By Ivan Oelrich and Hans Kristensen
On April 8, 2010, President Obama joined Russian President Dmitry Medvedev in Prague to sign the New START Treaty, a new arms reduction pact that will reduce the nuclear stockpile in the United States and Russia, and commits both countries to new procedures to verify the weapons each possesses.
The new treaty limits the number of warheads on deployed ballistic missiles and long-range bombers on both sides to 1,550 and the number of missiles and bombers capable of launching those warheads to no more than 700. While not the huge step hoped for, it is an essential step.
The modest reductions mandated by the long-awaited treaty did require the United States and Russia to talk about nuclear weapons again. The U.S. and Russia have at least 95 percent of the world’s nuclear weapons and they must lead the world in nuclear reductions. It represents a significant arms control milestone that both countries should ratify as soon as possible so they can negotiate deeper cuts. Without this first step there cannot be a second step, and there are yet many steps between where we stand today and eventually achieving the elimination of nuclear weapons.
This treaty is different, with real limits and real verification. Yet while the treaty reduces the legal limit for deployed strategic warheads, it doesn’t actually reduce the number of warheads. A peculiar counting rule increases the importance of bombers: each bomber counts only as one nuclear bomb although the B-52 can carry 20 nuclear-armed cruise missiles and the Russian bombers, for example the Backfire and Blackjack, have similar payloads. This rule reportedly resulted from Russia’s refusal to allow the necessary on-site inspections at its bomber bases. If a bomber with 20 bombs is defined as a single bomb, then suddenly we get a substantial reduction in the nuclear of weapons.
Indeed, the treaty does not require destruction of a single nuclear warhead and actually permits the United States and Russia to deploy almost the same number of strategic warheads that were permitted by the 2002 Moscow Treaty.
Verification Extended
The most important part of the new treaty is that it extends a verification regime at least a decade into the future. According to the White House, the inspections and other verification procedures in this Treaty will be simpler and less costly to implement than the old START treaty.
This includes on-site inspections. Each side gets a total of 18 per year, ten of which are actual warhead counts of deployed missiles and the remaining eight being “Type 2″ inspections of storage and dismantlement facilities.
Exchange of missile test telemetry data has been limited partly because it is not as necessary for verification as previously; there are other means for collecting this information. Even so, the treaty includes exchange of telemetry data for five test flights each year.
The Fine Print: Limits Versus Reductions
The new limit of 1,550 deployed strategic warheads is 74 percent lower than the 6,000 warhead limit of the 1991 START Treaty, and 30 percent lower than the 2,200 deployed strategic warhead limit of the 2002 Moscow Treaty.
That is correct, but the limit allowed by the treaty is not the actual number of warheads that can be deployed. The reason for this paradox is a new counting rule that attributes one weapon to each bomber rather than the actual number of weapons assigned to them. This “fake” counting rule frees up a large pool of warhead spaces under the treaty limit that enable each country to deploy many more warheads than would otherwise be the case. And because there are no sub-limits for how warheads can be distributed on each of the three legs in the Triad, the “saved warheads” from the “fake” bomber count can be used to deploy more warheads on fast ballistic missiles than otherwise.
The Moscow Treaty attributed real weapons numbers to bombers. The United States defined that weapons were counted as “operationally deployed” if they were “loaded on heavy bombers or stored in weapons storage areas of heavy bomber bases.” As a result, large numbers of bombs and cruise missile have been removed from U.S. bomber bases to central storage sites over the past five years, leaving only those bomber weapons that should be counted against the 2,200-warhead Moscow Treaty limit.
Since the new treaty attributes only one warhead to each bomber, it no longer matters if the weapons are on the bomber bases or not; it’s the bomber that counts not the weapons. As a result, a base with 22 nuclear tasked B-52 bombers will only count as 22 weapons even though there may be hundreds of weapons on the base.
According to U.S. officials, the United States wanted the New START Treaty to count real warhead numbers for the bombers but Russia refused to prevent on-site inspections of weapons storage bunkers at bomber bases. As a result, the 36 bombers at the Engels base near Saratov will count as only 36 weapons even though there may be hundreds of weapons at the base.
“This ‘fake’ counting rule frees up a large pool of warhead spaces under the treaty limit that enable each country to deploy many more warheads than would otherwise be the case.”
If the New START Treaty counting rule is used on today’s postures, then the United States currently only deploys some 1,650 strategic warheads, not the actual 2,100 warheads; Russia would be counted as deploying about 1,740 warheads instead of its actual 2,600 warheads. In other words, the counting rule would “hide” approximately 450 and 860 warheads, respectively, or 1,310 warheads. That’s more warheads that Britain, China, France, India, Israel, and Pakistan possess combined!
The paradox is that with the “fake” bomber counting rule the United States and Russia could, if they chose to do so, deploy more strategic warheads under the New START Treaty by 2017 than would have been allowed by the Moscow Treaty by 2012.
Force Structure Changes
How the new treaty and the “fake” counting rule will affect U.S. and Russian nuclear force structures depends on decisions that will be made in the near future. In the negotiations both Russia and the United States resisted significant changes to their nuclear forces structures.
Russia resisted restrictions on warheads numbers to keep some degree of parity with the United States. It achieved this by the “fake” bomber weapon count and the delivery platform limit that is higher than what Russia deploys today. Under the New START Treaty, Russia can deploy more strategic warheads on its ballistic missiles than it would have been able to under the Moscow Treaty, although it probably won’t do so due to retirement of older systems.
The United States resisted restrictions on its upload capability, which it achieved by the high limit on delivery platforms. The “fake” bomber count enables more weapons to be deployed on ballistic missiles and more weapons to be retained at bomber bases than would have been possible under the Moscow Treaty.
Although Russia has thousands of extra weapons in storage, all its deployed missiles are thought to be loaded to near capacity. As a result, under the New START Treaty, Russia will have little upload capacity. The United States, on the other hand, has only a portion of its available warheads deployed and lots of empty spaces on its missiles. The large pool of reserve warheads available for potential upload creates a significant disparity in the two postures.
Conclusions and Recommendations
The New START Treaty is an important achievement in restarting relations with Russia after the abysmal decline during the Bush administration. And extending and updating the important verification regime creates a foundation for transparency and confidence building.
The treaty will also, if ratified quickly and followed up by additional reductions, assist in strengthening the international nonproliferation regime and efforts to prevent other countries from developing nuclear weapons
The United States and Russia must be careful not to “oversell” the treaty as creating significant reductions in nuclear arsenals and strategic delivery systems. Although the treaty reduces the limit, the achievement is undercut by a new counting rule that enables both countries to deploy as many strategic warheads as under the Moscow Treaty.
The New START Treaty is not so much a nuclear reductions treaty as it is a verification and confidence building treaty. It is a ballistic missile focused treaty that essentially removes strategic bombers from arms control.
Because the treaty protects current force structures rather than reducing them, it will inevitably draw increased attention to the large inventories of non-deployed weapons that both countries retain under the new treaty. Whereas the U.S. force structure is large enough to permit uploading of significant numbers of reserve warheads, the Russian force is too small to provide a substantial upload capacity. Even with a significant production of new missiles, it is likely that Russia’s entire Triad will drop to around 400 delivery vehicles by 2017 – fewer than the United States has today in its ICBM leg alone.
To that end it is amazing to hear some people complaining that the U.S. deterrent is dilapidating and that the United States doesn’t gain anything from the New START Treaty.
In the words of one senior White House official, the United States came away as a “clean winner.”
What next?
This has long been described as a transitional treaty. It was meant to be a bridge between the expired START Treaty and the next treaty, which is going to fundamentally reshape the nuclear relationship of the Cold War legacy nuclear powers.
This New START Treaty has a ten-year limit with the option to extend for another five.
The good news is that a modest treaty will hopefully be easier to ratify. FAS
