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I’ve been quiet about the START negotiations, save for the occasional tweet, in large part because it doesn’t make sense to second-guess negotiators, especially before they’ve completed their work. (Buy me a beer, on the other hand …)

But Senator Richard Lugar (R-IN) made some remarks at the recent Strategic Weapons in the 21st Century (SW21) conference that have my attention — and I think they should have yours, too.

At this point, it is no secret that the new treaty is more like a SORT Plus, or if you want to be difficult, START Minus. The Russians went in with a goal of gutting the verification regime and, since that is also accomplished with the expiration of START, the Administration didn’t have too much leverage to stop them.

We know the START mobile missile monitoring regime has been, er, streamlined with the elimination of Portal-Perimeter Continuous Monitoring (PPCM) at Votkinsk. (If you are interested in how the START regime monitored mobile missiles — which comprised an integrated system of obligations — I recommend either Kerry Kartchner’s Negotiating START or Jill Jermano’s and Susan Springer’s Monitoring Road-Mobile Missiles Under START: Lessons from the Gulf War.)

And it is no secret that the last remaining issue is the encryption of telemetry data from missile tests— START prohibited parties from encrypting telemetry as part of the verification regime for throw-weight limits. The Russians want to resume encrypting telemetry, citing the development of US missile defenses and the lack of a limit on throw-weight to verify. (Or, at least, to get comparable data from the US on missile defenses.) If you want to know more, I recommend recent stories by Josh Rogin, Rocket data dispute still unresolved in U.S.-Russia nuke talks and Elaine Grossman, Talks Hit ‘Sweet Spot’ for Landing New START Agreement, U.S. Official Says, or commentary from John Warden and Kingston Rief.

After the Jones/Mullen visit to Moscow and the Obama-Medvedev phone call, it looks like the parties will split the baby, as it were — probably with a limited exchange of telemetry data, if I had to guess. And I hate to guess.

In light of these two issues — monitoring mobile missiles and telemetry — I draw your attention to Senator Lugar’s remarks at the SW21 conference, in which he described himself as “look[ing] forward to a successor to the START treaty” and outlined his thinking on what the Senate might, and might not, consent to ratify.

This is a shot across the bow. Like most Lugar statements, it is precise, civil and free from partisan hyperbole — but that doesn’t diminish the whiff of grapeshot:

Nowhere has the value of strong verification procedures been more clearly demonstrated than the START I Treaty. Whatever is devised to replace it, must be effectively verifiable. START I, together with the Nunn-Lugar program, have served as the means for a dramatically changed relationship with Russia. In fact, recalling the testimony of Ambassador Lehman before the Foreign Relations Committee in 1992 on the START I Treaty, it was clear that a primary goal of the nearly decade-long negotiations on the START I Treaty was to open Soviet society via the treaty. As time has progressed, some have asked whether START I’s “burdensome” verification provisions are necessary given the changed world in which we live. I believe that weakening verification procedures comes with great risks, not merely because the other side may cut corners, but because our relationship with Russia benefits from the mutual confidence and interaction inherent in such procedures.

I have been a strong advocate for extending START I verification procedures. Unfortunately, a choice was made to informally act in the spirit of the treaty after its expiration on December 5, 2009, rather than to extend it by formal agreement. I am hopeful that a successor for START I will be successfully concluded in the coming months and that it will contain strong verification procedures.

The successor to START likely will be considered in the Senate at the same time that we consider the new Nuclear Posture Review and plans for modernization of our nuclear deterrent. START I was submitted at a time when the United States had an active modernization program with specific elements. Today’s stockpile stewardship program lacks this specificity and encompasses many different aspects of the weapons complex.

In 1992, we did not have the record we have today regarding access to Russian sites that produce missiles. We also did not have the telemetric data on Russian missiles provided under START I. Thus, some observers assess the impact of losing START’s verification measures to be minimal. They claim Russia will not field many new missiles in the next ten years and that we have data on all the missiles they are likely to field. However, the rate at which our knowledge erodes is directly related to the rate at which Russia fields new missiles for which we lack data or it modifies existing missiles. Verification of missile capabilities, particularly mobile missiles, depends on both how good our inspection regime is and the extent to which other data provided under the treaty informs the inspection process. Even if inspections are perfect, they will only tell us where a missile is at any given time and the number of warheads it is carrying, not what its capabilities might be.

It may be the case that for the next ten years our existing knowledge, based on what we have learned through the START regime and the Nunn-Lugar program, will provide us with sufficient confidence in making assessments of Russian missile capability. But that confidence will diminish with time. As a matter of national priority, we must maintain an ability to judge with high confidence the capabilities Russia pursues. If we cannot do so, then any attempt to negotiate additional treaties with Russia could founder, to say nothing of efforts for a world free of nuclear weapons.

Verification issues will play an important role in Senate consideration of a new treaty to replace START I. Then CIA Director Bob Gates stated before the Foreign Relations Committee in hearings on START in 1992, “the verifiability of this treaty has always been seen, by supporters and opponents alike, as the key to the Senate consent process.” Such comments equally apply to the treaty that will replace START I.

I suspect Lugar’s statement is a signal of possible trouble for the START Follow-on in the Senate — the President is asking Republicans to hand him a foreign policy victory.

The Administration is going to have to do better than arguing that the verification regime is better than nothing, that the gaps in verification don’t matter or that they’ll fix it in the next treaty. That’s going to mean committing to spend more money on US verification capabilities — note that in another portion of his speech, Lugar proposed “a new verification initiative that devotes substantially more resources to the problem” — and explaining that the Administration set, and stuck to, red-lines that result in an effectively verifiable treaty.

Comment [8]

When the real life disappoints, as it is wont to do, human beings often take comfort in fiction, imagining an alternate reality where our problems aren’t so daunting and where we aren’t so fallible. We dream, in short, of a better world. Sometimes, those dreams can rekindle our sense of hope or inspire us as to how we might make the real world a little more ideal.

With the demise of the START Treaty, and prospects for a START Follow-On beginning to dim, it is a comfort that the parallel world of simulations is rather rosier. A few days ago, I mentioned that CNS makes very effective use of simulations to educate students.

The James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies recently completed a student simulation that resulted in the so-called Strategic Mutual Arms Reduction Treaty (SMART).

You can read a summary of the exercise, as well as the SMART Treaty Text, Memorandum of Understandings, and Joint Statements and additional MOUs.

Not only did the students manage the come up with a decent name for the Treaty — who can complain about mutual? — but the virtual Rose Gottemoeller had a rather easier time working out a deal with her Russian counterpart, who accepted continuation of monitoring at Votkinsk and a prohibition on encrypting telemetry after a developmental period for each missile.

I wrote to her, “Your Russian participants must have been teddy bears. How’d you get them to agree to that?” She replied:

Vodka and arm wrestling.

Someone give that kid a job.

Comment [11]

Ok, this is just downright weird.

Ileana Ros-Lehtinen rounds up the usual crowd to co-sponsor an utterly meaningless “Sense of the House” on the START Treaty. (Utterly meaningless since the Senate ratifies treaties. I don’t even want to hear about implementing legislation.)

The resolution is largely about China, and how that might impact the START Treaty, which is a very odd thing to say given the disparity between US and Chinese nuclear forces. Josh Rogin sort of snickers at the resolution:

The GOP’s own resolution actually states that China has about 40 nuclear-tipped missiles that could reach the continental United States today, and could only amass about 100 over the next 15 years.

That’s well below the levels being discussed between the U.S. and Russia — between 500 and 1,100 delivery vehicles each and between 1,500 and 1,675 deployed warheads. That has prompted some to wonder whether U.S. nuclear calculations should really be set with China in mind, considering that country’s relatively small nuclear arsenal.

“It’s silly really and undercuts their arguments for us to beef up our arsenal or do whatever it is they want to do with respect to nuclear weapons,” said one source working on the issue.

Max Bergman was more succint: “North Dakota could deter China.”

He means, of course, that China still has a long way to catch up to the 91st Missile Wing at Minot Air Force Base, one of three Minuteman wings in the United States. (Each wing now has 150 Minuteman III missiles. So Long, Deuce)

It is worth, however, considering the resolution on its merits, such as they are. The resolution boils down to two “asks” that are pretty standard GOP talking points (1) The Obama Administration should not sign a follow-on to START until the Nuclear Posture Review is completed and (2) The Obama Administration should not sign any agreement limiting missile defense.

Finish The Nuclear Posture Review

The resolution “urges the President to refrain from negotiating or entering into any follow-on agreement to START I until the Nuclear Posture Review is completed.”

DoD actually checked this box, as one of the awkwardly dated August 6 fact sheets on the NPR explains in some detail:

- The NPR made it an early priority to accomplish the analysis necessary to support the START Follow-on treaty negotiations, which President Obama and President Medvedev directed should be completed by December 2009, when START expires.

- The interagency NPR team, including the Department of Defense, the Department of State, the Department of Energy, and the US Strategic Command and other combatant commands analyzed and provided detailed consideration of a range of solutions to maintain strategic stability with operationally deployed strategic nuclear force levels that would represent significant reductions in nuclear weapons, presuming Russia will be similarly constrained.

- After rigorous analysis, the NPR team determined that maintaining a nuclear triad with a significantly reduced number of operationally deployed strategic nuclear weapons (ODSNW) and accountable strategic delivery vehicles (SDV) would enhance our national security objectives and provide extended deterrence to allies and friends.

- These findings were reviewed by military and civilian leadership and vetted through the interagency. START Follow-on treaty negotiating positions were then subsequently identified and approved at the Cabinet level. Although the specific guidance to our negotiating team remains classified, the results to date of the bilateral negotiations are reflected in the Joint Understanding resulting from the Presidential Summit.

The “cabinet level” decision regarding START Follow-on numbers, which was detailed by Elaine Grossman, occurred during the second week of June at a Principals Committee meeting.

As I understand it, the analytic method was this: Using existing nuclear weapons planning guidance in NSPD-14, how low could we go? One commenter called it NSPD-14 friendly, which I think is about right.

This is a harmless bit of grandstanding — the sort of grandstanding that both parties use to delay an unwelcome decision. Hell, this is why Nuclear Posture Reviews exist — to delay. A Republican Congress created the 2001 Nuclear Posture Review to delay implementing START II cuts until after Clinton left office. A Democratic Congress created the 2009 Nuclear Posture Review to delay a decision on the Reliable Replacement Warhead until after George W. Bush left office.

We certainly don’t do Nuclear Posture Reviews because they are useful exercises. (They always suck, no matter how capable and hard-working everyone involved might be.) A quick read of Janne Nolan’s An Elusive Consensus would tell you that.

Do Not Agree to Any Limitations On Missile Defense

Let’s see, this is a great idea except for two small things.

One, the START Follow-on won’t contain any limitations on missile defenses. And, two, the missile defense system even under the Bush Administration was sized so as “not be a threat to China.”

Other than that, this is a totally germane and sensible thing to include in a Sense of Congress.

Other totally germane and sensible ideas in this spirit include: A Sense of the House that a START follow-on shouldn’t provide for taxpayer-funded abortions. And that no illegal immigrants may be permitted to handle nuclear weapons. Are there any other tired chestnuts I’ve forgotten? Ah yes, inspectors may not bring a domestic partner to Votkinsk.

Still, it is nice to be reminded that Republicans support missile defense. Sometimes I forget.

Comment [12]

Nicholas Kralev has an interesting story on the impending closure of the Votkinsk Portal Monitoring Facility.

The key grafs confirm that rumor that the Bush Administration made the concession to Russian on ending monitoring at Votkinsk in November 2008:

Congressional officials said they were told by the Obama administration that it “got stuck” with a deal made by the Bush administration to close the monitoring facility at Votkinsk. They also said the Bush administration did not want to extend START at all.

Paula A. DeSutter, assistant secretary of state for verification, compliance and implementation in the Bush administration, said she sent the Russians a post-START proposal in November 2008, but it was not a negotiated agreement.

She confirmed that it did not include continuing the Votkinsk mission, but attributed that to the Bush team’s decision “not to limit delivery vehicles,” so it did not need to count every missile Russia produced. “We didn’t need the entire verification regime from START,” she said.

DeSutter suggests the Administration could have just “added” monitoring back in if it wanted, which just floors me.

I had somehow missed that the Bush Administration tabled a proposal to the Russians in November 2008. They had to know, as everyone else did, that Obama was going to win. But they went ahead anyway. David Gollust from VOA reported it on November 6, 2008;

The two powers have been holding general discussions for some time on how to replace their 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, or START, which expires at the end of 2009.

Rood said the previously-undisclosed U.S. proposal, conveyed to Moscow late last month, represents a shift in U.S. thinking by focusing on limiting nuclear warheads, rather than missile launchers, as in the START treaty.

“We now have put forward a legally-binding treaty. We think that the focus on nuclear warheads is appropriate in this treaty and that is what is reflected,” Rood said. “The START treaty itself did not set limits on nuclear warheads, it set limits on delivery systems, and then a formula was used to attribute a certain number of nuclear warheads to delivery systems. But the treaty we have put forward has, at the center of its focus, limitation on strategic nuclear warheads.”

Some of the verification hypocrites (ie we only need verification for treaties signed by Democratic Presidents) have been arguing that verification is only necessary now that the Obama Administration is considering significant reductions in the number of nuclear warheads. It would be nice to know the Rood warhead levels just to see how low DeSutter et al were prepared to go on trust alone.

***

On a related note, a Japanese reporter with a Japanese television station is trying to write a story on Votkinsk. If you are interested in being interviewed, please drop me at line at:

armscontrolwonk [at] gmail.com

Comment [4]

Posted without comment.

Comment

Credit: Otto Stokes

Within the community, we have been going back and forth on whether the United States is still present at Russia’s Votkinsk Machine Building Plant.

As far as I can tell, the US still staffs the Votkinsk Portal Monitoring Facility, which basically allows the United States to count mobile missiles leaving the Votkinsk facility. (The purpose of monitoring production is to provide some confidence that the other side isn’t attempting to break out of the treaty by building missiles that are, by design, very hard to find.)

The most recent news reference I can find is in 2006, when the Yekaterinaburg Counsel-General made a visit. (Wow, talk about a hardship post.) Votkinsk was included under both INF and START treaties. It seems likely we stopped perimeter monitoring when INF inspection regime ended in 2001. Please, dear readers, feel free to fill in the details.

None of this should obscure the really important point: There is a Facebook Group for the Votkinsk Portal Monitoring Facility.

Oh. Hell. Yes.

God help us if we ever manage to stand up JDEC. All humor aside, the site has great images. And, best all, there is an image of the portal gates:

Credit: Otto Stokes

The caption reads: Portal Gates, I didn’t take this one, but was told it was from a long time ago and was approved, note whats missing (photoshop from their side I assume).

I am not sure what the Russians may have ps’d out — which reminds me how much I loved The Commissar Vanishes. You can, however, see the several structures behind the portal gates in Google Earth. I am pretty sure this is the site; it is amazing how clearly you can see the three structures that hold the two gates in the satellite photograph.

Update | 12:26 November 13, 2008 We have a lot of discussion of about whether perimeter monitoring is still going on in the comments.

Comment [15]

Now, that was what I was talking about.

Dick Lugar, one of the old bulls of the Senate, has introduced a bill, S.2727, to extend, on a reciprocal basis, the inspections under START for another six months. (More precisely, it extends the necessary privileges and immunities to Russian arms inspection teams.)

The bill itself is good idea because the New START treaty isn’t going to be ratified by December 5, 2009. (The Senate took more than nine months to ratify SORT, and that might as well have been a blank piece of paper.) The bill puts the President in a position to cover the gap between the expiration of START on December 5 and the ratification of a new agreement sometime in the spring.

What is really welcome, however, is Lugar’s floor speech, in which he makes a serious argument about the value of a START Follow-on:

So far, most of the public discussion surrounding a potential successor agreement has focused on further reductions in strategic nuclear weapons. Scant attention has been paid to the verification arrangements for such a follow-on agreement. Informally, we understand that we will yet again be relying on START’s verification regime in the new agreement. For me, this will be the key determinant in assessing whether a follow-on agreement that comes before the Foreign Relations Committee and the Senate furthers the national interest. For the moment, we know only the outlines of such an agreement.

I happen to think that is about right — this isn’t a “deep” reductions treaty, though the modest cuts under discussion shouldn’t be particularly controversial.

A couple of weeks ago, I lamented what I saw as a lack of “seriousness” on the part of Republicans when it came to engaging on the issue of START replacement. Well, this speech goes a long way toward remedying that situation.

As I understand it, the main sticking points on verification have been Russian efforts to seek relief from provisions that provide the United States with monitoring of Russia’s primary missile production facility at Votkinsk and prohibit encryption of missile telemetry. Basically because Russia is building new missiles (Topol-M and Bulava) while the United States is not, the monitoring measures burden only Russia.

• Votkinsk Machine Building Plant is where Russia builds its Topol-M (SS-27) and, for now, Bulava (SS-26) missiles. The United States has the right to portal perimeter monitoring at the plant under START but Russian inspectors have no comparable locale to visit in the United States. (The United States terminated Peacekeeper production, which eliminated Russia’s right to monitor the then-Thiokol Strategic Operations facility in Promontory, Utah.) Moscow wants out of this requirement, since it allows the United States to monitor all of Russia’s new production missiles.

• Telemetry is a little different. Russia is testing new missiles like the MIRV’d Topol and Bulava, while the United States conducts comparatively boring tests of stockpiled missiles, such as the occasional Minuteman III Glory Trip. The Russian view is shared by some in the Missile Defense Agency, which uses the surplus Minuteman II missiles in missile defense tests — now largely as targets (or at least the rockets configured as the Minotaur II, which I think is treaty-limited). I gather some US officials worry that Russia could use the unencrypted Minuteman II data from missile defense tests to infer things about the capabilities of the interceptors. Apparently, that’s not enough to entice the Russians, who’ve always hated open telemetry as far as I can tell.

At some level, these measures may not be essential to monitoring Russian treaty compliance, but they are welcome forms of transparency. It would be unfortunate to lose them.

The Russians also grouse about the increasing use of so-called Re-entry Vehicle On Site Inspection (RVOSI) to verify something resembling actual warhead loadings (as opposed to verifying numerical attributions that may or may not correspond to actual loadings). This, I suspect, is really a back-door way to address so-called upload capacity of US strategic forces. (While the Russians reduced their forces by eliminating missiles, the United States largely removed warheads resulting in a significant numerical advantage for the United States if we wanted to return to Cold War loadings.) This is also the place where the two parties would establish a foundation for more intrusive warhead monitoring in a subsequent agreement, much as the way the INF pioneered on-site inspection that is so-central to START.

I find the Russian position on Votkinsk and telemetry rather short-sighted. There is, or ought to be, a dictum that, in arms control, the shoe ends up on the other foot. You live to regret the concessions you achieve. After all, it was the United States that spent the 1980’s complaining about Russian advantages in missile “throw-weight” — the same argument Russia makes today about US upload capacity.

The second thing about Lugar’s speech is that he articulated the concept of “effective verification” that asks, even if Moscow cheats, are we better off at the margin?

Some skeptics have pointed out that Russia may not be in total compliance with its obligations under START. Others have expressed opposition to the START Treaty on the basis that no arms control agreement is 100-percent verifiable. But such concerns fail to appreciate how much information is provided through the exchange of data mandated by the Treaty, on-site inspections, and national technical means. Our experiences over many years have proven the effectiveness of the Treaty’s verification provisions and served to build a basis for confidence between the two countries when doubts arose. The bottom line is that the United States is far safer as a result of those 600 START inspections than we would be without them.

Testifying before the Foreign Relations Committee on the INF Treaty in 1988, Paul Nitze provided the definition of “effective verification.” He stated:

“What do we mean by effective verification? We mean that we want to be sure that, if the other side moves beyond the limits of the Treaty in any militarily significant way, we would be able to detect such a violation in time to respond effectively and thereby deny the other side the benefit of the violation.”

In a similar vein, Secretary of Defense Bob Gates testified in 1992, when he was Director of Central Intelligence, that the START Treaty was effectively verifiable and that the data it provides would give us the ability to detect militarily-significant cheating.

The Senate has repeatedly expressed confidence in the START I verification procedures. It approved the START I Treaty in 1992, by a vote of 93-6. In 1996, it approved the START II Treaty, which relied on the START I verification regime, by a vote of 87-4. Likewise, the Moscow Treaty was approved by a vote of 95-0.

Comment [1]

Last week, the Senate Republican Policy Committee released this execrable document, START: Do Time Extension Instead of a Bad Treaty, on the New START treaty.

Today, I finagled a copy of a memo that Senator Kyl’s staff has distrubuted in advance of a briefing that Assistant Secretary Rose Gottemoeller will give to the Senate National Security Working Group tomorrow at 9 am.

The memo, October 8, 2009 briefing with START negotiating team, is not very encouraging.

Taken together, these two documents are disheartening, in that they depict an opposition to the President that isn’t serious.

So, this is sort of a long post on why the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) is important to US national security, but it is also in some sense an elegy to the dwindling number of moderate Republicans who played such an important role in setting US nuclear weapons and arms control policy.

Arms Control Is A Favor We Do Ourselves, Not The Russians

I want to start by addressing the juvenile tone of the Senate Republican Policy Committee document, which repeatedly implies the new START treaty is some kind of favor to Moscow.

The document repeatedly asks whether Russia has “earned” further reductions or whether its behavior “warrants” a new treaty.

This is crazy. The Administration seeks a New START agreement for the same reason that a McCain Administration would have: because it is in our interest, for at least two reasons.

1. A new START is important to drive the Russians toward a more stabilizing strategic posture that does not depend heavily on MIRV’ed ICBMs, and

2. A new START is essential to our ability to monitor Russian nuclear weapons programs.

I want to talk about each of these in turn, but indulge me for a bit on the subject of strategic stability.

Strategic Stability

A lot of people were shocked to hear Secretary Gates explain (in an unclassified setting) that one of Moscow’s main concerns was that “ground-based interceptors in Poland could be fitted with nuclear weapons and become an offensive weapon like a Pershing and a weapon for which they would have virtually no warning time.”

Yes, I know that sounds very War Games. But the Russians have always been paranoid about decapitation strikes against their creaky command and control structure, from the War Scare of 1983, through the 1995 Black Brant fiasco, right up to today.

Understand, this is the strategic culture that gave the world “Perimeter” — the so-called “Doomsday Machine” or “Dead Hand” detailed in David Hoffman’s book of the same name and in a recent Wired article by Nick Thompson. Perimeter, as Thompson writes, was largely a measure to compensate for inadequate Soviet command-and-control capabilities.

The fact that Moscow still worries today about command performance should give us pause. It is not in our interest for the Russians — and their giant nuclear arsenal — to operate on the basis of paranoid fantasies about the United States.

Arms control is one way to address that. So let’s be clear, we do this because it is in our interest.

Russia’s Declining Strategic Forces

The Senate Republican Policy Committee asks what is intended to be a rhetorical question: “Why pay for what is free?” Russia’s strategic forces are in decline, so why agree to cut ours?

Over the next decade, in the absence of any arms control treaty or agreement, “the number of delivery vehicles in Russia’s nuclear arsenal will continue to decline sharply,” perhaps to fewer than 500 delivery vehicles.55 This is because “Russian strategic systems have not been designed for long service lives,” and Russia is unable to replace aging delivery systems at the pace at which they are retired.56 There is certainly no reason for the United States to pay for something that is going to happen with or without an arms control treaty. In this respect, there is no reason for the United States to sacrifice U.S. nuclear force structure, or other
unrelated national defense matters, such as missile defense or prompt global strike, “as a price to be paid for an agreement that requires nothing of the Russians beyond discarding the aged systems they plan to eliminate in any event.”57

This is fantastically misleading!

What is declining in Russia is the number of delivery vehicles — missiles, bombers and the like — not the number of warheads.

The Republican Senate Policy Committee attempts to obscure this distinction by stating that “Russia needs this agreement far more than the U.S. does. It is desperately trying to lock the U.S. into lower nuclear levels, not the other way around.”

“Nuclear levels” is a meaningless phrase intended to deceive, not elucidate — Russia wants lower numbers of delivery vehicles but more warheads. The United States seeks the opposite: lower levels of warheads — much, much lower than even in the Joint Understanding — but many more delivery vehicles.

Senator Kyl’s letter acknowledges this, noting that “the Russians have been testing a new multiple-warhead version of the Topol-M ballistic missile” that would be prohibited under START.

Russia is deploying the MIRV’ed Topol because Moscow wants to keep its warhead numbers constant, even as the number of delivery vehicles plummets.

In other words, Russia is heading toward MIRVing the hell out of its strategic forces to keep its warhead numbers up around 1700. This is probably the only thing I agree with in Senator Kyl’s letter — I am also disturbed by the deployment of the MIRV’ed Topol. I don’t worry that the missile itself disturbs the strategic balance, but I do worry about what the MIRV’ed Topol deployment says about trends in future Russian strategic forces.

Recall the discussion of nuclear decapitation and strategic stability. It is not in our interest for Russian leaders to be confused about the possibility of a decapitating U.S. first strike — unless the thought of a half-drunk Boris Yeltsin staring at the Russian “football” doesn’t bother you. Now, imagine that a significant fraction of Russia’s nuclear forces are deployed on a small number of relatively vulnerable land-based ballistic missiles. What impact do you think that will have on the time pressure faced by a future Russian leader?

A very senior Bush Administration official, one who was deeply involved with negotiating the original START, once said to me: “One way to look at the arms control endeavor is as a bipartisan effort over the past thirty-years or so to drive the Soviets and now the Russians to a more stable strategic posture.”

That really stuck with me, because I think it is dead-on. Indeed, Kerry Kartchner’s history of the START negotiations, Negotiating START: Strategic Arms Reduction Talks and the Quest for Strategic Stability, makes this point eloquently:

The U.S. approach to START was, above all, a quest for strategic stability, the Holy Grail of the nuclear era. In fact, early Reagan statements made it clear that no agreement would be better than an arms control accord that failed to enhance strategic stability. This pont underscored the view that arms control was a means to an end, and certainly not the only means …

This is why, for instance, the George H. W. Bush Administration negotiated a START II agreement with Russia that banned MIRV’ed ICBMs.

Obviously, I’d like to get back to that MIRV ban. (MIRVs and the Moscow Treaty, December 12, 2004). But that’s not going to happen (STRATCOM Hearts MIRV, January 30, 2006, STRATCOM Still Hearts MIRVs, November 29, 2007).

In the interim the best we can do is try to make sure the New START agreement strikes a better balance between the number of operationally deployed warheads and the number of strategic delivery vehicles than what we are likely to have absent an agreement, while preserving the essential monitoring and verification provisions.

Why Not Just Extend START for 5 Years?

Let me begin by saying that I favored START extension throughout the twilight of Bush Administration.

I tried puns (START Talking March 7, 2007), the obvious (Extend START, April 20, 2007), and the over-the-top (Frickin’ Extend START Already, June 21, 2007) before slipping into despair (START: Dead Treaty Walking, September 22, 2008).

But the Bush Administration, or at least the parts that mattered, wasn’t interested because of the paperwork burden imposed by the verification measures. (Sadly, that is not hyperbole.)

So, believe you me, when Senate Republicans suddenly say “We should just extend the treaty,” well that comes at it mighty high.

The reality is that “extending START” is, as options go, a poison pill. If Rose Gottemoeller shows up in Geneva and says “scrap the joint understanding, let’s just extend START,” the Russians are going to take their MIRV’ed Topol ICBMs and go home.

We had a chance to extend the START Treaty — which I favored — but that opportunity is now past.

What about Verification?

Finally, Senator Kyl’s memo states that a draft New START “was not accompanied by the important verification protocol.” The implication is that the Administration has no intention of negotiating verification measures, which I sincerely doubt.

Again, given that the Bush Administration negotiated the Moscow Treaty without a verification protocol, this is somewhat churlish.

But the fact is that maintaining the verification and monitoring provisions in START is an important interest. We know, thanks to Jonathan Landay’s excellent reporting, that the Intelligence Community issued NIE on Russian strategic forces that expressed doubt about our ability to monitor Russian compliance with the Moscow Treaty without the measures in the START agreement. (See: IC Can’t Verify Moscow Treaty, December 22, 2004).

So, I guess this is the second area in which Senator Kyl and I agree — the verification provisions will be important. I am a little surprised to see this, because the Senate Republican Policy Committee was rather blase about the demise of START noting “If the verification regime is extended, both Russia and the United States benefit similarly; whereas if it lapses, there is probably equal detriment.”

That’s asinine.

Let me ask you: Do you think it is easier to make reliable open source estimates of US or Russian strategic forces? To say that the lapse of the verification provision would be to the equal detriment of both sides is one of the more foolish things I’ve seen in a long time.

Please Be Serious

This is really a plea for Senate Republicans to play a constructive, engaged role, rather than being arm-chair negotiators. (Hey, that’s my job!)

I happen to think that the START process under Reagan and Bush greatly improved on SALT, not the least for the conceptual approach taken by self-consciously “conservative” supporters of arms control that emphasized strategic stability over conviviality. In retrospect, I think the START I and START II treaties were impressive pieces of work that reflected both Democratic and Republican priorities.

I suppose it only seems that way with hindsight. But, right now, I am feeling nostalgia for the good old days.

Comment [14]

The Russians have made a lot of noise about the possibility that advanced conventional weapons in the US arsenal place their nuclear forces at risk and, as a corollary, that certain capabilities should be included in future arms control negotiations.

Which raises an interesting question — do they? Can the proposed Conventional Trident Modification (CTM) program — the program to put a conventional warhead on a D5 submarine-launched ballistic missile — or its likely follow-ons, bust Russian silos?

I should start by noting that CTM, as proposed by the Navy had little or no capability against hard and deeply buried targets.

However, one of the little noticed aspect of the National Academies report on U.S. Conventional Prompt Global Strike is that the Committee invented a hard-target kill capability for the Conventional Trident Modification (CTM) program — a “committee-proposed additional CPGS option” that would have have the space for an “earth-penetrator munition weighing on the order of 1,000 lb” that could “attack small, hardened buried targets…” They called this little devil the CTM-2.

This surely has to be a first in the history of the National Academies.

So, could CTM-2 bust Russian silos?

Keeping in mind that this is a paper-weapon, as it turns out the Committee on Conventional Prompt Global Strike was not the first set of smarty-pants to think about arming an SLBM with a conventional penetrator. As the slide atop this paper demonstrates, Lockheed Martin’s Nancy F. Swinford and Dean A. Kudlick were were doing similar work in the mid-1990s.

Dennis Gormley found the Swinford and Kudlick paper, and then used it to assess whether a hard-target CTM (or similar capability) could hold at risk Russian silos, in his new paper, The Path to Deep Nuclear Reductions: Dealing with American Conventional Superiority:

Tomahawk cruise missiles are surely accurate enough to hit on or very near to a Russian missile silo, but their warhead carries only 450kg of either blast fragmentation or combined-effects submunitions. The former is a mere pinprick vis-à-vis hardened missile silos; the latter is only relevant against soft targets. Indeed, even a Trident missile armed with a conventional penetrator would require Herculean accuracy and absolutely perfect targeting conditions to have any chance whatsoever of threatening silo-based missiles.76

76 Russian concrete silo covers are dome-shaped and approximately 20 feet in diameter and 5 feet high in the center. This means that they have a radius of curvature of about 12.5 feet. Employing the targeting requirement of approaching the target at less than 2 degrees from the vertical, the penetrator would have to impact less than 5 inches from the absolute center of the silo cover, or within a 10-inch diameter circle whose center is at the apex of the dome. My thanks to Dr. Gregory DeSantis, a former U.S. Department of Defense scientist, for making these calculations based on the penetrator design discussed in Nancy F. Swinford and Dean A. Kudlick, “A Hard and Deeply Buried Target Defeat Concept”, op. cit.

As you can see, Dennis is very, very skeptical that a conventional weapon will achieve the accuracy necessary for busting silos.

But perhaps this is the sort of thing we might usefully crowd-source.

The Swinford and Kudlick paper — “A Hard and Deepl Buried Target Defeat Concept”, Lockheed Martin Missiles & Space, Sunnyvale, CA 94088, Defense Technical Information Center document no. 19961213 060, January 1996, — is online and unbelievable. Take a look.

And kudos to Dennis for digging out a hard and deeply buried bit of paper!

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Holy cow.

When I read Pavel Podvig’s excellent “The Window of Vulnerability That Wasn’t: Soviet Military Buildup in the 1970s,” I was struck at his sourcing:

The main source of these data is the archival collection of Vitalii Kataev at the Hoover Institution Archive at Stanford University: Vitalii Leonidovich Kataev, papers, 10 boxes. The collection contains copies of official documents and notes taken at the time that describe various aspects of a number of Soviet strategic programs. Kataev was a senior adviser to the Secretary for the Defense Industry of the Central Committee of the Communist Party from 1974 to 1990.

I had no idea, however, how extensive that collection, held at the Hoover Institution, really was. (Here is a link to a description.

This morning, I attended a rountable at the Brookings Institution with David Hoffman — former Moscow Bureau chief for the Washington Post. Kataev had deposited half of his archive at Hoover; Hoffman arranged for the other half to make its way out of the Russian Federation and to sunny Palo Alto.

Hoffman has also just written The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and its Dangerous Legacy, which draws extensively from the archive. I haven’t read it yet, but his talk was filled with one revelation after another for me — including a full explanation of Polyus Skif!

The book doesn’t have a fulsome description of the archive, but Hoffman described the Kataev archive in the (virtual) pages of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists this way:

The notes from this meeting are just one small sample of documents in a large cache of materials now coming to light about the Soviet military-industrial complex, arms control, and weapons decisions. The materials were assembled, and in some cases written by, Vitaly Katayev, one of Zaikov’s two deputies. Katayev attended the meeting that day, made the notes, and preserved the agenda, a brief post-meeting memo, and the attendance sheet.

An aviation and rocket designer by training, Katayev had been transferred in 1974 from the missile complex in Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine, to the Central Committee staff in Moscow. In this position, he had a front-row seat on many of the most important debates of the late 1970s and the 1980s.

His archive may be as significant as the ones revealed in earlier years by Vasili Mitrokhin (in KGB, Comrade Kryuchkov’s Instructions, and Next Stop Execution and Oleg Gordievsky (in The Mitrokhin Archive and The World Was Going Our Way). The Katayev documents aren’t comprehensive or systematic—and in some cases they’re fragmentary or in draft form—but they offer new insights into the private deliberations in Moscow that have long been obscured by secrecy and propaganda. For nearly two decades, Katayev kept handwritten journals, entering meticulous, highly technical data in them about warheads, missiles, arms control negotiations, the military-industrial complex, and other matters. He also collected thousands of pages of documents and later wrote several papers that summed up what he had seen.

Update | 1:38 pm October 1, 2009 I somehow overlooked that the National Security Archive found and released a declassified study that made extensive use of the Kataev documents and other sources. See: William Burr and Svetlana Savranska, Previously Classified Interviews with Former Soviet Officials Reveal U.S. Strategic Intelligence Failure Over Decade, September 11, 2009.

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