President Donald Trump’s apparent preference for U.S. nuclear might over stockpile reductions does not necessarily preclude the United States and Russia from reaching a deal to extend the New START accord – or even sealing an all-new arms control plan, experts said.
During his campaign and in the early weeks of his presidency, Trump has made a number of eyebrow-raising comments regarding nuclear deterrence and arms control. Just on Thursday, he told Reuters the United States needs to be at the “top of the pack” when it comes to nuclear weapons arsenals and reaffirmed his view that New START is a bad deal.
Trump reportedly made the same point during a Jan. 28 telephone conversation with Russian President Vladimir Putin, though he was also said to appear unfamiliar with treaty.
“If he wants to scrap the START treaty of course there would be no follow-on. But from what I’ve read it’s not clear that he understands what this is all about,” said Janne Nolan, chair of the Nuclear Security Working Group at The George Washington University. “So it’s very hard to gauge this. It doesn’t seem like he’s had any briefings on this.”
New START, signed by then-Presidents Barack Obama and Dmitry Medvedev in 2010, requires both countries by next February to deploy no more than 1,550 strategic nuclear warheads on 700 ICBMs, submarine-launched ballistic missiles, and long-range bombers. The treaty has a withdrawal clause that Trump could invoke, but also allows for a five-year extension past its 2021 expiration.
Putin raised the question of extending the treaty, according to reports, suggesting the option is being taken seriously in Moscow. Trump, while criticizing the terms of the deal as “one-sided” on Thursday, has not indicated what he actually intends to do about the treaty.
“I suspect that Trump simply used a bully tactic [in his conversation with Putin], which is pretty common in business negotiations to put the other side on the defensive and get it to offer a better deal,” said Nikolai Sokov, a senior fellow at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies. “I hope someone explains to him that New START does not limit any feasible U.S. plans for replacement of delivery vehicles and does not limit operations of U.S. strategic forces.”
The Pentagon is pressing ahead with what is expected to be a $1 trillion program over 30 years to modernize the nation’s nuclear deterrent with all-new ICBMS, SLBMs, and strategic bombers. As long as the force count remained within the limits set by New START or any future deal, modernization would not run afoul of arms control. At the administration’s direction, the Defense Department is also preparing its latest Nuclear Posture Review, which would formalize the nation’s nuclear deterrence policy for up to a decade.
Meanwhile, longtime Senate committee general counsel Christopher Ford (now at the National Security Council) is said to be leading a broad administration review of U.S. arms control and national security policies, including treaties in place and what strategies it might pursue going forward. There have been no discussions yet regarding extending New START, much less negotiating a new agreement.
New Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is still establishing his senior-level team in Foggy Bottom, which ultimately would be charged with leading any nuclear talks. The State Department’s top arms control position has been vacant since Thomas Countryman’s resignation in January, and no replacement has been nominated (a situation spread extensively across the federal government).
During his confirmation hearing, Tillerson said he supported New START. But how much influence he would have with Trump remains an open question, as the president so far has leaned on close allies such as adviser Steve Bannon for advice.
There is also no small amount of opposition to New START, and to nuclear arms treaties more broadly, from conservative organizations such as the Heritage Foundation that could have Trump’s ear on federal budgeting and other matters. Heritage has opposed the treaty from early on, with senior policy analyst Michaela Dodge last June saying it has failed to deliver the promised U.S.-Russian strategic stability and did not require Moscow to make significant nuclear cuts relative to the size of its arsenal in 2010. Dodge urged post-Obama leadership in Washington to withdraw from the treaty.
Russia and the United States today hold 93 percent of all nuclear weapons, respectively with 7,000 and 6,800 warheads in total (deployed, stockpiled, or retired), according to the Federation of American Scientists.
Potentially driving Trump toward a new arms control deal would be his stated desire for stronger relations with Russia and the opportunity to save money on the nuclear deterrent to fund his promised buildup of conventional military forces, said Joseph Cirincione, president of the Ploughshares Fund. ”It’s hard to see how you could forge a new path with Russia and not have nuclear be part of the equation. It always has been in the past,” he said in a telephone interview, placing “even odds” on the chances of a new nuclear arms reduction deal.
Nolan and other issue watchers said in interviews before Trump’s latest comments that they could not predict what the president might do when it comes to nuclear weapons, but that scrapping New START would have significant ramifications. The treaty establishes a valuable level of predictability and insight into Russia’s nuclear forces, with 18 on-site visits per year in each country and regular data exchanges. Without those, the threat posed by Russia becomes more opaque – at a time when the Kremlin is also modernizing its nuclear deterrent and budgets are tight at the Pentagon, Nolan said.
“If those plans have to change then you have to fund additional weapons against an uncertain threat,” she said in a telephone interview with NS&D Monitor. “This is not very smart or prudent planning.”
The terms of any future negotiations would themselves have to be negotiated, Sokov said by email. While the United States to date has focused on reducing nuclear-weapon numbers, Russia has wanted talks to also address at least ballistic missile defense and long-range precision conventional weapons, he said. Washington would do well to expand any negotiations to include those topics, as Russia is quickly advancing its own missile defense and hypersonic conventional capabilities, according to the expert: “Thus, it would be in our interest to ensure reasonable limitations and predictability to those.”
Conservatives on Capitol Hill and beyond have taken a different tack, urging the United States to increase its capabilities to counter the growing threat from a refreshed Russian nuclear force. For example, Dodge said NATO should conduct exercises simulating Russian nuclear strikes and that the United States should ignore Russian demands to withdraw its roughly 200 tactical nuclear weapons from NATO bases in Europe.
Sokov and Nolan acknowledged that any future nuclear deal would require resolving the widely held (but not in Moscow) view that Russia has for years been in violation of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. The issue stormed back into view earlier this month when The New York Times reported that two Russian battalions were now armed with a cruise missile that would breach the INF’s prohibition against ground-to-ground missiles with ranges between 500 and 5,500 kilometers. U.S. lawmakers in both houses of Congress quickly introduced legislation that would mandate steps to address the matter, including restricting funding for a New START extension and pursuing additional missile defense resources.
Trump’s own unpredictability is another issue – one that has inspired many analyses of the potential dangers of having his hand on the nuclear button. Prior to the election, the billionaire discussed having countries such as Japan and South Korea develop their own nuclear deterrents rather than relying so heavily on expensive U.S. protections. Just before Christmas, he tweeted that the United States needs a stronger nuclear arsenal, then followed that by reportedly telling MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski that the United States would win any nuclear arms race.
In the immediate aftermath of Trump’s latest comments, the arms control community let loose on the president again – saying the U.S. nuclear arsenal is already top of the pack and denying the claim that the nation has “fallen behind on nuclear weapon capacity.”
“He probably had a discussion about the replacement of the triad and found out it has to be done wholesale and done ASAP,” Sokov said by email late Thursday. “If I needed to make a decision to replace the triad, I’d make the same statement – what else any US president could say? That broad statement does not say anything about the specifics – if I wanted, I could even assume he wants a dyad instead of a triad: it would still be top of the pack.”
Trump actually has an opportunity to make significant nuclear reductions, should he choose to accept it, according to Cirincione. History has shown that Republican commanders-in-chief have been able to make far deeper nuclear cuts than their Democratic peers – with President George H.W. Bush alone cutting 14,000 weapons. Republican lawmakers will support GOP presidents working to negotiate nuclear cuts, as will Democrats. But Republican lawmakers will largely oppose a Democratic president with the same aim, Cirincione said. Only 13 Republican senators voted in favor of ratifying New START.
U.S.-Russian nuclear arms control will be a key topic of discussion at the ExchangeMonitor’s Nuclear Deterrence Summit, happening Feb. 28-March 2 at the Capitol Hilton in Washington, D.C. Speakers on the topic will include Thomas Countryman, former acting undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, and Laura Holgate, former U.S. ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency.
