Biden’s New START Extension is a Gift to Russia and China

John Rossomando February 1, 2021
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Originally published by The National Interest

Editor’s note: Update: Russian government authorities affirmed after the article was published by The National Interest that its Avanguard hypersonic missile system will be covered under the terms of the New START Treaty.

Both Russia and China cheered Biden’s announcement.

Russia and China will benefit from President Joe Biden’s decision to unconditionally extend the 2010 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) for five years. It marks a departure from the Trump administration’s effort to halt their nuclear modernization programs.

Both Russia and China cheered Biden’s announcement. The treaty expires on February 1. President Biden spoke Tuesday with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Both parties agreed to complete the five-year extension of the treaty by February 5 during the call.

Extending START without any sort of follow-up plan to compel the Chinese and Russians to halt the modernization of their nuclear weapons programs makes the world a more dangerous place.

President Biden’s instinct to put his head in the sand and deny that a nuclear arms race exists is reckless. Pretending that an arms race doesn’t already exist doesn’t make it any less so.

New Russian nuclear weapons systems such as the R-28 ICBM, dubbed the “Satan 2” by NATO, which can carry up to ten large nuclear warheads or sixteen smaller ones, or mount twenty-four hypersonic glide vehicles will not be barred under Biden’s policy. It also boasts the ability to evade U.S. missile defenses.

The Heritage Foundation notes that such capabilities make it difficult to detect cheating by the Russians on treaty limitations. The same goes for Russian nuclear-tipped cruise missiles such as the 3M-14 Kalibr that can be fired on U.S. cities from Russian submarines parked approximately 1,200 miles offshore.

START limits both nations to 1,500 deployed warheads apiece, but it does not prevent the Russians from modernizing their nuclear arsenal. Nor does it cover Russia’s battlefield nuclear weapons such as the short-range Iskander missile that threaten America’s NATO allies such as Poland and the Baltics. Warsaw is well within range of the Russian missiles currently based in Russia’s Kaliningrad enclave.

A Congressional Research Service report from a year ago estimated that Russia has 1,830 tactical nuclear weapons in its arsenal. It also deployed missiles such as the 9M729 missile, which the Trump administration determined in 2018 violated the now invalidated 1987 Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty.

The two presidents also agreed during this week’s call to “explore strategic stability discussions on a range of arms control and emerging security issues.”

President Biden has never addressed the problem of Chinese or Russian nuclear modernization. His team said it would weigh cuts of the Trump administration’s $1 trillion American nuclear modernization program in December. On the campaign trail, Biden said he wants to reduce U.S. reliance on nuclear weapons for defense. Biden supported abandoning the no-first-use doctrine on nuclear weapons as vice president.

In contrast, Putin signed an executive order last June that presumes that Russia would use nuclear weapons as a first course of action.

The Trump administration wanted to place these short-range nuclear weapons under treaty limitations and also rope in China, which is expected to double its nuclear arsenal of 200-400 nuclear weapons. The Global Times, a news outlet closely linked with the Chinese Communist Party, suggested that China should expand its nuclear arsenal to 1,000 nuclear weapons in “a relatively short time” as a deterrent against the United States.

China has assembled 2,200 mid- and long-range missiles, which START kept Russia from fielding, without constraints. China publicly says it has a no-first-use policy; however, Defense Department analysts dispute this. China continues to work apace at building a nuclear triad of land-based missiles, submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs), and bombers.

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John Rossomando
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