In an ideal world a binding arms control treaty governing numbers and types of deployed and stored nuclear weapons, proclaiming, and enforcing strictly agreed to mutual verification procedures would be a wonderful thing. But we do not live in that world nor is it likely to appear anytime soon. The New START Treaty expired on February 5 and there is not even a negotiation in sight let alone a viable treaty. Predictably the arms control community blames the Administration for this. Angela Kane, the former UN High Representative for Disarmament Affairs and Under-Secretary-General for Management in the United Nations, wrote that, civil society urged the Trump administration to accept Vladimir Putin’s proposal to continue observing the numerical limits of that treaty after expiration.
That may be true in Europe and among the arms control lobby here. But they assuredly do not speak for whatever she means by the term civil society here and in Europe. Indeed, treaty extension is a bad idea, and the Administration rightly refused Putin’s offer. Washington got it right. Putin’s offer was a typical Russian ruse. Notably it said nothing about verification, and it came from a government that has systematically broken every arms control treaty that it has ever signed. It is an axion of successful arms control that unless both sides can verify a treaty’s observance that treaty is worthless.
In the meantime Russia has used chemical weapons in Ukraine, provided them to the Assad government, conducted biological warfare against opponents at home and abroad – most recently – Alexei Navalny – and probably against U.S. diplomats abroad, the notorious Havana Syndrome being a case in point. Russia violated the Budapest accords on Ukrainian nuclear disarmament by seizing Crimea in 2014 and then invading again in 2022, actions that violated eight solemn international treaties.
As Dr. Blank wrote in 2023, Russia’s post-2014 aggression does not merely target Ukraine. Instead, it deliberately assaults the very idea of international order, particularly that of a European security order. Indeed, Putin, Secretary of the Security Council of Russia Nikolai Patrushev and Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov proclaim the collective West is at war with Russia. Russian nationalist political scientist Sergei Karaganov openly says that “We are at war with the West. The European security order is illegitimate.”
As part of its assault on international order Russia violated the CTBT (Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty) by conducting nuclear weapons tests in 2019. At the same time, Russia’s Oreshnik missile, a prototype of which appeared approximately 15 years ago, was developed in violation of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. Furthermore, the Oreshnik prototype, the Rubezh missile, was developed in violation of the New START Treaty, since, given its range, it can be classified as an intercontinental ballistic missile.
Russia is also seeking to deploy a nuclear weapon in space in violation of previous treaties. Apart from all these treaty violations for which no penalty was exacted, Moscow regularly threatens Ukraine, Europe, and the U.S. with nuclear strikes for supporting Ukraine. The latest such threat against. Estonia occurred on February 22. Finally by moving nuclear weapons to Belarus, funding North Korean nuclear programs, and transferring missile, satellite, and nuclear submarine technology to Pyongyang Moscow has violated the Non-Proliferation treaty and a host of UN resolutions.
Neither is Russia alone, China’s breathtaking and utterly unconstrained nuclear buildup represents a growing threat to both the U.S. and Russia not to mention India, Japan, Australia, and virtually every other state in Asia. China now has a nuclear triad but because no treaty constrains it, it is also apparently developing a new generation of low-yield “mini-nukes” to give it the future option of limited nuclear warfare. It violated the CTBT in 2020 despite being a signatory to the treaty. Thus, it too cannot be counted on to uphold a treaty without strict verification and enforcement mechanisms.
It is hard to imagine either American or European governments let alone civil society, however it is defined, resuming an unverifiable treaty with Russia and/or China under such conditions of intolerable disadvantage, a phrase coined in 1999 by members of the Clinton Administration. As Thomas Schelling and Morton Halperin wrote in 1960-61, “the aims of arms control and the aims of a national military strategy should be substantially the same.” And a more recent commentary observes, “This principle established national security as the dominant goal of arms control, not the reduction of arms per se.”
Unfortunately, Ms. Kane and the arms control community have evidently forgotten this crucial distinction. Arms control is not and cannot be a moral crusade for unilateral disarmament or global zero. Experience shows that Moscow negotiates only when it fears a U.S. technology buildup or when one, as is now beginning, takes place. Neither will China be moved by moralism and what amounts to American self-deterrence. But it might be moved by a genuine American buildup to parry its threats. Otherwise, nuclear proliferation will inevitably become a more realistic option as China pushed in a secret 1982 Politburo meeting. Indeed, at the first sign of the fraying of our alliances in Asia and Europe those countries’ nuclearization instantly returns to their agendas as is now happening. Regardless of claims made on behalf of a nebulous civil society, Western populations expect their governments to defend them against threats and history shows us that only when we build do our enemies negotiate.
Stephen Blank is a senior fellow at Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI).
Peter Huessy is a senior fellow at the National Institute for Deterrence Studies.
This article was originally published by RealClearDefense and made available via RealClearWire.
