Russian Gambit on Buying Missile Defense at Cost of Nuclear Deterrence is a Non-STARTer

(Washington, D.C.): The Kremlin yesterday launched a new trial balloon with regard to missile defense. The next U.S. President — whomever he may be — would be well-advised to tell Moscow “Thanks, but no thanks.” And the lame duck incumbent should do nothing in the remaining weeks of his term to compromise his successor’s ability to do just that.

According to a report circulated by Reuters on 13 November, “General Vladimir Yakovlev, commander of the Strategic Rocket Forces, told Russian reporters it would be very difficult to persuade Washington not to violate the 1972 Anti- Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty that limits defenses against nuclear attack.”

On the same day, Russia’s Interfax news agency reported:

“As is known, the current lull in the ABM Treaty issue is caused by the change of the American administration and is likely to end soon,” Yakovlev said. “The main threat posed by altering the ABM accords is that it will radically change the state of affairs in the sphere of strategic offensive weapons.”

Yakovlev has proposed that U.S. plans for ABM Treaty modification be counterbalanced with “an invariable aggregate index of strategic armaments to be made up of nuclear attack and missile defense means.”

As a counterbalance to American plans to modify the [ABM] treaty’s references to anti-missile defenses, Yakovlev proposed to introduce an unchanging general indicator of strategic weapons which would include anti-missile defense means as well as means of nuclear attack. “A country that wishes to increase one of the components will have to cut the other,” Yakovlev said.

“In that case, a country that wishes to enlarge one of the components will have to cut the other. We can seek the equaling of our ground-based intercontinental ballistic missiles with similar missiles of the United States based on submarines. In that case, they would be exempt from START II, which does not allow intercontinental ballistic missiles with multiple warheads with individually targeted elements,” Yakovlev said. (Emphasis added.)

What is Wrong With This Picture?

There are several obvious problems with such an initiative. They include:

• This proposal is clearly intended to breathe new life into a bilateral arms control process that has grown increasingly irrelevant in the post-Cold War world. As Gov. Bush made clear during the course of the campaign, the Cold War is over; equally pass should be the idea that the United States and Russia must maintain some sort of balance of terror within the construct of negotiated agreements.
• Were the Yakovlev proposal to be embraced by the United States, it would afford the Kremlin a wholly undesirable mechanism for interfering with and otherwise influencing U.S. missile defense programs. For starters, the Russians will surely try to lock us into a “first phase NMD” along the lines of the single, ground-based site President Clinton ultimately chose not to start building in Alaska.

  American anti-missile systems have suffered for far too long from such meddling on the part of the Kremlin and its agents of influence in the United States. It is time to build the best, most flexible and, if possible, the least costly missile defense the Nation can devise. This will almost certainly involve the use of sea-based assets utilizing the Navy’s AEGIS fleet air defense infrastructure — an option the Russians are determined to foreclose.

• By making the United States pay for its right to deploy missile defenses with cuts in strategic nuclear forces — if Moscow has its way, at levels below 1500 warheads — this country would be driven into an imprudent, if not reckless, minimum deterrence posture. Given that the United States will likely require in the future sufficient forces (both in terms of quantity and modern, flexible weapons types) to deter myriad potential adversaries, such a posture would be most ill- advised.
• Considerable care is in order in with regard to reductions to levels of nuclear warheads so low that China and possibly other nations may aspire to secure “superpower status” by approximating them. This is hardly a formula for strategic stability.

  By the same token, Russia’s evident interest in maintaining multiple-warhead land-based missiles threatens to make a mockery of the START II agreement — whose principal selling point was that it would de-MIRV the former Soviet ICBM force — while creating new, and strategically significant, cheating opportunities for future agreements ostensibly promising still lower levels of nuclear weaponry.

• Since the Russians have not acknowledged — and the U.S. government has not confirmed — that the former Soviet Union has long deployed a territorial defense against ballistic missile attack, the Yakovlev gambit would allow Moscow to penalize the United States for any decision to field defensive systems without having to pay any premium for its own, massive anti- missile programs. Even if it were desirable to maintain some kind of symmetry between the two countries’ strategic capabilities, this inherent inequity would preclude such an outcome.

The Bottom Line

There is an understandable temptation on the part of proponents of U.S. missile defenses to embrace General Yakovlev’s largely undefined suggestion since it implicitly, if not explicitly, confirms what we have long maintained: Russia’s adamant insistence on the inviolability and immutability of the ABM Treaty was a negotiating ploy, subject to change whenever it suited the Kremlin’s purposes.

The General’s proposal seems especially geared toward seducing Gov. Bush’s camp, given the emphasis it placed during the campaign on its determination to deploy effective missile defenses as soon as possible while reducing to the maximum extent practicable the number of offensive weapons in the U.S. arsenal — including possibly to levels below those being contemplated for START III (i.e., 2,000- 2,500 weapons).

Extreme caution should be exercised, however, in light not only of the foregoing considerations but one other fact: Russian President Vladimir Putin chose — on the same day Yakovlev launched his trial balloon — to declare, according to the Washington Post, that “Russia is ready to consider an even lower limit than the 1,500 nuclear warheads on each side that Moscow now proposes could be reached by 2008. At the same time, he reiterated Russia’s opposition to a U.S. proposal to build a national missile defense system–a decision that President Clinton has left to his successor.”

The truth is the Russians remain adamantly opposed to any American missile defense and will use, if allowed to do so, whatever techniques are available — diplomatic or political, carrots or sticks — to try to confuse, delude or otherwise preclude the next U.S. President from deploying any effective anti- missile shield. They must not be allowed to succeed in this gambit.