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New arms control treaty gives nuclear armed bombers free rein

It is a ballistic missile focused treaty that essentially removes strategic bombers from arms control.

The dodgy accounting of nuclear diplomacy, guardian.co.uk, Julian Borger, 9 April 2010, The new arms control treaty signed in Prague contains new counting methods that call into question its real scope Take down the flags, put away the champagne, etc. The text of the new Start treaty is out on the US state department website, and the small print confirms the warnings of its sternest critics. Dodgy new counting rules mean that the real reductions in deployed nuclear weapons could turn out to be far less than the 30% advertised. Indeed, they could add up to nothing at all.

The treaty sets a new ceiling for deployed strategic warheads at 1550 on each side. That is indeed down about 30% from the ceilings established in the Moscow Treaty in 2002. But Article III, paragraph 2 of the new Start reveals a catch, explaining how the warheads will be counted.

Each re-entry vehicle on top of each ICBM and each submarine-launched SLBM missile will count as one warhead, which makes sense. But Article III also says that: “One nuclear warhead shall be counted for each deployed heavy bomber.” That is a backwards way of saying every heavy bomber counts as just one warhead, even though a US B-52 Stratofortress or Russian Tu-95 Bear, can carry multiple bombs and missiles – up to 20 in the case of the B-52.

Hans Kristensen, at the Federation of American Scientists, the doyen of independent bomb-counters, was among the first to spot the implications of this counting method…..
Kristensen welcomes the verification regime, involving mutual inspections of each side’s nuclear sites, but this is his trenchant verdict on the agreement as a whole:

Indeed, the new Start Treaty is not so much a nuclear reductions treaty as it is a verification and confidence building treaty. It is a ballistic missile focused treaty that essentially removes strategic bombers from arms control.

The dodgy accounting of nuclear diplomacy | World news | guardian.co.uk

April 9, 2010 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | politics international, Russia, USA | antinuclear, nuclear, nuclear secrecy, nuclear spin, nuclear technology, nuclear weapons