Nuclear Security & Deterrence Vol. 19 No. 12
Visit Archives | Return to Issue
PDF
Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor
Article 4 of 18
March 20, 2015

Panel: Russia’s Aggressive Behavior Threatens World Order, Destroys Bilateral Trust

By Todd Jacobson

Brian Bradley
NS&D Monitor
3/20/2015

Russia’s annexation of Crimea, coupled with the Kremlin’s withdrawal from longstanding bilateral nuclear cooperation efforts and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s recent nuclear saber-rattling, has severed trust between Russia and the U.S. and continues to threaten international stability, former Sen. Sam Nunn (D-Ga.) said this week during a nuclear security panel discussion in Washington. “The rhetoric that’s being used now by Russia about nuclear weapons is, in my view, not only irresponsible, but very dangerous, because it sends signals,” Nunn, who co-chairs the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI), told attendees of an evening discussion at Georgetown University.

A March 15 Associated Press article reported that Putin said his country was ready to bring its nuclear weapons into a state of alert during last year’s unrest in Crimea. Two days later, the English-language version of Sputnik News released an article citing an anonymous Russian Defense Ministry source who said the country’s “snap” military exercises—set to run until March 21—will include bomber and Iskander ballistic missile deployments to Kaliningrad. The news comes more than two months after Russian officials canceled a program which involved in-person U.S. help in securing the country’s highly enriched uranium and plutonium stockpiles. That bilateral effort was rooted in the U.S.-sponsored Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction Program of the 1990s, which saw Belarus and the two countries with the third and fourth biggest nuclear stockpiles—Ukraine and Kazakhstan—give all their nuclear weapons to Russia.

Will Rep. Fortenberry Meet with Russian Ambassador?

Nunn called for the United States to initiate private discussions with Moscow to revive nuclear security cooperation, and Rep. Jeff Fortenberry (R-Neb.) during the panel toted his idea of meeting with Russian Amb. Sergey Kislyak in that spirit. “This is so critical, that it should try to transcend the current tensions, and some form of public communication, perhaps with the Russian ambassador, might be in good order,” Fortenberry said. Although nuclear security cooperation is waning, the two countries continue to trade compliance inspectors for the New START Treaty, which dictates the drawdown of strategic deployed nuclear warheads on both sides to 1,550 by 2018.

Russia’s Potential Adversaries Could Seek U.S. Help

The Kremlin’s aggressive behavior could breed uncertainty about future approaches to defense among countries in Russia’s region, according to former Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.). “It leaves other countries who may be in harm’s way to try to think, ‘What would we do? Maybe go to the United States, try to get anti-nuclear protection? And if that really doesn’t work, is there any stopper?’” he said. “If you are determined to push on and retake territory, claiming this was always yours to begin with and so forth.”

Are U.S. and Russia Still a Good Model for Arms Control?

The Department of Defense’s Cooperative Threat Reduction Program set the precedent whereby the international community looked to the United States and Russia as models for effective arms control, said Des Browne, NTI Vice Chair and former U.K. Secretary of State for Defence. The two countries’ stockpiles currently compose 90 percent of the world’s nuclear weapons. “We’ve seen the number of nuclear weapons in the world go down from about 70,000 at the height of the Cold War to about 16 or 17,000 now,” Browne said. “I think most people would agree it’s far too many, but it’s a significant reduction. And we’ve lost all of that, but some remnants of it, in a comparatively short period of time.”

Browne said most nations consider terrorism as the biggest nuclear threat, and questioned the logic behind countries spending more on nuclear modernization than stockpile security. He said: “It just strikes me as odd that every country in the world has at the top of its nuclear security strategy its number-one threat as nuclear terrorism, and yet you can move from that to spending literally trillions of dollars across the world on strategic nuclear weapons, which have no relevance at all to any aspect of the number-one strategic threat.”

 

 

Comments are closed.

Partner Content
Social Feed

NEW: Via public records request, I’ve been able to confirm reporting today that a warrant has been issued for DOE deputy asst. secretary of spent fuel and waste disposition Sam Brinton for another luggage theft, this time at Las Vegas’s Harry Reid airport. (cc: @EMPublications)

DOE spent fuel lead Brinton accused of second luggage theft.



by @BenjaminSWeiss, confirming today's reports with warrant from Las Vegas Metro PD.

Waste has been Emplaced! 🚮

We have finally begun emplacing defense-related transuranic (TRU) waste in Panel 8 of #WIPP.

Read more about the waste emplacement here: https://wipp.energy.gov/wipp_news_20221123-2.asp

Load More