An SS-18 dismantled under START I.

Jonathan Landay of Knight-Ridder reports that the intelligence community cannot verify the terms of the Moscow Treaty.

The article is fascinating because of the revelations about how the Bush Administration approached the issue of verification and what that says about, for example, Stephen Rademaker’s recent claim that the Moscow Treaty was “the deepest reduction ever mandated by a strategic arms control treaty.”

First, a two facts:

  • The Moscow Treaty limits the number of operationally deployed strategic nuclear warheads to 1,700-2,200 on December 31, 2012– the same day the treaty expires. There is no schedule for reductions.
  • The Moscow Treaty contains no verification provisions. Russian strategic forces are largely monitored through the provisions of the START I Treaty, which expires in 2009. (The intelligence community concluded that, without START verification procedures, it could not verify Russian compliance with the Moscow Treaty with a high degree of certainty.)

How, then, did the intelligence community intend to confirm that Russia was moving toward, and then compliant with, the terms of the treaty on December 31, 2012? Ah, that’s the interesting part:

The assessment, which reflected the consensus of 15 civilian and military intelligence agencies, concluded that Russia’s precarious finances would force it to slash to about 1,500 the number of nuclear warheads deployed in bombers, submarine-launched missiles and intercontinental ballistic missiles.

But the assessment said there could be circumstances in which Russia could deploy without detection by the United States a few hundred more warheads than the 2,200 allowed by SORT.

In other words, Russian forces were declining as defense spending failed to replace aging systems. The Moscow Treaty didn’t mandate anything, so much as ratified the status quo IC predictions in 2001.

The point is not to suggest that the the deployment of a few hundred additional warheads would change the strategic balance; they would not. Rather, the point is that the Moscow Treaty wasn’t a reduction and didn’t alter the configuration of U.S.-Russian nuclear forces which remain, as then-Governor Bush said, on “high-alert, hair-trigger status—another dangerous vestige of Cold War confrontation.”

ACW recently noted that some on the Bush Administration are worried about recent changes in Moscow’s foreign and defense policies and are beginning to regret the amount trust placed in the Moscow Treaty. Perhaps this concern accounts for Bush’s recent call for more access to Russian nuclear sites, although a senior administration official told Landay on condition of anonymity that Bush was referring to efforts to secure nuclear materials and wasn’t changing his position on the lack of verification measures.

I too am worried about changes in Russia’s nuclear policies—though for a very different reason than the old Cold Warriors in the Bush Administration. We both worry that Russia may cheat on the agreement, deploying larger numbers of forces for a variety of military contingencies. We differ in that the old Cold Warriors worry about cheating because they believe it will give Moscow an intrinsic advantage. I think that advantage is largely illusory, but worry that larger, more ready Russian forces will be matched with our own, creating a pair of organizational nightmares that may be more prone to accidents and incidents.