By Ann Roosevelt
The new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) pending in the Senate calls for tougher, “eyes on” verification, a senior State Department official said.
“This treaty…has a more intensive verification regime for on-site inspection of reentry vehicles, or nuclear warheads, so we are actually going to be counting the number of nuclear warheads on top of missiles,” Rose Gottemoeller, assistant secretary of State for Verification, Compliance and Implementation, and chief U.S. negotiator for the New START Treaty, told the Defense Writers Group recently.
The START Treaty, which expired in December 2009 after 15 successful years, used an attribution system, where if the Russians tested the SS-18 with 10 warheads on top, the U.S. saw that, and said that’s the SS-18 attribution rule. Thus, every time the inspectors went in, the SS-18 was expected to have 10 warheads on it.
“Now we’re going in and affirmatively saying there are 10 warheads on that particular missile, or they’ve been downloaded,” Gottemoeller said. This change is important for the United States, she said. It’s a technical detail that hasn’t been much discussed in the lead-up to the expected Senate Foreign Affairs Committee vote Thursday on treaty ratification.
For example, under the expired START treaty, the United States began to pay a penalty on D-5 submarine-launched ICBMs, because there were fewer than the full up eight warheads, she said. Under the treaty inspection regime, the D-5 had to be counted with the full load of eight warheads, even though there were perhaps five or six, with the rest of the warheads removed. Over the life of the treaty, the D-5 was being counted with a higher level of warheads than there actually were.
“That’s why under this treaty we wanted a different kind of counting approach. We wanted to count the exact number of warheads on the missile in order to be able to really take account of the actual numbers and not pay a penalty.
“In this [New START] treaty, we’re going to have very good eyes on what’s happening as long as we can get inside the Russian nuclear facilities,” Gottemoeller said. “On top of that, we do have national technical means. All the pieces work together to perform effective verification of the treaty.”
The New START treaty will deal with about half the facilities as the expired treaty. This is because the START treaty was ratified by the then-Soviet Union, which dissolved soon thereafter. The treaty was then used to remove nuclear weapons from the former Soviet republics of Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Belarus. Those bases are now closed and the Russian Federation also has shuttered a number of bases. The number of facilities to be inspected under New Start will be half–35. There also will be fewer inspections: 18 inspections annually instead of the 28 under START.
There are risks to non-ratification, she said. The primary concern is that without the “eyes and ears” within the Russian Federation, over time there will be less certainty and less known about Russian strategic nuclear forces.
As of Dec. 4, the United States will not have had inspectors in the Russian Federation for a “solid” year, she said.
“In terms of the balance of priorities, I think our military leadership would prefer to be concentrating on what’s needed for our soldiers in Afghanistan than having to– through worst case planning–pour resources into nuclear planning.”
Meanwhile, Gottemoeller said there should be no concern that the new treaty would hamper the United States missile defense activities.
“This treaty in no way constrains the missile defenses of the United States nor in any way makes them more expensive or more difficult to pursue,” she said.
Furthermore, “There are absolutely no secret deals in this treaty. Zero,” Gottemoeller said.
The treaty, she said, is in the strategic interests of both the United States and Russia. “It allows us to limit our strategic nuclear forces and those of the Russian Federation in a way that is verifiable.”