably would not be interested in unequal limits.

This perhaps explains why, well more than one year after it began calling for China’s inclusion, the Trump administration appears to have no proposal or outline or even principles for a trilateral agreement.

For its part, Moscow would welcome China limiting its nuclear arms.  The Russians, however, choose not press the question, raising instead Britain and France.  Amb. Billingslea pooh-poohed the notion, but France has as many nuclear weapons as China, and Britain has two-thirds the Chinese number.  The logic for bringing in one but not the other two is unclear.  The question raises yet another hinderance to including China.

A more nuanced approach might prove more successful.  It would entail a new U.S.-Russian agreement providing for reductions beyond those mandated by New START.  Washington and Moscow could then ask the Chinese (and British and French) to provide transparency on their nuclear weapons numbers and agree not to increase their total weapons or exceed a specified number.  Much like his president, however, the arms control envoy does not appear to be into nuance.

Non-Strategic Nuclear Weapons

Amb. Billingslea’s second condition dealt with including in a new negotiation nuclear arms not constrained by New START, especially Russia’s large number of non-strategic nuclear weapons.  Again, this is laudable goal, but getting there will require much time and unpalatable decisions that the Trump administration will not want to face.

Russian officials have regularly tied their readiness to discuss non-strategic nuclear arms to issues of concern to them, particularly missile defense.  The Trump administration,  however, has made clear that it has zero interest in negotiating missile defense.

Even if Moscow severed that linkage, negotiating limits on non-strategic nuclear weapons would take time.  New START limits deployed strategic warheads by virtue of their association with deployed strategic missiles and bombers.  The only warheads directly counted are those on deployed intercontinental ballistic missiles and submarine-launched ballistic missiles.

By contrast, most if not all non-strategic warheads are not mounted on their delivery systems.  Monitoring any agreed limits would require new procedures, including for conducting on-site inspections within storage facilities.  This does not pose an insoluble challenge, but it represents new territory for both Washington and Moscow.  Working out limits, counting rules and verification measures will prove neither quick nor easy.

Verification

Amb. Billingslea earlier suggested some dissatisfaction with New START’s verification measures, though he did not articulate any particular flaw, and, as noted, the State Department’s annual compliance report says Russia is meeting the treaty’s terms.  Last week, he made verification measures for his desired U.S.-Russia-China agreement the third condition for New START extension. 

Verification measures are critical.  Treaty parties have to have confidence that all sides are observing the agreement’s limits or, at a minimum, that any militarily significant violation would be detected in time to take countervailing measures.  Working out agreement on those measures will prove a long process, even in just a bilateral negotiation, especially if it addresses issues such as stored nuclear weapons.  That is not just because of Russian reluctance to accept intrusive verification measures such as on-site inspection; the U.S. military also wants verification measures that do not greatly impact its normal operations.

Russian officials have reiterated their readiness to extend New START now.  Amb. Billingslea’s conditions will thwart extension for the foreseeable future.  That’s unfortunate.  By not extending New START, the Trump administration forgoes a simple action that would strengthen U.S. national security and make Americans safer.

Ending the moratorium would not advance U.S. security interests.  The United States has conducted about as many nuclear weapons tests as the rest of the world combined (and 30 percent more than the number conducted by the Soviet Union/Russia).  U.S. weapons scientists learned more from testing.  When I served as a diplomat at the American Embassy in Moscow in 1988, I accompanied a U.S. team to the Soviet nuclear test site at Semipalatinsk (in what is now Kazakhstan).  Our Soviet hosts showed us a vertical shaft for an upcoming underground test; it was about three feet in diameter.  A U.S. team member from the test site in Nevada, which the Soviets would visit the following month, commented that U.S.-drilled vertical shafts for nuclear tests typically were nine to eleven feet in diameter.  That maximized the area above the weapon for instruments that would gather a burst of data in the nanosecond before they vaporized.

The testing moratorium and the CTBT, if ratified and entered into force, would seem to lock in an area of U.S. advantage regarding nuclear weapons and nuclear effects.  Why would we want others to test and erode that advantage?

Up until the idea of gaining leverage with Beijing and Moscow arose, the primary possible reason for a return to testing was if it became necessary to confirm the reliability of a weapons type in the stockpile.  However, the National Nuclear Security Administration has overseen for 25 years the Stockpile Stewardship Program, intended to confirm that U.S. nuclear weapons are safe, secure and reliable without having to test them in a manner that produces a nuclear yield. To do so, the program uses supercomputers, modeling and tools such as the Dual Axis Radiographic Hydrodynamic Test Facility (think of the world’s most powerful X-ray device).

Each year, the commander of Strategic Command and the directors of the national nuclear laboratories at Los Alamos, Sandia and Lawrence Livermore certify the safety and reliability of the nuclear stockpile.  When I visited Los Alamos several years ago, the director told me that, as long as the Stockpile Stewardship Program was funded, he was confident that nuclear testing was not needed.  He added that, as a result of the program, weapons scientists had learned things about how nuclear weapons work that they did not and could not learn from testing nuclear weapons underground.

The smart thing for U.S. national interests is to continue the moratorium, ratify the CTBT, and press others to ratify so that the treaty can be brought into force.  The Senate failed to give consent to ratification in 1999, due to concerns about how to maintain the stockpile’s reliability without nuclear testing and about monitoring the treaty.  The Stockpile Stewardship Program, just in its beginning stage then, can now answer the first concern and has been doing so.

As for monitoring a test ban, U.S. national technical means have improved over the past two decades, and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Organization has established the International Monitoring System with some 300 stations around the world.  It can detect underground nuclear explosions down to below one kiloton (the weapon that destroyed Hiroshima had a yield of 15 kilotons) as well as detecting tests in the atmosphere or ocean, both of which are banned by the 1963 Limited Test Ban Treaty.  Once in force, the CTBT also provides for an inspection mechanism.

As former Secretary of State George Shultz said in 2013, senators might have been correct not to consent to ratification in 1999, but given the Stockpile Stewardship Program’s development and enhanced monitoring systems, they would be right to vote for ratification now.

Conducting a nuclear test to bring China and Russia to the negotiating table will not work.  It will instead open the door for others to resume testing and close a nuclear weapons knowledge gap that favors the United States.  That will not make us safer or more secure.  It is an unwise idea that hopefully will continue to meet resistance within the U.S. government.

President Trump’s newly named envoy for arms control, Marshall Billingslea, gave a lengthy interview last week on the administration’s approach to nuclear arms negotiations. He stressed bringing in China, struck a pessimistic note about the sole treaty constraining Russian and U.S. nuclear forces, and offered no ideas for getting Moscow to discuss non-strategic nuclear arms.

Unfortunately, the interview reinforces the view that the Trump administration is unlikely to achieve a nuclear deal…or even develop a serious proposal.

Read full article at Defense One

The Department of Defense has begun to ratchet up spending to recapitalize the U.S. strategic nuclear triad and its supporting infrastructure, as several programs move from research and development into the procurement phase.  The projected Pentagon expenditures are at least $167 billion from 2021-2025. This amount does not include the large nuclear warhead sustainment and modernization costs funded by the Department of Energy, projected to cost $81 billion over the next five years.

Nuclear forces require modernization, but that will entail opportunity costs. In a budget environment that offers little prospect of greater defense spending, especially in the COVID19 era, more money for nuclear forces will mean less funding for conventional capabilities.

That has potentially negative consequences for the security of the United States and its allies. While nuclear forces provide day-to-day deterrence, the Pentagon leadership spends most of its time thinking about how to employ conventional forces to manage security challenges around the world. The renewed focus on great power competition further elevates the importance of conventional forces. It is important to get the balance between nuclear and conventional forces right, particularly as the most likely path to use of nuclear arms would be an escalation of a conventional conflict. Having robust conventional forces to prevail in or deter a conventional conflict in the first place could avert a nuclear crisis or worse.

Nuclear Weapons and Budgets

For the foreseeable future, the United States will continue to rely on nuclear deterrence for its security and that of its allies (whether we should be comfortable with that prospect is another question). Many U.S. nuclear weapons systems are aging, and replacing them will cost money, lots of money. The Pentagon’s five-year plan for its nuclear weapons programs proposes $29 billion in fiscal year 2021, rising to $38 billion in fiscal year 2025, as programs move from research and development to procurement. The plan envisages a total of $167 billion over five years. And that total may be understated; weapons costs increase not just as they move to the procurement phase, but as cost overruns and other issues drive the costs up compared to earlier projections.

The Pentagon knew that the procurement “bow wave” of nuclear weapons spending would hit in the 2020s and that funding it would pose a challenge. In October 2015, the principal deputy undersecretary of defense said “We’re looking at that big bow wave and wondering how the heck we’re going to pay for it…  and probably thanking our stars that we won’t be here to have to answer the question.”

The Pentagon’s funding request for fiscal year 2021 includes $4.4 billion for the new Columbia-class ballistic missile submarine that will replace Ohio-class submarines, which will begin to be retired at the end of the decade; $1.2 billion for the life extension program for the Trident II submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM); $1.5 billion for the Ground Based Strategic Deterrent, an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) to replace the Minuteman III ICBM; $2.8 billion for the B-21 stealth bomber that will replace the B-1 and B-2 bombers; $500 million for the Long-Range Standoff Missile that will arm B-52 and B-21 bombers; and $7 billion for nuclear command, control and communications systems.

The Pentagon funds primarily go to delivery and command and control systems for nuclear weapons. The National Nuclear Security Administration at the Department of Energy bears the costs of the warheads themselves.  It seeks $15.6 billion for five nuclear warhead life-extension and other infrastructure programs in fiscal year 2021, the first year of a five-year plan totaling $81 billion. The fiscal year 2021 request is nearly $3 billion more than the agency had earlier planned to ask, which suggests these programs are encountering significant cost growth.

Some look at these figures and the overall defense budget (the Pentagon wants a total of $740 billion for fiscal year 2021) and calculate that the cost of building and operating U.S. nuclear forces will amount to “only” 6-7 percent of the defense budget. That may be true, but how relevant is that figure?

By one estimate, the cost of building and operating the F-35 fighter program for the U.S. Air Force, U.S. Navy and U.S. Marines over the program’s lifetime will be $1 trillion. Amortized over 50 years, that amounts to $20 billion per year or “only” 2.7 percent of the Defense Department’s fiscal year 2021 budget request. The problem is that these percentages and lots of other “small” percentages add up. When one includes all of the programs, plus personnel and readiness costs as well as everything else that the Pentagon wants, the percentages will total to more than 100 percent of the figure that Congress is prepared to appropriate for defense.

Opportunity Costs

The defense budget is unlikely to grow. Opportunity costs represent the things the Pentagon has to give up or forgo in order to fund its nuclear weapons programs. The military services gave an indication of these costs with their “unfunded priorities lists,” which this year total $18 billion. These show what the services would like to buy if they had additional funds, and that includes a lot of conventional weapons.

The Air Force, for example, would like to procure an additional twelve F-35 fighters as well as fund advance procurement for an additional twelve F-35s in fiscal year 2022. It would also like to buy three more tanker aircraft than budgeted.

The Army is reorienting from counter-insurgency operations in places such as Afghanistan and Iraq to facing off against major peer competitors, that is, Russia and China. Its wish list includes more long-range precision fires (artillery and short-range surface-to-surface missiles), a new combat vehicle, helicopters and more air and missile defense systems.

The Navy would like to add five F-35s to its aircraft buy, but its bigger desire is more attack submarines and warships, given its target of building up to a fleet of 355 ships. The Navy termed a second Virginia-class attack submarine its top unfunded priority in fiscal year 2021. It has set a requirement for 66 attack submarines and currently has about 50. However, as older Los Angeles-class submarines retire, that number could fall to 42.  Forgoing construction of a Virginia-class submarine does not help to close that gap.

Moreover, the total number of Navy ships, now 293, will decline in the near term, widening the gap to get to 355. The Navy’s five-year shipbuilding program cut five of twelve planned Arleigh Burke-class destroyers, and cost considerations have led the Navy to decide to retire ten older Burke-class destroyers rather than extend their service life for an additional ten years. This comes when China is rapidly expanding its navy, and Russian attack submarines are returning on a more regular cycle to the Atlantic Ocean.

The Navy has said that funding the first Columbia-class ballistic missile submarine forced a cut-back in the number of other ships in its fiscal 2021 shipbuilding request. The decision not to fund a second Virginia-class attack submarine appears to stem directly from the unexpected $3 billion plus-up in funding for the National Nuclear Security Administration’s fiscal year 2021 programs.

These are the opportunity costs of more nuclear weapons: fewer dollars for aircraft, ships, attack submarines and ground combat equipment for conventional deterrence and defense.

Nuclear War and Deterring Conventional Conflict

The principal driving factor behind the size of U.S. nuclear forces comes from Russian nuclear forces and doctrine. Diverse and effective U.S. nuclear forces that can deter a Russian nuclear attack should suffice to deter a nuclear attack by any third country. In contrast to the Cold War, the U.S. military no longer seems to worry much about a “bolt from the blue”—a sudden Soviet or Russian first strike involving a massive number of nuclear weapons designed to destroy the bulk of U.S. strategic forces before they could launch. That is because, under any conceivable scenario, sufficient U.S. strategic forces—principally on ballistic missile submarines at sea—would survive to inflict a devastating retaliatory response.

The most likely scenario for nuclear use between the United States and Russia is a regional conflict fought at the conventional level in which one side begins to lose and decides to escalate by employing a small number of low-yield nuclear weapons, seeking to reverse battlefield losses and signal the strength of its resolve. Questions thus have arisen about whether Russia has an “escalate-to-deescalate” doctrine and whether the 2018 U.S. nuclear posture review lowers the threshold for use of nuclear weapons.

If the United States and its allies have sufficiently robust conventional forces, they can prevail in a regional conflict at the conventional level and push any decision about first use of nuclear weapons onto the other side (Russia, or perhaps China or North Korea depending on the scenario). The other side would have to weigh carefully the likelihood that its first use of nuclear weapons would trigger a nuclear response, opening the decidedly grim prospect of further nuclear escalation and of things spinning out of control. The other side’s leader might calculate that he/she could control the escalation, but that gamble would come with no guarantee.  It would appear a poor bet given the enormous consequences if things go wrong. Happily, the test has never been run.

This is why the opportunity costs of nuclear weapons programs matter. If those programs strip too much funding from conventional forces, they weaken the ability of the United States and its allies to prevail in a conventional conflict—or to deter that conflict in the first place—and increase the possibility that the United States might have to employ nuclear weapons to avert defeat.

For the United States and NATO members, that could mean reemphasis on an aspect of NATO’s Cold War defense policy.  In the 1960s, 1970s and early 1980s, NATO allies faced Soviet and Warsaw Pact conventional forces that had large numerical advantages, and NATO leaders had doubts about their ability to defeat a Soviet/Warsaw Pact attack at the conventional level. NATO policy thus explicitly envisaged that, if direct defense with conventional means failed, the Alliance could deliberately escalate to nuclear weapons. That left many senior NATO political and military officials uneasy. Among other things, it raised uncomfortable questions about the willingness of an American president to risk Chicago for Bonn.

Russia found itself in a similar situation at the end of the 1990s. With a collapsing economy following the break-up of the Soviet Union, the Russian government had to cut defense spending dramatically. As its conventional capabilities atrophied, Moscow adopted a doctrine envisaging first use of nuclear weapons to compensate. (In the past fifteen years, as Russia’s defense spending has increased, a significant amount has gone to modernizing conventional forces.)

The United States and NATO still retain the option of first use of nuclear weapons. If the U.S. president and NATO leaders were to consider resorting to that option, they then would be the ones to have to consider the dicey bet that the other side would not respond with nuclear arms or that, if it did, nuclear escalation somehow could be controlled.

Assuring NATO allies that the United States was prepared to risk Chicago for Bonn consumed a huge amount of time and fair amount of resources during the Cold War. At one point, the U.S. military deployed more than 7000 nuclear weapons in Europe to back up that assurance. Had NATO had sufficiently strong conventional forces, the Alliance would have been able to push that risky decision regarding nuclear first use onto Moscow—or even have been able to take comfort that the allies’ conventional power would suffice to deter a Soviet/Warsaw Pact attack.

In modernizing, maintaining and operating a safe, secure and effective nuclear deterrent, the United States should avoid underfunding conventional forces in ways that increase the prospect of conventional defeat and/or that might tempt an adversary to launch a conventional attack. If Washington gets the balance wildly out of sync, it increases the possibility that the president might face the decision of whether to use nuclear weapons first—knowing that first use would open a Pandora’s box of incalculable and potentially catastrophic consequences.

Getting the Balance Right in the COVID19 Era

This means that the Department of Defense and Congress should take a hard look at the balance. The Pentagon presumably has weighed the trade-offs, though it is not a unitary actor.  “Nuclear weapons are our top priority” has been the view of the leadership. The trade-offs have been easier to manage in the past several years, when nuclear programs were in the research and development phase, and defense budgets in the first three years of the Trump administration grew. As nuclear programs move into the more expensive procurement phase and the fiscal year 2021 budget shows little increase, the challenge of getting the balance right between nuclear and conventional spending has become more acute. It is not apparent that the Pentagon has weighed the opportunity costs over the next ten-fifteen years under less optimistic budget scenarios.

As for Congress, which ultimately sets and approves the budget, no evidence suggests that the legislative branch has closely considered the nuclear vs. conventional trade-offs.

All that was before COVID19. The response to the virus and dealing with the economic disruption it has caused have generated a multi-trillion-dollar budget deficit in 2020 and likely will push up deficits in at least 2021. It would be wise now to consider the impact of COVID19.

Having added trillions of dollars to the federal deficit, and facing an array of pressing health and social needs, will Congress be prepared to continue to devote some 50 percent of discretionary funding to the Department of Defense’s requirements? Quite possibly not. If defense budgets get cut, the Pentagon will face a choice:  shift funds from nuclear to conventional force programs, or accept shrinkage of U.S. conventional force capabilities and—as the United States did in the 1950s and early 1960s—rely on nuclear deterrence to address a broader range of contingencies. In the latter case, that would mean accepting, at least implicitly, a greater prospect that the president would have to face the question of first use of nuclear weapons, i.e., a conventional conflict in which the United States was losing.

This is not to suggest that the U.S. military should forgo the strategic triad. Trident II SLBMs onboard ballistic missile submarines at sea remain the most survivable leg of the strategic deterrent. The bomber/air-breathing leg offers flexibility and can carry out conventional missions. The ICBM leg provides a hedge against a breakthrough in anti-submarine warfare. Moreover, if in a crisis or a conventional conflict, the Russian military were to develop the capability to attack U.S. ballistic missile submarines at sea, the Kremlin leadership might well calculate that it could do so without risking a nuclear response. Attacking U.S. ICBMs, on the other hand, would necessitate pouring hundreds of nuclear warheads into the center of America. A Russian leader presumably would not be so foolish as to think there would be no nuclear retaliation.

While sustaining the ICBM leg, one can question whether maintaining 400 deployed ICBMs, as the current plan envisages, is necessary. Reducing that number for the Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent (GBSD) would achieve budget savings, albeit later in the production run.  Another question is whether some way might be found to extend the service life of some portion of the current Minuteman III force that would allow delaying the GBSD program, which is projected to cost $100 billion, by ten-fifteen years and postponing those costs—freeing up funds in the near term for conventional force requirements.

Another issue concerns the Long-Range Standoff Missile (LRSO) and its cost, estimated at some $20 billion when including the nuclear warheads. The B-21 bomber will incorporate stealth and advanced electronic warfare capabilities allowing it to operate against and penetrate sophisticated air defenses. The LRSO, to be deployed beginning in 2030, is intended to replace older air-launched cruise missiles carried by the B-52 bomber and could later equip the B-21 if it loses its ability to penetrate.

An alternative plan would convert B-52s in 2030 to conventional-only missions and delay the LRSO to a future point if/when it appeared that the B-21’s ability to penetrate could come into question. By 2030, the Air Force should have a significant number of B-21s (the B-21 is scheduled to make its first flight in 2021 and enter service in 2025). With at least 100 planned, the Air Force should have a sufficient number of B-21s for the 300 nuclear weapons it appears to maintain at airfields where nuclear-capable bombers are currently based.

These kinds of ideas would free up billions of dollars in the 2020s that could be reallocated to conventional weapons systems. Delaying the GBSD and LRSO and their associated warhead programs by just one year (fiscal year 2021) would make available some $3 billion—enough money for a Virginia-class attack submarine.  Delaying those programs for ten-fifteen years would make tens of billions of dollars available for the military’s conventional force needs.

All things being equal, it is smarter and more efficient to choose to make decisions to curtail or delay major programs rather than to continue them until the money runs out and forces program termination. As it examines the administration’s proposed fiscal year 2021 defense budget, Congress should carefully consider the trade-offs and press the Pentagon to articulate how it weighed the trade-offs between nuclear and conventional forces. In the end, Congress should understand whether it is funding the force that is most likely to deter not just a nuclear attack, but to deter a conventional conflict that could entail the most likely path to nuclear war.

Originally for The National Interest

Former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, who signed the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) with Barack Obama on April 8, 2010, called last week for the United States to agree to extend the treaty. On Friday, a Department of State spokesperson told the Russian news agency TASS in response:  “The President has directed us to think more broadly than New START…  We stand ready to engage with both Russia and China on arms control negotiations that meet our criteria.”

Unfortunately, nothing suggests President Trump will achieve anything on nuclear arms control.

Read full article at The Hill.

In the budding days of the COVID-19 pandemic, President Trump idled his days away, launching random tweets about unrelated issues. One such issue was nuclear waste disposal: “Nevada, I hear you on Yucca Mountain…my Administration is committed to exploring innovative approaches – I’m confident we can get it done!”

After this particular proclamation, the nuclear expert community was left scratching its collective head. Does the president support Yucca Mountain as an eventual nuclear waste repository, or does he not? And, more puzzling, what “innovative approaches” for nuclear waste does he have in mind? Maybe he was thinking about the “waste eating” advanced reactors promoted by the US Energy Department and the private sector; maybe he was thinking about reprocessing spent nuclear fuel; or maybe he was thinking about deep boreholes for permanent waste storage.

Read the rest at the Bulletin

The 2010 New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) expires in one year. Unfortunately, President Trump’s attitude seems to reflect disinterest, if not antipathy. Last April he asked for a proposal to involve Russia and China and cover all nuclear arms, but it has yet to emerge. Neither Moscow nor Beijing has shown any real interest in the concept.

Little suggests grounds for optimism about nuclear arms control as long as Mr. Trump remains president. Change will require that the Democratic candidate win in November. His or her administration would then have to move immediately to extend New START before exploring additional measures that could usefully regulate an ever more complex arms competition with Russia and others.

Disinterest or Antipathy:

President Trump seems to understand little about nuclear arms or how agreements negotiated to constrain them enhance America’s security. During his January 2017 call with Russian President Vladimir Putin, he reportedly was unfamiliar with New START.

In February 2019, the Trump administration gave six months’ notice of its intention to withdraw from the 1987 Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty. That treaty, signed by Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, banned all U.S. and Soviet land-based missiles with ranges between 500 and 5,500 kilometers.

Russia violated the INF Treaty by testing and deploying the 9M729 land-based, intermediate-range cruise missile.  While asserting that it wanted to bring Moscow back into compliance, the Trump administration showed little strategy for doing so.  It eschewed military and political measures that would have raised the costs to the Kremlin of its violation and might have affected Moscow’s calculation.

The demise of the INF Treaty last August leaves New START as the only treaty constraining U.S. and Russian nuclear forces. New START limits each country to no more than 1,550 deployed strategic warheads on no more than 700 deployed strategic missiles and bombers.  In contrast to the INF Treaty, Russia has complied with New START’s limits.  The compliance concerns expressed to date come from Russian officials, who challenge the adequacy of processes used to convert some U.S. strategic missile launchers and bombers so that they no longer count under New START.

New START expires by its terms on February 5, 2021. It can, however, be extended by up to five years by agreement between the countries’ presidents. Mr. Putin has stated that Russia is ready to extend without preconditions. Instead, Mr. Trump wants a negotiation to limit all U.S. and Russian nuclear weapons as well as bring China into the equation. Both are desirable—but highly unrealistic—goals.

Moscow has long declined to discuss limits on non-strategic nuclear weapons unless the United States discusses issues such as limits on missile defense, but the Trump administration’s 2018 missile defense review stressed no constraints on missile defenses. Absent a readiness to address issues of concern to Moscow, Mr. Trump will not succeed in negotiating limits covering all U.S. and Russian nuclear arms.

China has repeatedly made clear that it will not negotiate until the gap between U.S. and Russian nuclear weapons numbers, on the one hand, and Chinese nuclear weapons numbers, on the other, narrows. Currently, the United States and Russia each have well more than ten times as many nuclear weapons as does China.

In mid-January, U.S. and Russia officials held strategic security talks covering a range of issues.  They agreed to further meetings—which is good news—but nothing suggests progress toward a negotiation that would include all nuclear arms and bring in China.

Nine months after Mr. Trump expressed interest in going big on arms control, his administration has offered no concrete ideas as to what limits it wants or how it would persuade Moscow and Beijing to join its desired trilateral negotiation. That could mean internal disagreement within the U.S. government. It fuels suspicion that the proposal seeks to divert attention from the administration’s failure to extend New START.

Extending New START to 2026 should be a no-brainer. Doing so would maintain the treaty’s limits on Russian strategic forces when Moscow has hot production lines running (U.S. production of new strategic bombers, submarines and missiles will begin in earnest only in the mid-2020s). Extension would continue the flow of information about Russian forces provided by the treaty’s data exchanges, notifications and inspections, which helps the Pentagon avoid costly worst-case assumptions. It would offer a mechanism for addressing exotic new kinds of Russian strategic weapons. Extending New START would achieve all this without forcing the U.S. military to alter any part of its strategic modernization program, as that program was designed to fit within New START’s limits.

Unfortunately, the administration’s attitude toward the INF Treaty and New START give little reason to think anything positive will happen on the arms control agenda under Mr. Trump’s watch. Change will require the Democratic candidate wins in November.

Looking Forward

If the Democrats were to win, New START extension would demand urgent attention from the incoming president. He or she would take the oath of office on January 20, 2021—just 15 days before the treaty’s expiration date. The new president should immediately agree to Mr. Putin’s offer on extending the treaty.

If extension were decided, U.S. and Russian officials could use the treaty’s Bilateral Consultative Commission to take a more serious look at Russian concerns about conversion of U.S. strategic systems and the new kinds of strategic arms under development in Russia, such as the Poseidon nuclear-armed, nuclear-powered torpedo.

New START extension would provide a solid foundation for discussions with Russian officials on the full range of issues affecting the U.S.-Russian strategic relationship:  strategic nuclear weapons, non-strategic nuclear arms, precision-guided long-range conventional strike systems, missile defense, third-country nuclear forces, cyber and space issues, as well as how to maintain strategic stability in a rapidly changing world.

During the Cold War period, strategic stability—a situation in which neither Washington nor Moscow had an incentive to strike first with nuclear weapons, even in an intense crisis—required a relatively straightforward calculation.  It focused on the strategic nuclear weapons of each side.  As long as each had survivable strategic forces capable of devastating the other, even after absorbing a first strike, stability could be maintained.

Today’s stability model is far more complex. It is multi-domain, including missile defense, conventional strike, cyber and space operations in addition to nuclear arms. It is multi-player, as third-country actions have to be factored into stability calculations.

U.S. and Russian security officials should discuss the challenges posed by this new era. The talks might not spin off specific negotiating agendas, at least not immediately. To get negotiations started, both sides would have to weigh trade-offs. Realistically, if Washington wants Moscow to negotiate non-strategic nuclear weapons, it would have to consider addressing Russia’s concerns on missile defense. However, even absent new negotiations, a structured discussion venue would allow U.S. and Russian experts to exchange views and better understand, and perhaps alleviate, the other side’s concerns.

A new administration should seek a parallel set of discussions with China. Seeking negotiated limits on Chinese nuclear forces would pose a wildly impractical goal, at least in the near term.  The dialogue might instead usefully begin with an exchange of views on concerns about the other’s force structures and doctrines. It might later seek to move China toward some transparency on its total nuclear weapons number and a unilateral commitment not to increase that number if the United States and Russia continue to limit and reduce their nuclear arms.

As for the INF Treaty, the Russian military wants the 9M729, and the Pentagon has four different land-based missiles under development or planned with ranges that the treaty would have prohibited. While the 9M729 reportedly can carry nuclear or conventional warheads, the Russian military appears interested primarily in its conventional capability. All four of the Pentagon’s planned intermediate-range missiles are intended to be conventionally armed. This opens the possibility of a negotiation to ban land-based, intermediate-range missiles armed with nuclear warheads. That would pose verification challenges, but they should not prove insurmountable.

The U.S. military has expressed the greatest interest in having land-based intermediate-range missiles in the western Pacific to counter China’s large number of intermediate-range missiles, most of which are conventionally armed. The Pentagon’s development of intermediate-range missiles might open the possibility—admittedly, a long shot—for a separate U.S.-Chinese discussion, or a trilateral U.S.-Chinese-Russian discussion, on prohibiting nuclear-armed, land-based, intermediate-range missiles.

Extending New START, strategic discussions with Russia and China, and the possible negotiation of an agreement to ban land-based, intermediate-range missiles armed with nuclear warheads comprise a more modest agenda for nuclear arms control than many would like. These measures nonetheless would provide useful guardrails for the nuclear competition between the United States and its two peer military rivals. They would provide time to consider further steps to reduce nuclear risks and enhance strategic stability in the modern era.  Unfortunately, little suggests that Mr. Trump is prepared to take such steps. They will have to await his successor.

Original Source: The National Interest