President Barack Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev As the United States and Russia near completion of a new strategic arms treaty, and as President Barack Obama envisions a further round of negotiations to cut the stockpiles of short-range nuclear missiles and of nuclear warheads locked in storage bins, I would offer one bit of advice: Don't spend so much time and effort on nuclear-arms talks; better to focus on more important matters.
This may seem perverse. What could be more important than reducing the chances of nuclear war?
The thing is, the substance of nuclear-arms accords has little effect on the prospect of nuclear war.
In the 1970s and '80s, arms control negotiations were a surrogate for other kinds of diplomacy. They were useful not so much because of the treaties they produced but, rather, because they provided a forum for the two sides to talk about something"”to engage each other, probe intentions, test and expand the limits of cooperation"”at a time when political differences precluded talks about anything else.
Now we are talking about a lot of things that threaten our mutual interests"”nuclear proliferation, terrorism, financial instability, climate change. The idea of a Russian-American nuclear-arms race, much less a nuclear war, is, for now and the foreseeable future, preposterous.
Of course, foreseeable is not the same as indefinite. So, yes, while relations are relatively healthy, Obama and the Russian leaders should nail down a new strategic arms-reduction treaty, which will reportedly cut each side's "delivery vehicles""”the long-range missiles and bombers that carry nuclear weapons"”from roughly 1,600 to 800 and the number of actual bombs and warheads from 2,200 to 1,500.
Some hawks, like former George W. Bush officials John Bolton and Keith Payne, have denounced these reductions as "shockingly" dangerous and "destabilizing."
But listen to someone who knows what he's talking about. Franklin C. Miller, now a private defense consultant, was the Pentagon's top nuclear planner"”the civilian official who had the deepest knowledge of, and the greatest influence over, U.S. nuclear war plans"”from 1985 to 2000. He told me in a phone conversation this morning, "I see no plausible scenario under which a force of 1,500-1,600 warheads and 750-800 delivery vehicles would not be capable of meeting U.S. national-security requirements."
(The real concern of someone like Bolton is that renewed Russian-American détente might lull us into a state of complacency. In this sense, nukes and the "nuclear balance" have long been symbolic tokens as much for confrontational partisans as for diplomats.)
However, if Obama is serious about trying, in follow-on talks, to reduce the number of tactical nuclear weapons and nuclear warheads in storage, he will run into a set of near-intractable issues.
It is pretty easy to monitor and verify the number of long-range missiles and bombers a country possesses. Intercontinental ballistic missiles are large; they're deployed in underground, concrete-covered silos alongside command-control-communications facilities. Submarines armed with such missiles periodically return to port. Bombers are stationed at airbases. In all cases, spy satellites and signals-intelligence gear can spot them with little problem.
Things got more challenging when the two sides started negotiating to limit not just the number of "delivery vehicles" but also the number of bombs and warheads they carried. They finally agreed on a neat solution: If, say, the Soviet SS-19 ICBM had been tested with six warheads in its nosecone, then all SS-19s would be counted as if they were carrying six warheads, whether or not they actually did. (It would have been impossible to verify a declaration that these SS-19s carried six warheads while those SS-19s held one or two; neither side would have permitted such intrusive inspection.)
But to verify the number of tactical nuclear weapons (which are very small and mobile) and stored warheads (which are inside and thus invisible to satellites), continuous, intrusive inspections would be mandatory. Even talking about such matters in formal talks may highlight our differences, reignite distrust, and exacerbate tensions.
The diplomatic risk might be worth taking if the payoff was substantial, but it's not, for four reasons.
Read Full Article »