Tuesday, August 4, 2009
...Despite President Barack Obama's strange, pre-Moscow summit remark last month in a New York Times interview that the U.S. and Russia are continuing to "grow" their nuclear stockpiles, both countries have in fact reduced their stockpiles drastically since the Soviet Union disintegrated in 1991. Those reductions resulted from unilateral decisions, not from arms-control bargaining.
Thus, on Nov. 13, 2001, President George W. Bush announced that the U.S. would unilaterally reduce its "operationally deployed strategic nuclear warheads to a level between 1,700 and 2,200 over the next decade." This was far less than the 6,000 limit allowed under the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START). Russian President Vladimir Putin promptly said in December 2001 that Russia would similarly reduce its nuclear forces.
Thus, benefiting from the happy reality that the Cold War was over, each country felt free to cut its arsenal, whether or not the other committed itself to do so. The 2002 Moscow Treaty, which simply made legally binding the reduction pledges each president had already announced, was negotiated as a friendly gesture to Russia. U.S. officials did not see it as a strategic necessity, but Mr. Putin wanted formal acknowledgment that Russia retained nuclear-arms parity with the U.S., though it could no longer be seen as America's peer overall.
Now, with START set to expire in December, it is Mr. Obama who's intent on signing a new treaty. He says U.S.-Russian arms reductions will help stem nuclear proliferation.
Mr. Obama here is mixing up pretext and policy. When criticized for pursuing nuclear weapons, proliferators like North Korea and Iran make diplomatic talking points out of the size of the great powers' arsenals. They try to shift the focus away from themselves by complaining that the Americans and Russians aren't working hard enough to reach disarmament goals envisioned in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. But depriving proliferators of such talking points won't affect their incentives to acquire nuclear weapons--or the world's incentives to counter the dangers that the North Korean and Iranian nuclear programs pose to international peace...
Reading it all, let's get this straight. We're going to pursue an arms control treaty that we don't need. We're going to put defensive "weapons" on the table for inclusion in control, thus limiting our ability to protect both ourselves and our allies, putting them further at risk to blackmail and diluting our own influence in the world, and far from globally reducing arms, we're going to unintentionally wind up encouraging a real, world-wide arms race as other countries seek out their own arsenals. This might have been a nifty line to pursue 30 years ago, but now it's completely counterproductive. It'll be a good photo-op at the signing, though...if the Russians can keep themselves from snickering.
