Disarmament based on trust

Russia and the USA will take advantage of the experience of the 1970s

The Treaty on the Reduction and Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms (START-1), signed by Moscow and Washington in 1991, expires on December 5. On the eve of this event, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov announced that Russia and the United States manage to sign a new agreement by the specified deadline. The fact is that many analysts doubt this and assume that the parties will not agree on the scale of reductions in nuclear warheads and their delivery vehicles. Instead, they will sign an interim document of a general nature. However, the Foreign Ministry insists: “Intense negotiations continue, but things are nearing the finish line.”

But even if a new treaty is suddenly signed, the parliaments of both countries will not have time to ratify it. This means that for some time Moscow and Washington will have to live without a treaty limiting their nuclear arsenals, which are still capable of destroying the entire world several times over. Is it dangerous? Most Russian and foreign experts think no. In conditions where the two main nuclear powers still maintain a certain level of mutual trust, there is no great danger. In addition, teams of experts from both countries in Geneva, where negotiations on this are taking place, are already trying to create some new temporary regime of mutual control over nuclear arsenals. Such a regime would be in the interests of both countries.

“Because the treaty must be ratified by parliaments, we already understand that by December 5 we will not have a ratified treaty that can immediately enter into force,” explains US State Department spokesman Ian Kelly. “So we are in discussions with Russia to see how we can extend some of the transparency and verification measures until the new treaty is ratified.” The American press has repeatedly noted that the United States cannot afford to lose the opportunities to monitor Russian nuclear potential that the previous treaty provided. Meanwhile, some opportunities will still be lost (for example, the imminent departure of American inspectors from the Russian Votkinsk machine-building plant is already inevitable), and President Barack Obama is already being criticized for this in the United States.

The now expiring START-1 Treaty has fulfilled its main task. He obliged Moscow and Washington to reduce their nuclear arsenals from 10 thousand warheads on each side to six thousand. And the number of carriers is up to 1600, that is, approximately one and a half times. For comparison: according to the New York Times (albeit with reference to anonymous American officials), today there are no more than 900 American carriers with nuclear warheads on combat duty. The authors see this as an incentive for even deeper cuts.

For Russia, whose nuclear potential has been gradually declining since the nineties due to its obsolescence and the high cost of conservation measures, the prospect of reducing warheads at least to the level of 1,500-1,675 units agreed upon this summer by Medvedev and Obama seems very tempting. Let us recall that based on carriers they determined future reductions within the range of 500-1100 units.

There are several “buts” here. First, American officials, much like Israeli officials, have always maintained a certain veneer of ambiguity over their communications about American nuclear capabilities. Just as Israelis say neither yes nor no to questions about Israel's nuclear capabilities, Americans are very vague about their capabilities and plans. This is nuclear diplomacy. Secondly, it is unlikely that both the United States and Russia will now agree to reduce their arsenals to a level of several hundred warheads. As the head of the Russian Council on Foreign and Defense Policy, Sergei Karaganov, notes, such a reduction would put our countries on the same level as minor nuclear powers and would encourage India and Pakistan to increase their still small nuclear arsenals in the hope of catching up with the “grands.”

Some analysts do not even consider the topic of reducing nuclear arsenals among the priorities of American foreign policy. “There will be no radical changes in world politics on December 5,” Alexander Yanov, emeritus professor at the University of the City of New York, predicted in an interview with Vremya Novostei. -- If the parties do not have time to sign a new document by December 5, they will extend the old agreement. The trouble is that Obama is now in a difficult position due to a number of other problems, and nuclear disarmament is not at the top of his list of priorities.” One can agree with the historian professor that this is a disaster for Russia.

In recent months, Obama has signaled to Russia that he intends to take a pragmatic line on security and disarmament issues, reminiscent of President Richard Nixon's stance in the early 1970s. Nixon, as we know, was the first American president who began to view the Soviet Union not primarily as an ideological opponent, but as the world's second superpower, with which it was necessary to find a form of coexistence - a modus vivendi. Subsequent experience has shown that this approach is the most productive for Russian-American relations. Under Nixon, a detente began, and the cracks in the Iron Curtain opened up, causing a sharp improvement in the US image among ordinary Russians.

Barack Obama chose approximately the same line as Nixon in the first months of his presidency. It is possible that the regime of “sovereign democracy” that has developed in Russia does not arouse his sympathy. But today's Russia is not a threat to the United States, but it can help in solving the Iranian nuclear problem. At least Obama thinks so. And if so, the question of democracy in Russia can be postponed until later. Now it is worth trying, in exchange for further reductions in nuclear weapons, to obtain Russian diplomatic support in putting pressure on Iran, a country that is indeed capable of harming US interests.

After Obama abandoned the program to deploy elements of a missile defense system in Eastern Europe, American journalists intensively discussed the topic of some kind of “compensation” that Russia should supposedly provide Washington in exchange for abandoning anti-missile missiles in Poland and the Czech Republic. The fact that Russia refused to retaliately deploy its Iskander missile systems in the Kaliningrad region was presented as an insufficient measure. Some kind of breakthrough was expected in negotiations with Tehran, or at least Russia's agreement to tighten international sanctions against Iran in the UN Security Council. Nothing of the kind followed, and a feeling of dissatisfaction remained in US public opinion. The Russian Foreign Ministry, however, has always stated that there have not been and could not be any exchanges or deals in this direction. But what about the feeling of dissatisfaction among Americans? Will it get worse if the nuclear arms negotiations fail?

“Obama is in a difficult position. Sending every additional thousand troops to Afghanistan means another billion American taxpayer dollars. And because of the president's decision to focus on reform of the health care system, the problem of unemployment and the problem of mortgage debt "sagged". Under these conditions, bad news from the “disarmament” front will not add to Obama’s popularity,” Alexander Yanov tells VN. How can we help Obama avoid major political losses from the problems that have befallen him from all sides? It’s worth doing this, because when else will Russia receive such a pragmatic and sane partner in Washington.

The Russian leadership cannot make significant unilateral concessions. Nuclear weapons are one of the foundations of the country's sovereignty. Since the late sixties, nuclear weapons, in addition to their many other roles, have also played the role of a kind of guarantor of the stability of ruling regimes, especially authoritarian ones. After the creation of a powerful Soviet nuclear potential, attempts at regime change in the Soviet Union ceased. A similar role for China was played by the test of the Chinese atomic bomb in 1964, which became one of the reasons for the reconciliation of the PRC with the United States and even a sharp improvement in relations between them in the early seventies. You can love or dislike the regime of a nuclear power, but you have to live with it - this is the main lesson of the “nuclear chess” of the twentieth century, perfectly learned by Nixon and, it seems, Obama too.

There is only one thing left to do - to agree to the widest possible cooperation in verification and control procedures. “The whole point of so-called arms control is to prevent a surprise attack. During the sixties and seventies, disarmament was about reducing clearly defined individual dangers, the main ones being a surprise attack or a preemptive strike aimed at preventing such an attack,” recalls Henry Kissinger, who served under Nixon, in his book Diplomacy Secretary of State

So no need to worry. If good working relations between the leadership of Russia and the United States are maintained, these two countries will sooner or later - this week or a little later - come to the conclusion of a new treaty on the reduction of nuclear weapons. It is worth repeating that the main thing is to maintain and even strengthen measures of mutual trust and control. Soviet and American leaders Leonid Brezhnev and Richard Nixon once started with them. Then disarmament began towards the end of the Cold War. Today, the parties follow the same pattern.

Dmitry BABICH, RIA Novosti columnist, -- for Vremya Novosti