Thomas Countryman
A key arms control treaty that limits the number of strategic nuclear weapons the United States and Russia can deploy is set to expire in February 2021. Without it, the two countries could be locked into a nuclear arms race not seen since the height of the Cold War. Fortunately, the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, known as New START, is popular in both Washington and Moscow, and it can be extended for an additional five years with just the signatures of Presidents Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin.
Renewing it should be the easiest foreign policy decision Trump can make. However, he is holding out in hopes of getting a bigger deal, one that covers other types of nuclear weapons and also involves China. While this is a worthwhile goal in principle, focusing on it and letting the existing deal lapse could have disastrous consequences.
New START was signed in 2010 by President Barack Obama and then-Russian President Dmitry Medvedev. It verifiably limits each country to no more than 1,550 deployed nuclear warheads and 700 deployed delivery systems, which include missiles, bombers and submarines.
Simply put, the treaty is working. Military and intelligence officials have said they greatly value New START’s monitoring and verification provisions, which provide predictability and transparency and help promote a stable nuclear deterrence posture vis-à-vis Russia. All U.S. allies, in NATO and in East Asia, have publicly expressed their support for extension.
Members of Congress from both parties support extending it, as do 80 percent of the American public, based on recent polls. There is no other step the president can make in foreign policy, and certainly not with regard to Russia, that would draw such strong bipartisan support. And for Trump personally, by extending New START while pledging to expand on it in the future, he could potentially boast that he has surpassed an achievement of the Obama administration.
Two key obstacles to an extension have recently been lifted. In early December, Putin stated explicitly that he was prepared to extend New START immediately, without preconditions and without a negotiation process. Russia has also explicitly affirmed that the treaty will cover two new Russian strategic delivery systems that are of great concern to military planners in Washington: a new heavy intercontinental ballistic missile and a new hypersonic glide vehicle. In addition, John Bolton, a serial assassin of arms control agreements, was axed as Trump’s national security adviser in September, so he is no longer able to block action on an extension.
And yet, Trump hesitates even to open discussions with Moscow on the modalities of an extension. As is his habit, he wants more—a bigger deal. Specifically, he wants to see a more expansive treaty, one that covers not only strategic nuclear weapons but also smaller, low-yield “tactical” nuclear weapons. More ambitiously, he wants to bring China into a new treaty and establish limits on its nuclear arsenal.
These are praiseworthy long-term goals that should be pursued. But Trump’s belief that China is currently interested in negotiations on a three-way nuclear arms control pact with Russia is a fantasy, much like his assertions that China bears the cost of U.S. tariffs, or that Mexico will pay for the U.S. border wall. Beijing’s inventory of nuclear warheads is just 5 percent of Washington’s or Moscow’s, so it has no logical incentive to join negotiations aimed at permanently locking in a numerical advantage for two superpowers whose stars, in Chinese eyes, are fading.
If New START is not extended, February 2021 could mark the start of a new nuclear arms race—one that even surpasses the Cold War in risk and expense.
Eight months after Trump first declared his goal of a bigger deal, the best minds in the U.S. government seem no closer to devising an incentive for China to participate. Like 17th-century mariners sent by European kings to find the Northwest Passage to Asia, they are doggedly seeking a path that simply doesn’t exist.
Meanwhile, a better solution is staring the administration in the face: lock in the current limits on U.S. and Russian nuclear forces with an extension of New START. At the same time, Trump and Putin could issue a political declaration—not a treaty—stating their intent to pursue further nuclear reductions and ultimately bring China into the process. This is one way Trump could make a credible claim to have done something better and smarter than his predecessor.
If New START is not extended, February 2021 could mark the start of a new nuclear arms race—one that even surpasses the Cold War in risk and expense. Both sides would be able to quickly install hundreds of additional warheads into existing missiles, potentially preserving numerical parity, but increasing instability.
Even if the U.S. and Russia don’t immediately build up their forces, the treaty’s monitoring and verification regime will be impossible to replace. The U.S. intelligence community has concluded that even the most advanced national technical means cannot substitute for the transparency provided by New START. Without it, Russian and American military planners will gradually lose confidence in their understanding of each other’s nuclear forces and intentions, incentivizing them to assume the worst-case scenario about their adversary’s nuclear capabilities and rush to match them.
The end of New START could also put pressure on the Pentagon to build additional new delivery systems, both strategic and tactical. This would add to the staggering $1.7 trillion the U.S. has already committed over the next 30 years to nuclear arsenal sustainment and modernization.
Such an outcome would have further implications directly contrary to Trump’s stated goals of reducing tactical weapons stockpiles and including China in negotiations. The collapse of New START risks replicating Cold War-thinking about how to “win” a “limited” nuclear war by expanding the number of tactical nuclear weapons and delivery systems. And the lack of limitations and transparency on Russian and American arsenals will give Beijing a strong incentive to speed up expansion of its own nuclear options.
But with the right leadership, the expiration of New START would not necessarily lead to a new arms race. The U.S. and Russia could simply make a political agreement to continue to abide by the pact’s numerical limitations and transparency measures. This is the path that President Ronald Reagan took in the early 1980s, when he agreed with Moscow to continue to respect the terms of the SALT II strategic arms limitation treaty, which was signed in 1979 but never ratified. And some of the most significant reductions in nuclear arms occurred without benefit of a treaty, with commitments made in the early 1990s by President George H.W. Bush and then-Russian leader Mikhail Gorbachev, which came to be known as the Presidential Nuclear Initiatives.
But it is difficult to be sanguine about such an outcome. Both Trump and Putin, in keeping with their “tough guy” personas, have emphasized readiness to out-build the other. And neither has made more than fleeting reference to the long-term goal—reiterated by every American president since John F. Kennedy—of eventually eliminating the nuclear threat entirely. Nor is there reason to believe that Trump, should he win reelection next year, will suddenly develop the foreign policy competence that has been so blindingly absent from his administration.
Military planners and arms control advocates must already begin to prepare for the more dangerous security environment that we will face without any limitations on Russian or American nuclear arsenals. But at the same time, Trump must be convinced to snatch the low-hanging fruit and declare victory by extending New START.
Thomas Countryman is chair of the board of directors at the Arms Control Association in Washington, D.C. He was a career U.S. Foreign Service officer for 35 years until retiring in 2017, having most recently served as acting undersecretary of state for arms control and international security.
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