Mapping a National Security Failure: Ratification of the New START Treaty

Claims like this were significantly buttressed by former Secretaries of State Kissinger, Shultz, Baker, Lawrence Eagleburger and Colin Powell in December, 2010, in the pages of the Washington Post. Though they declined to comment directly on the timing of a Senate vote, their view that time was of the essence was unmistakable:

We believe there are compelling reasons Republicans should support ratification. First, the agreement emphasizes verification, providing a valuable window into Russia’s nuclear arsenal. Since the original START expired last December, Russia has not been required to provide notifications about changes in its strategic nuclear arsenal, and the United States has been unable to conduct on-site inspections. Each day, America’s understanding of Russia’s arsenal has been degraded, and resources have been diverted from national security tasks to try to fill the gaps. Our military planners increasingly lack the best possible insight into Russia’s activity with its strategic nuclear arsenal, making it more difficult to carry out their nuclear deterrent mission.[74]

Two questions arose from New START skeptics in response to these kinds of statements on verification: 1) did New START actually provide an effective verification regime?; and 2) was ratification of New START really the only means for closing the “verification gap”?

In arms control, the leverage to be gained from cheating increases with the reduction in weapons that either side is allowed to retain. Verification therefore becomes critical to ensuring that such cheating is not taking place.[75] This is all the more so in the context of arms control between the United States and Russia, given Russia’s history of cheating on such agreements.[76]

Yet, in the view of several analysts, New START’s verification regime was inferior to that of START I. As the New START Working Group pointed out:

Of the [START I verification provisions], only two survived relatively intact in New START: 1) the reliance on national technical means of verifications; and 2) the requirement for a compliance commission. Continuous monitoring of mobile ICBM production has been eliminated. Data exchanges and notifications have been substantially reduced. Cooperative measures required by START are completely gone.

Which changes matter most?  If the New START verification regime is compared with that of START I, the most significant of the changes are the elimination of verification measures for mobile ICBMs and the weakening of telemetry exchange provisions. Under New START, telemetry exchanges amount to nothing more than a symbolic gesture.[77]

Notably, Senator Christopher “Kit” Bond (R-Missouri), then Vice-Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, took to the Senate floor on 22 November 2010 to echo similar concerns: “[There is] no doubt in my mind that the United States cannot reliably verify the treaty’s 1,550 limit on deployed warheads.”[78]

The premise that the “verification gap” caused by START I’s expiration could only be remedied by ratification of New START was also called into question by arms control experts. Robert Joseph, former Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security, and Eric Edelman, for Under Secretary of Defense for Policy—two of only three New START skeptics to testify publicly before the Senate during the course of deliberations, out of a total of twenty-six witnesses (some of whom testified multiple times)—noted that President Obama could simply have sought an extension of START I in order to maintain verification mechanisms, rather than setting an “arbitrary deadline” for New START.[79]

Former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton and Paula DeSutter, former Assistant Secretary of State for Verification, Compliance, and Implementation (and Rose Gottoemoeller’s immediate predecessor at the State Department) later expanded on this, writing that the verification gap was a “red herring, a problem of Mr. Obama’s own making.”[80] Bolton and DeSutter continued:

Initially, the Obama administration’s negotiators confidently predicted they would have START I’s successor negotiated in ample time to avoid a verification gap. When it became clear they would fail, their line changed. Within days of Mr. Lugar’s proposed legislation [which would have allowed START I inspections to continue as a follow-on agreement was negotiated], The Washington Post reported that ‘senior U.S. officials’ would create a ‘bridge mechanism’ between the expiring and prospective treaties ‘to allow for the continuation of inspections, exchanges of data and notification about the testing and movement of weapons and other changes.’  A week later, a White House spokesman said ‘we have a bridging agreement that we also are working with the Russians. I fully suspect we’ll be able to get that in place by Dec. 5 [2009].’ On Dec. 5, however, START I expired without any provision for ongoing verification. New START was not submitted to the Senate until May 13 [2010].

Thus, it was the Obama administration that failed to meet its own deadline for achieving a new arms-control treaty with Russia, the Obama administration that decided not to extend START I and the Obama administration that did not obtain a verification bridging agreement.[81]

The arguments against using the “verification gap” as justification for pushing the New START treaty through a lame-duck session of the Senate would ultimately fail to persuade Senate leadership to take up the process anew in 2011. The treaty was brought up for a final vote in December 2010, despite significant flaws in the verification argument, and despite appeals from several then-serving Senators, a bipartisan group of fifteen former Senators[82] and most of the newly-elected Senators from the November 2010 elections, the latter of which asserted: “Out of respect for our states’ voters, we believe it would be improper for the Senate to consider the New START treaty or any other treaty in a lame duck session prior to January 3, 2011.”[83]  As the group of fifteen former Senators noted in their letter to Majority Leader Reid and Minority Leader McConnell, denying the newly-elected Senators the opportunity to lend their advice and consent to New START was especially problematic, given that the treaty would be implemented—and the impacts of it incurred—on their watch.[84] 

Missile Defense

Perhaps no other New START issue generated more controversy than that of the treaty’s implications for U.S. missile defense. Though the text of the treaty itself did in fact articulate limits on missile defense, those limits received comparatively little attention in the broader New START discourse. It was the Obama administration’s decision not to provide badly needed clarification to the Senate on the question of missile defense—by refusing to share with it the full New START negotiating record, despite repeated requests—that would become a major point of contention throughout the debate, significantly shaping the course of ratification in Washington and Moscow.

Even before the text of New START was ever agreed upon or released, there were high-level rumblings in both the United States and Russia as to the treaty’s linkage to missile defense. Russian Prime Minister Vladmir Putin stated in December, 2009 that the primary obstacle to the successful conclusion of a follow-on agreement to START I was U.S. missile defense plans:

If we don’t develop a missile defense system, a danger arises for us that with an umbrella protecting our partners from offensive weapons, they will feel completely safe…The balance will be disrupted, and then they will do whatever they want, and aggressiveness will immediately arise both in real politics and economics.[85]

According to reporting by The New York Times, though Presidents Obama and Medvedev had apparently reached an initial consensus on the terms of the treaty, the Russian delegation reintroduced the issue of missile defense later in the negotiations, insisting that New START contain a commitment not to change U.S. missile defense plans further.[86] President Medvedev would follow up with a demand that a joint statement limiting missile defense in this way be issued, with President Obama refusing to issue a joint statement but agreeing to separate unilateral, non-binding statements outlining the respective American and Russian positions on missile defense.[87]

By then, still before the release of New START’s text, some Senators were already sending a signal of concern to the administration regarding New START and missile defense. On 17 February 2010, Senators Kyl, McCain and Lieberman sent a letter to then-National Security Advisor Gen. James Jones, stating:

As you know section 1251 of the National Defense Authorization Act of FY 2010 (P.L. 111-84) expresses the sense of the Congress that ‘the follow-on to the START Treaty not include any limitations on the ballistic missile defense systems” of the United States. We are concerned that at this late stage of negotiations the Russians continue to hold out for such limitations…

…We ask for your assurance that the Administration will not agree to any such provisions, even a unilateral Russian declaration, in the treaty text or otherwise that could limit U.S. missile defenses in any way. This obviously includes any side agreements or understandings with the Russian Federation as to U.S. missile defenses.[88]

For its part, the Obama administration insisted throughout the course of the ratification process that New START did not restrict U.S. missile defense. In March 2010, the White House released a fact sheet on New START containing the statement: “The Treaty does not contain any constraints on testing, development or deployment of current or planned U.S. missile defense programs or current or planned United States long-range conventional strike capabilities.”[89]

However, despite the administration’s arguments to the contrary, the text of New START and the statements that followed would validate the missile defense concerns cited by Senators Kyl, McCain and Lieberman their February, 2010 letter.