Return to Winter: Russia, China, and the New Cold War Against America (25 page)

It’s vital to remember that the treaty passed ratification in the U.S. Senate only after President Obama promised to invest $85 billion over 10 years to update the aging U.S. nuclear arsenal and infrastructure, which by now is mostly outdated technology from the 1980s or even earlier. But congressional sequestration threatens any money for upgrades, and unless the fiscal picture changes, the American nuclear arsenal, without upgrades or replacements, will age and eventually become obsolete.

Another huge failing of New START is in the area of tactical nuclear weapons, a category in which Russia has as much as a 10-to-one numerical advantage.
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Tactical nukes are weapons that can be used on the battlefield; they’re highly destructive but of such a scale that
they are practical for use in combat. New START does not address tactical weapons at all. In terms of the safety of Europe in particular, tactical nukes are more relevant than strategic missiles.

The Russians love tactical nukes: They have shown their willingness in the past to threaten their European neighbors by moving shorter-range tactical nuclear weapons to border regions.
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It was shortsighted of the U.S to think that Russia would be genuinely committed to reducing tactical nuclear capabilities. They buttress Russia’s military capabilities in such a way that the Russians can actually contend with, and even defeat, other major powers. Thus the Russians are quite pleased with New START, since the treaty leaves their tactical stockpile untouched.

For a time, New START improved Obama’s relations with the Russians, but it placed the president in a weaker position from which to build America’s arsenal, since Russian leaders believed the treaty to be more binding than their American counterparts did. Most important, they interpreted it as a legally binding limit on constructing missile-defense systems rather than as a directive to simply restrict the use of missiles themselves. “The first thing is that our American colleagues do not recognize the legal force of the treaty’s preamble,” said Konstantin Kosachev, chairman of the Russian parliament’s international-affairs committee. “The preamble sets a link between strategic offensive arms and defensive arms.”
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Since the signing of New START, Russia has sought to exploit loopholes in the treaty—something at which they have deep experience, as Washington knows. (In early 2014, for example, the Obama administration informed its NATO allies that the Russians have been testing ground-launched cruise missiles in violation of the landmark 1987 treaty banning such tests.
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) Now the Russians seek to attach multiple warheads to individual missiles in a process called MIRVing (Multiple Independent Reentry Vehicles). It has the effect of making
it more and more advantageous to strike first, thus increasing the danger of the Russian arsenal while keeping it within the bounds of the treaty.
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If New START weren’t bad enough, President Obama has proposed further reductions outside the treaty framework.

Beyond New START: Nuclear Zero?

In his 2013 Berlin speech, President Obama announced his intention to negotiate an additional one-third cut in nuclear stockpiles, which would allow the United States and Russia to lower the number of warheads to between 1,000 and 1,100 each, down from the New START limit of 1,550.
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“I intend to seek negotiated cuts with Russia to move beyond Cold War nuclear postures,” the president said. “At the same time, we’ll work with our NATO allies to seek bold reductions in U.S. and Russian tactical weapons in Europe.”
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That’s the category in which the Russians already hold a major edge.

While the cuts announced in Berlin are dramatic, they probably don’t represent the bottom line in Obama’s vision of a reduced American stockpile of nuclear weaponry. The administration has asked the Pentagon to draw up plans—at the very least, on an exploratory basis—to examine cutting America’s nuclear arsenal by
another 80 percent
—bringing us down to, at the most aggressive estimate, somewhere between 300 and 400 total nuclear weapons. The last time the U.S. nuclear stockpile was that small was 1950, when the country was still in the early stages of ramping up its nuclear defenses.
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Shortly after the president’s 2013 Berlin speech, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel announced that despite the reductions, the United States would continue investing in nuclear modernization and maintain its triad of bombers, intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBMs), and ballistic-missile submarines.
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But funding for nuclear modernization is being cut by congressional sequestration—and the
existing funding, says Representative Mike Rogers, chairman of the House Armed Services Strategic Forces Subcommittee, was already the “minimum required to accomplish this modernization.” Rogers estimates that the administration is underfunding nuclear forces by between $1 billion and $1.6 billion annually. Programs taking a hit include the replacement of the
Ohio
-class ballistic-missile submarine, life-extension programs for W-78 and W-88 nuclear warheads, the long-range standoff cruise missile, and the submarine-launched Trident D-5—now two years behind schedule and not deployable until 2029 at the earliest. The cuts also canceled a plutonium lab in New Mexico, which Rogers sees as “one of the most urgently needed facilities.”
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Former Senator John Kyl picks up the trail of the damage from here:

       
U.S. modernization programs—to extend the life of America’s aging ballistic nuclear warheads and modernize its “triad” approach to defense against nuclear attack—are in trouble.

              
Intercontinental ballistic missiles are the first leg of the triad. Although Russia is preparing to field a new generation of intercontinental ballistic missiles (one type of which can carry as many as 15 warheads), the Obama administration is still studying whether to develop its own modernized ICBMs.
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In effect, President Obama has announced his intention to work around the Senate’s authority to ratify foreign treaties. Obama does not need to wait for another formal treaty to implement new reductions; he and Putin could make them more rapidly, through “parallel, reciprocal reductions of strategic warheads to well below 1,000 within the next five years.”
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With an aggressive second-term president eager to implement his agenda before time runs out, and who has never enjoyed positive relations with Congress, it’s hard to know what unilateral moves Obama might yet make.

Why U.S. Nuclear Defenses Still Matter

To put it plainly, President Obama’s proposed cuts would put the United States at enormous risk. Rogue nations such as North Korea and Iran seek to build larger nuclear arsenals, while allies such as Japan might move to build their own arsenals if they determine they can no longer depend on the U.S. nuclear umbrella. And Obama chooses to do all this in a dangerous world in which the trend is not to disarm, but to rearm.

“Our experience has been that nuclear arsenals—other than ours—are on the rise,” says Jim Inhofe, the top Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee. “A country whose conventional military strength has been weakened due to budget cuts ought not to consider further nuclear force reductions while turmoil in the world is growing.” Senator Bob Corker, the ranking member of the Foreign Relations Committee, warned that “the president’s announcement without first fulfilling commitments on modernization could amount to unilateral disarmament.”
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It’s dangerous in no small part because the Russians don’t comply with the agreements they do sign. Representative Buck McKeon, head of the House Armed Services Committee, has raised the issue of the Russians’ previous treaty violations in his criticism of President Obama’s Berlin speech, saying that “the President’s desire to negotiate a new round of arms control with the Russians, while Russia is cheating on a major existing nuclear arms control treaty, strains credulity.”
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Russia has been violating these agreements for years. Consider just its violations of the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, which bans the two nations from “developing, testing, or possessing ballistic or cruise missiles with a range between 500 and 5,500 kilometers.”

       
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Russian tests of the R-500 cruise missile, which may already be prepared for deployment, “falls within the INF’s prohibited range,” according to John Bolton.
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Russia has rejected basic elements of the 20-year-old Cooperative Threat Reduction (CTR) Program, known as the Nunn-Lugar Program. Even though Russia received billions of dollars for eliminating Soviet-era missile, nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons, it now prohibits U.S. access to weapons sites while still seeking aid.

       
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Russia has violated the Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty, introducing “additional military forces into Georgia without host state consent and subsequent recognition of Abkhazia and South Ossetia as independent states.”
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It’s enough to remind one of what Ronald Reagan said famously 30 years ago: that the Russians “reserve unto themselves the right to commit any crime, to lie, to cheat.” They’re still doing it. Their pattern of noncompliance should not encourage Washington to believe that the Russians will implement its New START obligations.

And these cautions apply not only to Russia but also to the more volatile and dangerous proliferators, and potential proliferators, of nuclear weapons around the world—especially North Korea but also Iran and others. That is why, in February 2013, 20 foreign-policy experts and retired military officers wrote an open letter to President Obama urging him to reconsider his aggressive disarmament agenda:

       
It is now clear that, as a practical matter under present and foreseeable circumstances, this [nuclear zero] agenda will only result in the unilateral disarmament of the U.S. nuclear deterrent. That will make the world more dangerous, not less.

              
According to published reports, you are considering further, draconian and perhaps unilateral cuts in the numbers of nuclear weapons in our arsenal. We respectfully recommend that this plan be abandoned in favor of the fulfillment of commitments you made at the time of the New START Treaty to: modernize all three legs of the Triad; ensure the safety and deterrent effectiveness of the weapons with which they are equipped; and restore the critical industrial base that supports these forces.

              
Doing otherwise will put our country, its allies and our peoples at ever-greater risk in a world that is, far from nuclear-free, awash with such weapons—with increasing numbers of them in the hands of freedom’s enemies. It is unimaginable that that is your intention. It must not be the unintended result of your actions, either.
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Logic and history argue against all of President Obama’s naive assumptions and his reckless insistence that the United States can maintain its current level of security without a large nuclear advantage. In fact, detailed scholarship indicates that states with an advantage in nuclear forces are more likely to win in nuclear crises against states with smaller arsenals.
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President Obama’s drastic reductions to the nuclear arsenal make it more likely that the United States will lose such confrontations in the future, should they arise. This is especially true when those states are so determined to arm up.

THE AXIS ARMS UP

Perhaps President Obama’s eagerness to disarm would have some application in a world in which other powerful nations were equally or even more determined to reduce their arsenals. That is not the case, however, especially with the nations that view the United States as an adversary, as Russia and China often do, or as an outright enemy, as
Iran and North Korea do. All these countries, as well as Pakistan—our estranged “ally” in the War on Terror—are aggressively expanding and upgrading their nuclear stockpiles, delivery systems, and defenses. A review of their postures makes clear that Obama’s anti-nuclear passions are a poor fit for this moment in history.

Russia

Dmitri Medvedev was ready to leave the political stage as Russia’s president in May 2012. As part of his farewell, the president held a Kremlin ballroom ceremony to honor Russian citizens from all areas of endeavor. He awarded medals to a policeman, a theater director, the chairman of the Russian hockey federation, and dozens of other ordinary citizens. Then Medvedev approached the podium to speak, and he had a special message for the young. The next generation of Russians, he said, needed positive role models to inspire them toward “success in literature, art, education.” Then he paused and added, “and nuclear weapons.”
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That has to be one of the more creative segues any statesman has ever made, but Medvedev’s linkage was not accidental; it was deeply revealing about Russia’s attitude toward nukes. The way the Russians see it, an expansive nuclear arsenal is essential to their national goals. As Medvedev’s speech shows, in contrast to China, Russia has never made any secret of the extent of its nuclear arsenal. In fact, the Russians take every opportunity to brag about it, and they have much to boast about it: The Russians maintain the world’s largest nuclear arsenal, and unlike the Americans, they are determined to modernize and upgrade it.
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Russia spends 40 percent of its total military budget—about $30 billion a year—on its nuclear program, most of it focused on developing less vulnerable nuclear-launch systems such as mobile ICBM launchers and new submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs).
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At the same time, Moscow has pressured the U.S. and its NATO allies in Europe not to install the updated missile-defense shield, as discussed when we looked at Obama’s hot-mic promise of post-election “flexibility” vis-à-vis Russia. Moscow claims that the shield is an offensive weapon pointed against it, while NATO argues that it is for defensive purposes against third parties such as Iran. The U.S. has even invited the Russians to participate in the shield. The Kremlin rejected this offer and countered by explicitly threatening a preemptive strike against countries such as Poland that wish to deploy it. It was an echo of Soviet-era threats against Western Europe.