Eight good reasons not to ratify START II

BY: Sven F. Kraemer
The Washington Times, December 20, 1995

On Pearl Harbor Day, Dec. 7, 1995, Senate leaders yielded to White House pressure and
agreed to bring the proposed START II Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty to a ratification vote.
But the stakes are high and a Senate vote should not be automatic. If potential future Pearl
Harbors are to be avoided, START II deserves each Senator’s exceptionally careful study and
advice, not consent.

The White House wants rapid rubber-stamp ratification at a time when American soldiers are
going off to dubious battle in Bosnia. Meanwhile, Russia’s Duma elections are bringing more
militant, anti-reform and anti-Western leaders to power, many with communist and criminal ties.
These events should make senators more, not less, concerned about understanding START’s
grave risks and more opposed to appeasing Russia’s hard-liners. It should make them more
determined to safeguard the American people against new threats emerging in Russia and
elsewhere around the globe.

START II is fatally flawed in its provisions and in its linkages to other high-risk strategic
gambles. Ratification would entrust U.S. security to an unsound and unenforceable agreement
whose risks have been fatally magnified by developments in the three years since it was first
presented to the Senate in January 1993.

START II is coming up for a vote without having had any critical scrutiny in the Senate. Most
senators have simply ignored it, and its handlers promote illusions that the treaty “eliminates”
Russia’s multiple-warhead and heavy missile threats, that it accurately reflects Reagan
administration START policies, and that if Bush administration officials liked it three years ago, it
must be considered sound even now. No committee has conducted a bottom-up review of the
treaty or issued a report reflecting a critical understanding of its fateful assumptions, provisions
and strategic linkages. Only once was any expert critical of the treaty permitted to testify before
any committee.

A blinders-off approach to START II ratification is surely necessary and would expose several
awful truths about this false treaty:

• START II ratification would reward Russia’s hard-liners, not promote effective arms control
  or a sound U.S.-Russian strategic relationship. Russian military hard-liners, now further
  strengthened by the Duma elections, have resisted democratic civilian control while modernizing
  Russia’s strategic forces and engaging in brutal battles in Chechnya, Tajikistan and elsewhere.
  And while Russia’s military leaders press for more START waivers, more money and more
  sympathy from Washington, general staff officers briefing the Duma’s Security Committee in July
  1995, described START II as like “manna” from heaven because it permits Russia’s vast current
  strategic modernization programs, that START’s warhead “downloading” provisions can be
  reversed through uploading, and that expected U.S. compliance would drastically reduce
  potential U.S. nuclear capabilities and would block advanced U.S. anti-missile defenses.
• START II ratification would not “zero out” or “eliminate” Russia’s multiple-warhead (MIRV)
  missiles, a key claim of its handlers, but would legitimize a treaty marked by major loopholes in
  this and other major provisions. START II does not require the physical elimination of a single
  one of Russia’s 30,000 nuclear warheads (12,000 strategic). While permitting 3,000 to 3,500
  warheads on deployed Russian systems even after seven years, it ignores thousands of additional
  weapons as not “accountable” under the treaty. Excepting missiles designated as “heavy,” even
  the missiles considered “START-accountable” are merely “reduced,” “non-deployed,”
  “converted,” “retired” or “downloaded,” not eliminated. Russia’s multiple-warhead (MIRV)
  missiles, for example, can be “de-MIRVed” by “downloading” warheads, but since no destruction
  is required of the warheads or missiles, the de-MIRVing is reversible through uploading.
• START II ratification would legitimize a major threat from Russia’s “heavy” missiles. While
  START II requires destruction of 308 SS-18 “heavy” missiles deployed in Russia and Kazakhstan
  by 2003, it permits retention of all of the 3,800 warheads now on such missiles, it permits
  production of new SS-18 missiles until 2003, and it permits Russia to “convert,” (i.e. modify,
  rather than destroy) and retain 90 SS-18 launch silos, leaving a heavy missile threat for at least
  seven years. The converted silos will serve Russia’s new Topol-M missile, an advanced
  SS-25-type follow-on, which Russia is now testing and which will also be a potent threat.
• START II ratification would reward extensive Russian strategic modernization programs that
  are unwarranted by any conceivable Russian defense needs and completely unmatched by the
  United States. START II’s elastic “arms control” provisions support Russia’s assertive new
  post-Cold War military doctrine and modernization goals announced in November 1993, but
  ignored by the White House ever since. The doctrine emphasizes Russia’s determination to be a
  modern nuclear superpower, calls for extensive strategic modernization and abandons Russia’s
  “no-first use” nuclear policy.

Russia’s strategic programs reportedly include: development of two new land-based missiles
(one a hard-to-find mobile system, of which the United States has none), a new submarine-based
strategic missile, a new strategic ballistic missile submarine and construction of deep underground
war-fighting bunkers. In addition, Russia conducts strategic exercises and stepped-up intelligence
against us and calls for the incorporation of the former Soviet republics into a Moscow-dominated
“Commonwealth.” If NATO expands, Russian military leaders threaten production of
intermediate-range nuclear missiles prohibited by the 1987 INF treaty and the redeployment of
tactical nuclear weapons they had removed in 1991 to reciprocate U.S. actions.

• START II ratification would reward continued Russian non-compliance with the Nunn-Lugar
  “Cooperative Threat Reduction” agreements. The General Accounting Office and independent
  observers report considerable delay, waste and corruption and indicate that the Russian
  government is violating six restrictions established by Congress in appropriating over $ 1.7 billion
  dollars in assistance under Nunn-Lugar. U.S. auditors are blocked from checking on the details
  of the act’s dollar disbursements and promised dismantlements. Russia is reportedly failing to
  dismantle weapons of mass destruction, modernizing and replacing weapons beyond defensive
  requirements, reusing fissionable materials and components for weapons, blocking U.S.
  verification of nuclear and biological weapons facilities, violating arms control agreements, and, as
  detailed in a recent Amnesty International report, also failing to observe internationally recognized
  human rights.
• START II ratification would reward Russia’s arms treaty violations and thereby encourage
  future arms control cheating by Russia and other countries. The White House wants early
  ratification of START II and other proposed high-risk arms control treaties notwithstanding a
  lack of effective verification and enforceability and Russia’s violations of existing agreements and
  the Nunn-Lugar Act requirements. Russia has been reported in noncompliance with START I
  (and START II provisions), the Biological Weapons Convention, the Chemical Weapons
  Convention, the Conventional Forces in Europe Agreement, the Vienna Confidence Building
  Measures Agreement, the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Agreement and the Anti-Ballistic Missile
  Treaty. In disregarding such violations, in Russia, North Korea and elsewhere, the administration
  promotes unsound international norms as precedents for future arms control.
• START II ratification would reward Mr. Clinton’s recent START space-launcher agreement
  and increase Russian proliferation threats. In a fatal amendment to both START I and START II,
  the White House on Sept. 28 agreed to let Russia sell, reassemble and maintain stages of its
  START-accountable SS-24 and SS-25 intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) as
  “space-launchers” anywhere in the world, including Cuba, Libya, Iran etc. Since a missile that can
  launch a peaceful object into space can also launch a warhead to intercontinental distances,
  START ratification would bless a step increasing Russia’s proliferation threat and permitting
  forward-basing of Russian ICBMs.
• START II ratification would block the advanced strategic defense systems required to
  protect the American people against arms-control cheating and global proliferation threats.
  Russia links its compliance with START II — and START I — to U.S. adherence to the obsolete
  Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, which Moscow broke in 1983 and which blocks advanced
  anti-missile defenses. This Cold War relic locks the American people and the entire globe into the
  destabilizing and ethically Strangelovian doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD). In a
  new agreement signed with Russia in November 1995, the White House added to START’s
  poison-pill linkage with the ABM Treaty by dumbing down and restricting even “theater” defense
  missiles like the ground-based THAAD and the Upper Tier Aegis system.

It should be clear, especially in light of trends in Russia, that the Senate should reject the
START II treaty and its deadly associated strategic gambles. Only a new START treaty with
mandatory Russian dismantlements, inspections and non-compliance sanctions, combined with the
safeguard of accelerated deployment of advanced U.S. strategic anti-missile defenses, can
provide real strategic arms control, security and global strategic stability. Space-based systems
would be by far the most effective. Together with a new START, nothing else could as capably
protect the American people and the entire globe from future strategic Pearl Harbors by
“providing for the common defense” against Russian START cheating, against a potential
strategic threat from China and against the growing threat of the global proliferation of weapons
of mass destruction.

Sven F. Kraemer was director of arms control for the National Security Council from 1981 to
1987.