Below is a link to the full text of the New START Treaty:
Tag: New START treaty
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President Obama Is on the Right Track
This article was originally published on the National Journal Experts’ Blog
President Obama is on the right track with his multiple efforts to reduce nuclear dangers. I only wish that it were a faster track and reflected a greater sense of urgency. His policies take account of some important current realities: The Cold War has ended (20 years ago); the greatest threat confronting the US and the world is no longer all-out nuclear war, but nuclear proliferation and nuclear-armed terrorists; and the United States has obligations under the Non-Proliferation Treaty to engage in “good faith” negotiations to achieve total nuclear disarmament.
The Obama administration made a smart move by ruling out using nuclear weapons against non-nuclear weapon states that are in compliance with the Non-Proliferation Treaty. It could have gone further, though. While the administration surely sees its posture as a useful threat for states not in compliance, this is a two-edged sword. Such threats also send a message to the rest of the world that the US still finds nuclear weapons useful and is willing to threaten their use. This continued reliance on nuclear weapons reinforces the current double standards of nuclear “haves” and “have-nots,” which in the long run will not hold. Some states may be encouraged, as was North Korea, to pursue nuclear weapons capabilities in the belief that they can deter an attack by a more powerful adversary.
The nuclear weapons reductions in the New START agreement are modest and leave more than enough capability on each side to destroy civilization, but they are a step forward and they do extend the important verification provisions of the first START agreement. They should be seen as a platform from which to continue the downward movement in nuclear arms to zero. Ultimately, zero is the only safe, secure and stable number of nuclear weapons in the world.
The US has enormous conventional force capability. While this allows us to reduce our reliance upon nuclear weapons, it also creates problems with the Russians in achieving further nuclear reductions. Russia has repeatedly expressed concerns with our missile defense deployments, our unwillingness to curtail space weaponization, and our Prompt Global Strike program that would entail putting conventional warheads on ICBMs. To get to substantially lower levels of nuclear arms and finally to zero, we are going to have to meet the concerns of the Russians and other countries that we are not simply making the world safe for US conventional weapons superiority.
Realists such as former Secretaries of State George Shultz and Henry Kissinger support the new nuclear posture of the Obama administration. Critics such as Senators Jon Kyl and John McCain are playing nuclear politics with loaded barrels, pursuing outdated nuclear policies that are MAD in all senses, not only policies of Mutual Assured Destruction but policies based upon Mutual Assured Delusions. We cannot continue to base our security on nuclear weapons without running the risk of massive and catastrophic disaster.
I would urge President Obama to move rapidly in building on the progress he has made to this point. There is no scenario that would justify US use of nuclear weapons again. Nuclear deterrence is unstable and dangerous. Deterrence is a theory and it cannot be proven to be effective under all conditions in the future. It came close to failing on various occasions during the Cold War. Deterrence relies upon rationality, and it remains a dangerous assumption that all leaders will act rationally at all times. Deterrence is subject to human fallibility, and human fallibility and nuclear weapons are a flammable mixture.
A stronger indication that President Obama is indeed committed to seeking “the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons” would be a policy of No First Use of nuclear weapons, coupled with taking the weapons off hair-trigger alert and continuing to work with the Russians and soon other nuclear weapon states on major reductions in arsenals. We should be pursuing a new treaty, a Nuclear Weapons Convention, for the phased, verifiable, irreversible and transparent elimination of nuclear weapons. US leadership for this will be essential.
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How to Build on the Start Treaty
This article was originally published by The New York Times
This has been a remarkable time for the Obama administration. After a year of intense internal debate, it issued a new nuclear strategy. And after a year of intense negotiations with the Russians, President Obama signed the New Start treaty with President Dmitri Medvedev in Prague. On Monday, the president will host the leaders of more than 40 nations in a nuclear security summit meeting whose goal is to find ways of gaining control of the loose fissile material around the globe.
New Start is the first tangible product of the administration’s promise to “press the reset button” on United States-Russian relations. The new treaty is welcome. But as a disarmament measure, it is a modest step, entailing a reduction of only 30 percent from the former limit — and some of that reduction is accomplished by the way the warheads are counted, not by their destruction. Perhaps the treaty’s greatest accomplishment is that the negotiations leading up to its signing re-engaged Americans and Russians in a serious discussion of how to reduce nuclear dangers.
So what should come next? We look forward to a follow-on treaty that builds on the success of the previous Start treaties and leads to significantly greater arms reductions — including reductions in tactical nuclear weapons and reductions that require weapons be dismantled and not simply put in reserve.
But our discussions with Russian colleagues, including senior government officials, suggest that such a next step would be very difficult for them. Part of the reason for their reluctance to accept further reductions is that Russia considers itself to be encircled by hostile forces in Europe and in Asia. Another part results from the significant asymmetry between United States and Russian conventional military forces. For these reasons, we believe that the next round of negotiations with Russia should not focus solely on nuclear disarmament issues. These talks should encompass missile defense, Russia’s relations with NATO, the Conventional Armed Forces in Europe Treaty, the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, North Korea, Iran and Asian security issues.
Let’s begin with missile defense. Future arms talks should make a serious exploration of a joint United States-Russia program that would provide a bulwark against Iranian missiles. We should also consider situating parts of the joint system in Russia, which in many ways offers an ideal strategic location for these defenses. Such an effort would not only improve our security, it would also further cooperation in dealing with the Iranian nuclear threat, including the imposition of consequential sanctions when appropriate.
NATO is a similarly complicated issue. After the cold war ended, Russia was invited to NATO meetings with the idea that the country would eventually become an integral part of European security discussions. The idea was good, but the execution failed. NATO has acted as if Russia’s role is that of an observer with no say in decisions; Russia has acted as if it should have veto power.
Neither outlook is viable. But if NATO moves from consensus decisions to super-majority decisions in its governing structure, as has been considered, it would be possible to include Russia’s vote as an effective way of resolving European security issues of common interest.
The Russians are also eager to revisit the two landmark cold war treaties. The Conventional Armed Forces in Europe Treaty enabled NATO and Warsaw Pact nations to make significant reductions in conventional armaments and to limit conventional deployments. Today, there is still a need for limiting conventional arms, but the features of that treaty pertaining to the old Warsaw Pact are clearly outdated. Making those provisions relevant to today’s world should be a goal of new talks
Similarly, the 1987 treaty that eliminated American and Soviet intermediate-range ballistic missiles was a crucially important pact that helped to defuse cold war tensions. But today Russia has neighbors that have such missiles directed at its borders; for understandable reasons, it wants to renegotiate aspects of this treaty.
Future arms reductions with Russia are eminently possible. But they are unlikely to be achieved unless the United States is willing to address points of Russian concern. Given all that is at stake, we believe comprehensive discussions are a necessity as we work our way toward ever more significant nuclear disarmament.