When President Trump exited the landmark 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty with Russia in August 2018, it left in force only one agreement limiting nuclear arms: the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, negotiated by the Obama administration and signed by the United States and Russia in 2010.
New START, which limits each side to 1,550 deployed warheads, expires in February of next year but can be renewed for five more years if Washington and Moscow both agree.
Currently, the Trump administration is disinclined to extend the treaty because it suffers from some of the same deficiencies as the now-defunct INF treaty: Namely, it’s a bilateral agreement between the U.S. and Russia that leaves out China, which is rapidly expanding its nuclear arsenal, and it doesn’t cover a range of new Russians weapons such as hypersonic and cruise missiles, some of which Russia has already deployed in violation of the old INF treaty.
In a statement marking the demise of the INF treaty, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo called upon Russia and China to join the U.S. in beginning “a new era of arms control that moves beyond the bilateral treaties of the past.”
On June 22, U.S. Special Presidential Envoy for Arms Control Marshall Billingslea sat down in Vienna with his Russian counterpart, Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov, and began to see whether Russia was willing to explore a new arms control framework that would go beyond the Cold War construct of just two world superpowers.
The U.S. invited China to take part in the discussions, but, as Billingslea tweeted from Austria, “China is a no-show. Beijing still hiding behind #GreatWallofSecrecy on its crash nuclear build-up, and so many other things.”
China is estimated to have roughly 300 nuclear warheads but is believed to be on a path to at least double, perhaps more than triple, the size of its strategic arsenal over the next decade.
“China, after many years of proclaiming its minimum nuclear deterrent, has developed its own nuclear triad to directly rival America,” wrote Republican Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming in a letter to Trump this month.
In addition to modernizing its nuclear arsenal, China is developing maneuverable reentry vehicles and hypersonic glide weapons to evade U.S. missile defenses and topping its ICBMs with multiple independently targeted warheads.
The Cheney letter, signed by 40 Republican colleagues, expresses “strong support” for Trump’s efforts to ensure “China is included in meaningful U.S. arms control efforts.”
“The notion of trying to pull the Chinese into that agreement is, in theory, a good idea. In practice? Impossible,” said former Defense Secretary Robert Gates in a session with the Center for Strategic and International Studies four days before the Vienna talks began.
“The Chinese have no incentive whatsoever to participate,” said Gates, who was a CIA analyst for the very first Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty talks in 1969. “And the irony is if they were to level out their military, their number of nuclear weapons, an agreement would have to authorize the Chinese to build dramatically more, far more, nuclear weapons than we think they have at the current time to get level with the United States in China.”
Beijing’s answer, as tweeted by a spokesperson for the Ministry of Foreign affairs, is that the way to get China on board is for the U.S. and China to “reduce its nuclear arms stockpile, creating conditions for other nuclear-weapon states to join in multilateral nuclear disarmament talks.”
Billingslea tweeted that his first round of Vienna talks was “very positive,” with “detailed discussions on full-range of nuclear topics, technical working groups launched” and an “agreement in principle on second round.”
But without China at the table, the prospects for an ambitious new accord to replace New START seem remote — the treaty is set to lapse in just over seven months.
The question now is whether to allow New START to die a quiet death as a relic of the Cold War or to revive it as a placeholder to give time for new efforts to engage China and address new Russian capabilities, including short-range tactical systems that are not covered by the current accord.
“Yes, Russia is developing new nuclear weapons not covered by the treaty, and yes, China is not in the treaty at all. Options to address these issues can be explored for a follow-on agreement but will simply take too long to consider by early 2021,” writes former Defense Secretary William Perry and co-author Tom Collina in their new book on arms control, The Button.
Proponents of extending New START argue that whatever its limitations, the treaty’s verification regime provides a window into what Russia is doing that would otherwise slam shut in February.
In May, Billingslea said that New START has “a very weak verification regime” with “significant loopholes in the way verification is physically conducted, which the Russians have been exploiting.”
But Rose Gottemoeller, who was President Barack Obama’s chief U.S. negotiator for the treaty, says it’s a mistake to focus solely on on-site inspections.
“It is the whole panoply of capacity and capability in the verification regime for the New START Treaty that gives us 24-7 insight into the status of Russian nuclear forces,” she told reporters in January.
“I really hope that they will renew New START, both for verification purposes and because of the predictability it brings into the arms control, into the strategic arms arena,” says Gates. “I think there are some opportunities for arms control with China. I don’t think strategic arms right now is one of them.”
The fate of the last surviving arms control treaty between the U.S. and Russia may well be determined by the November presidential election.
“President Trump may do nothing or oppose extension,” write Perry and Collina, “In that case, a new president who takes office in January 2021 would have just weeks to pick up the pieces.”
Jamie McIntyre is the Washington Examiner’s senior writer on defense and national security. His morning newsletter, “Jamie McIntyre’s Daily on Defense,” is free and available by email subscription at dailyondefense.com.
