Washington: The Biden administration was quick to breathe new life into the last remaining treaty limiting US and Russian nuclear weapons. The going will be slower when it turns to other arms control problems that are either festering or emerging as potential triggers of an international arms race.
China is modernising its arsenal of nuclear weapons and has shown no interest in negotiating limits. North Korea is at or near the point of being able to threaten the US homeland with a nuclear missile strike. Russia has begun deploying new, exotic weapons, including nuclear-capable devices designed to evade the best of American missile defences. Iran is seen as the biggest missile threat in the Mideast.
Each of those problems is a priority for President Joe Biden, but he acted on Russia first, reflecting the urgency of extending the treaty even as Biden seeks to take a tougher line with Russian President Vladimir Putin in response to issues like the arrest of opposition figure Alexei Navalny and Russia’s alleged involvement in a massive cyber espionage campaign against the US government.
In announcing that Biden and Putin agreed in a phone call Tuesday that they would extend by five years the New START treaty — which would otherwise have expired next week — the White House alluded vaguely to broader challenges with Moscow. It said the leaders “also agreed to explore strategic stability discussions on a range of arms control and emerging security issues.”
New START, negotiated while Biden served as vice president, limits the United States and Russia to 1,550 deployed nuclear warheads on strategic weapons like submarines, bomber aircraft and land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles. The limits took effect in February 2018 and would expire in February 2021 unless the parties agreed to extend the deal for up to five years.
Both houses of the Russian parliament voted unanimously Wednesday for the treaty extension. Speaking to the World Economic Forum’s virtual meeting, Putin hailed the extension as “a step in the right direction,” but he also warned of rising global rivalries and threats of new conflicts.
The pact’s extension doesn’t require approval by the US Congress. It is expected to be validated by an exchange of diplomatic notes. Then the question will be: How does international arms control proceed, given the tense state of U.S.-Russia relations, the rise of China and the other sources of uncertainty?
Although Russia is America’s most willing partner, arms control may no longer be addressed solely by Moscow and Washington, whose nuclear arsenals were largely the only ones that counted during the Cold War.
In that period, US war planners viewed China’s relatively small nuclear force as a subset of Russia’s rather than as a major threat in its own right. Space and cyber weapons were distant problems but are now in the forefront.
“The big-picture question is whether what we’re seeing with the extension of New START is a last breath put into the dying body of arms control, or whether this is genuinely the start of a re-invigoration of arms control efforts,” says Mark Bell, an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota who specialises in nuclear weapons issues. “The landscape for arms control is not a particularly optimistic one moving forward.”
The hope among arms control advocates is that Biden’s decision to accept Russia’s offer of a five-year extension of New START will set the stage for broader talks on steps to lessen the risk of war between the world’s two biggest nuclear powers.
Biden knew that extending New START would be welcomed by America’s NATO partners, who had opposed the Trump administration’s withdrawal from other arms control deals.
