The world is sleepwalking toward a period free of nuclear arms control

Nuclear arms control: What happens when US and Russia let it lapse? WHY WE WROTE THIS
In less than a year, the world could enter a period free of nuclear arms control treaties for the first time in more than a half-century. Is such a state of affairs sustainable? Christian Science Monitor By Fred Weir Correspondent, 2 June 20, MOSCOW

The world is sleepwalking toward a period free of nuclear arms control, as New START, the last remaining nuclear weapons treaty, is set to expire next February.

This dark horizon has been approaching for quite a while, but the political will to avert it has collapsed. The Trump White House has spent its term withdrawing from arms control treaties – the latest being the Open Skies Treaty last month – and shows little interest in extending New START. And Russia has not been able to woo the U.S. back to the negotiating table, despite a desire to keep the process going.

Now the biggest nuclear powers appear ready to plunge back into the strategic chaos that prevailed in the early 1960s, before the Cuban missile crisis focused the minds of terrified U.S. and Soviet leaders and led them to initiate a multigenerational effort to construct what became a comprehensive system of nuclear arms control.

In the early 1960s “we walked up to the edge of the nuclear abyss with the Cuban missile crisis. Then we walked back and started negotiating,” says Alexandra Bell, senior policy director for the Washington-based Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation. “In retrospect, we were lucky to make it out of there alive the first time. Arms control gave us guard rails against chaos. It will be really bad if, for the first time in 50 years, we don’t have any on-the-ground insight into each other’s military forces.”

Arms control waning

The wake of the Cuban missile crisis brought not only restraints on the once-burgeoning numbers and types of new weapons, but also reduced tensions with trust-building measures, channels of regular communication, and reliable verification mechanisms. That structure survived the end of the Cold War, as did the massive, global-life-threatening nuclear forces of the U.S. and Russia.

Several U.S. presidents added their own contributions to the network of accords. As recently as a decade ago Barack Obama inked New START, the deal that made the deepest-ever reductions to strategic nuclear arsenals, with his Russian counterpart Dmitry Medvedev.

But the edifice erected by Cold War-era leaders has been gradually unraveling since George W. Bush unilaterally pulled the U.S. out of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which had served as a keystone for the whole system by placing tough caps on defensive systems. That had ensured absolute mutual deterrence in the form of mutual assured destruction (MAD), thus making the very idea of nuclear war unthinkable.

Things have been shaky ever since, though arms control experts on both sides have insisted until recently that the system might be revived if leaders wanted it. But the Trump administration, which seems averse to any limitations on U.S. power, has buried the whole idea by tearing up quite a few international treaties. Specifically, it recently pulled out of the 1987 Intermediate Nuclear Forces treaty, which had banned an entire class of nuclear missiles and was dubbed “the treaty that ended the Cold War.”

In May, Mr. Trump announced the U.S. will be leaving the Open Skies Treaty, a 2002 agreement signed by 34 nations, which supports arms control by allowing countries to overfly each other’s territory on demand. Most U.S. allies have complained that leaving it will be a destabilizing act. Next, Mr. Obama’s New START, which had allowed for 18 on-site inspections per year, will expire in February without earnest efforts – of which there is little sign – on both sides to extend it………

No choice but to come back to the table

Andrei Kortunov, head of the Russian International Affairs Council, which is affiliated with the Foreign Ministry, says new forms of arms control will undoubtedly be needed in the future. The most dangerous thing about the present moment is that the old tried-and-true framework is being destroyed before any new controls have been even envisioned. The dangers of miscalculation or misunderstanding will multiply amid that vacuum, he says.

“Over the past 50 years we have developed a common strategic culture with our American counterparts. We were talking the same language, and everyone knew what the terms meant.”

If that common culture, all the mechanisms of dialogue, trust-building, and verification are lost, Russia will probably not try to match the U.S. missile for missile as the USSR did in the past, he adds.

“In the absence of any arms control, it will become almost impossible for the U.S. to know what we really have or what we may be able to do. Russia is likely to follow a policy of ‘strategic ambiguity,’ to keep them guessing as a means of deterrence. That would be a very dangerous state of affairs, one that nobody would wish for,” Mr. Kortunov says……..https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Europe/2020/0601/Nuclear-arms-control-What-happens-when-US-and-Russia-let-it-lapse

June 2, 2020 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | 2 WORLD, weapons and war

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