Treaty Gambles With Arms Control Future

Although the Moscow Treaty's goal of reducing deployed nuclear arsenals is noble -- which is why the U.S. Senate approved it 95-0 in March -- its abandonment of long-held arms control principles makes the agreement a rather serious gamble. In fact, the treaty threatens to give us the worst of both the old and the new worlds, maintaining (and perhaps even destabilizing) the Cold War reliance on assured destruction while feeding the threat from nuclear terrorism.

The Moscow Treaty calls on the United States and Russia each to remove almost 4,000 strategic nuclear warheads from their missiles and bombers, a step that draws unanimous approval. Yet it provides no way of knowing what the Russians will do with those warheads. That is, it has no verification procedures.

Because the treaty does not require removed warheads to be destroyed, Russia could end up indefinitely storing those warheads -- each with power far greater than the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima -- in its dangerously unsafe nuclear complex.

President George W. Bush's administration maintains we need not worry about warhead destruction and treaty verification, because Russia no longer is a U.S. enemy, and notes that past treaties did not call for warhead destruction either. While that may sound like progressive post-Cold War thinking, the administration would be better off adopting a post-Sept. 11 mentality. In a world where the threat of terrorism is all too real, it is more important than ever to reduce the number of nuclear weapons in storage and ensure close watch over those that are kept.

Safeguarding Russia's nuclear material has long been a problem. Numerous official and nongovernmental studies have noted that it is vulnerable to theft by terrorists or rogue states. The United States has tried to ease this danger by helping Russia pay for the safe storage and destruction of its retired nuclear weapons.

But we are not yet close to eliminating the threat posed by what one blue-ribbon, bipartisan commission, chaired by Lloyd Cutler and Howard Baker, termed Russia's potential "Home Depot" for terrorists in a Jan. 10, 2001 report. Now an additional 4,000 warheads may be thrown into this shop of horrors without any specific plans for accounting, storage or destruction.

It might be possible to rationalize this danger if we were truly changing our nuclear posture, treating Russia as a friend and eliminating the "nuclear balance of terror," as Bush has claimed. But we're not: We're keeping 2,200 deployed warheads, and only a pre-emptive strike designed to eliminate Russia's nuclear weapons and limit its ability to retaliate -- the thrust of U.S. nuclear strategy during the Cold War -- would require that many weapons.

A purely deterrent capability would require only a few hundred survivable warheads that could be launched against Russian cities in retaliation for an attack. In short, the numbers say that not only are we prepared to use nuclear weapons against Russia, we're maintaining our capability to strike first. Even a pre-emptive strike against China, which has only 20 nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missiles, would require drastically fewer than 2,200 weapons.

Although it may seem incredible that we are maintaining a pre-emptive capability against Russia, Bush administration officials have provided no alternative reason for keeping so many weapons. When pressed, they cite the need to hedge against unforeseeable future threats.

That explanation would make sense except the Pentagon has set aside thousands of nuclear weapons for that very purpose: 2,400 strategic warheads that are removed from deployment under the Moscow Treaty will be kept in ready reserve; 3,000 warheads are currently stored in inactive reserve; and the United States has thousands of stored components that quickly could be made into warheads.

Because the Moscow Treaty does not require the destruction of delivery vehicles, as past treaties did, the United States will retain the ability to redeploy many of its downloaded warheads, some within a matter of weeks or months. Of course, the Russians will retain the ability to do the same thing, meaning that neither Moscow nor the United States will be able to predict the other's force structure confidently.

Such a problem might not seem threatening given the relative warmth of U.S.-Russian relations, but consider the words of Duma Chairman Gennady Selezynov, who announced March 18 the legislature would delay a scheduled vote on the treaty. Selezynov said that a world in which the United States could invade Iraq without U.N. approval would be one run by the "law of the jungle."

He then took that observation a step further, saying that in such an environment, "The strong will trample the weak. And we don't want to be weak. Therefore, we will still need the missiles."

The gap between the president's declaration that "the Cold War is over" and the Pentagon's readiness for nuclear war with Russia is therefore more than just disingenuous; it is dangerous. By targeting Russia with nuclear weapons while abandoning basic arms control principles -- like the predictability and verification offered by the Strategic Arms Reduction treaties -- the administration is keeping the most dangerous, but abandoning the most stabilizing, elements of U.S. Cold War policy.

This treaty points the United States and Russia in the right direction. But until we find out what Russia is going to do with its warheads and until we can be sure that U.S.-Russian relations will continue to improve, the Moscow Treaty will remain a gamble.