Warming words but chill is still in the air

Does the strategic arms reduction treaty signed by Russia and the US liquidate 'the legacy of the cold war', asks

At last week's summit between US president George W. Bush and Russian president Vladimir Putin, the two leaders signed a strategic arms reduction agreement that will implement the political statements made in November last year.

This agreement will replace the Start 2 treaty, which never came into force even though it was ratified by the US Senate and the Russian Duma. Under the new agreement, the reductions in strategic arsenals will be deeper than those proposed under Start 2. The US and Russia will reduce the number of deployed intercontinental-range strategic nuclear warheads from 6,000 to 1,700-2,200 by 2012, not including shorter-range tactical nuclear weapons.

These cuts are in line with the US Nuclear Posture Review, according to which the US will reduce its nuclear arsenal to 3,800 operationally deployed warheads by 2007, and 1,700-2,200 warheads by 2012. In the short term, 50 MX Peacekeeper missiles, which carry ten warheads each, will be retired. In addition, four Trident submarines, which carry 96 warheads each, will be reassigned from strategic to conventional missions.

President Bush has hailed the agreement as liquidating "the legacy of the cold war". National security adviser Condoleezza Rice has described it as signifying a new relationship between Russia and the US "based on increasingly common interests and mutual trust". These sentiments are shared by the governments of both countries. Putin took the decision to support the US in the war against terror, has moved to a closer relationship with Nato and has tolerated the basing of US forces in former Soviet Central Asia. However, the new arms control agreement cannot be characterised as a fundamental transformation of the US-Russian strategic nuclear relationship. In some ways, it represents a retrograde step compared with the provisions of the Start 2 accord that it replaces.

A significant departure from the framework of Start 2 is that the new agreement will allow the retention of land-based missiles with multiple warheads. It was considered that the banning of inter-continental ballistic missiles with multiple warheads was an important contribution to strategic stability, because it would render a first strike completely impractical. Russia had already begun to shape its ICBM force in accordance with this requirement by the deployment of the single-warhead Topol-M, which is to become the mainstay of Russia's strategic nuclear force. Permitting multiple warheads deals with two Russian concerns. One is that Russia has had great difficulty in financing the cost of new single-warhead missiles to comply with the provisions of Start 2. It has been able to produce only about ten new ICBMs a year, thereby making it difficult to comply with the agreement. Russia is now likely to produce a modification of the Topol-M with three warheads. This would allow it to comply with the new agreement with a much lower number of missiles and therefore reduce the cost substantially.

Another problem is related to a fundamental strategic asymmetry in Start 2. The treaty permitted multiple warheads on sea-based missiles. The US has the highly accurate sea-based Trident D5 missile with multiple warheads for which Russia has no equivalent. This was perceived by Russian opponents of Start 2 to give the US a significant advantage. Permitting land-based missiles with multiple warheads supports the assurance given by the Bush administration that the national missile defence system ("son of Star Wars") will not affect Russian strategic capabilities. (The proposed systems for defence against ballistic missiles cannot effectively defend against missiles with multiple warheads, especially if they include decoys and other so-called "penetration aids").

On the other hand, one of the most significant arms control measures from Start 2 has been lost for the foreseeable future. As a consequence, despite the substantially reduced number of warheads, the composition and capability of the strategic nuclear arsenals of the erstwhile superpowers remains for all practical purposes unchanged, and a state of "mutual assured destruction" prevails. Another manifestation of the fact that the Bush administration seeks to maintain its position as a global strategic nuclear power, albeit at lower levels, was its insistence on storing, rather than eliminating, nuclear warheads from missiles dismantled in accordance with the provision of the agreement. This is a reversal of previous policy that was dedicated to the elimination of as many warheads as possible and raises suspicions about US intentions. Indeed, it could devalue the agreement to some extent. The Russian government sought to persuade the US to accept the elimination of warheads from dismantled weapons platforms. A compromise has been reached whereby some of the nuclear warheads will be dismantled, according to a formula that has not been made public. Russia will accept that warheads from dismantled missiles can be stored and will not count towards the limits on strategic warheads.

The most important concession from the Russian perspective is that the Bush administration will conclude a formal treaty to be ratified, even though it would prefer an informal accord. A bilateral commission will be established to oversee the implementation of the treaty. But the agreement is very basic and does not include detailed provisions for verification and transparency.

Both the US and Russia have indicated that the agreement reflects the way in which nuclear arms policy would develop even without it. The agreement is important to Russia because most of its ICBM force is reaching the end of its service life and will have to be retired by the end of the decade. In view of Russia's lack of financial resources, it will be able to support only a much-reduced land-based missile force. The US is not subject to the same constraints, but has shifted its emphasis from Russia to other regions of the world as the most plausible source of a threat and is therefore prepared to reduce the strategic nuclear component of its military forces.

The failure to deal with tactical nuclear weapons will be a matter of concern. Both Russia and the US have shown an increased interest in tactical weapons. The decline of Russia's conventional military capabilities and Nato's military operation against Serbia motivated changes in military doctrine that indicated an increased reliance on nuclear weapons. In the context of the debate about the Nuclear Posture Review and the aftermath of September 11, there were indications of an interest in low-yield third-generation nuclear weapons. A secret Pentagon report leaked to reporters in March calls for the US to develop contingency plans to use nuclear weapons against Russia and six other nations - Libya, Syria, China, Iran, Iraq and North Korea. Whatever the status of this report, the US is clearly concerned about the prospect of rogue states being able to strike with weapons of mass destruction, and China's strategic nuclear force. The potential role of US nuclear weapons to deal with such threats is uncertain. For more than 40 years, the main role of nuclear weapons has been deterrence. But the US's potential adversaries are unlikely to be deterred by any action that it could take. The idea that nuclear weapons might at some point become part of the war against terror is alarming.

The impact of the agreement on the safety and security of nuclear weapons remains a concern. The Cooperative Threat Reduction programme initiated in 1991 is designed to provide for the safe and secure dismantling of nuclear weapons and prevent the theft of nuclear materials and the proliferation of nuclear weapons expertise. Although the Bush administration has continued the CTR programme, it announced that it would withhold funding for some CTR programmes until Russia complied more fully with the treaties banning biological and chemical weapons, despite the administration's own opposition to the biological weapons convention. If the Russians emulated the US in creating a hedge force consisting of stored nuclear warheads, this would go against the principles of CTR, according to which warheads were being progressively dismantled. A decline in the commitment to CTR may result in a greater vulnerability of Russia's nuclear infrastructure to terrorists. There is clearly a new relationship with Russia emerging. The proposed agreement is in line with US and Russian strategic policy, but does not go as far as some might have wished in reducing the role of nuclear weapons in international security. As new threats to security have arisen, the legacy of the cold war remains.

Christoph Bluth is professor of international studies at the Institute for Politics and International Studies, University of Leeds.