1-23-2021
President Biden has just days to save the last
major treaty limiting deployment of nuclear weapons.
Over the last four years, Donald Trump did everything possible to help the world unravel. Sometimes that meant withdrawing from organizations like the World Health Organization, or dropping out of the Paris agreement.
It also meant flat-out breaking trade agreements or even the six-party nuclear agreement on Iran. Trump has also moved to simply allow existing treaties to expire, including major arms agreements that have (had) existed for decades.
Now there’s just one major treaty remaining that places limits on the nuclear stockpiles of the two nations that control most of the world’s nuclear weapons:
The START Treaty between the United States and Russia. As The Washington Post reports, that treaty is set to expire on Feb 5.
Now President Biden has just days to secure an extension on that agreement, after Trump made absolutely no preparations to deal with that looming deadline.
Trump’s failure to make any opening moves on a renewed START Treaty leaves the Biden administration in a tough spot. On the one hand, there’s a strong desire to punish Russia for their none-too-subtle cyber intrusions and attempts to interfere with the election.
Vladimir Putin has also been repeatedly bragging about a new generation of missiles that are tougher to stop and more precise in their targeting.
All of this means that what the U.S. really wants is a treaty that cuts Russia’s nuclear capacity.
That’s just part of why Victoria Nuland, slated to take the number three slot at the State Department, has argued that the United States should seek only a brief extension of the START Treaty while using sanctions and other actions to pressure Moscow into further reductions in their nuclear stockpile.
The current version of the START Treaty gives each nation the right to keep up to 1,550 strategic nuclear warheads ready to fire. Both nations have larger stockpiles of weapons (6,350 total warheads for Russia, 5,800 in the United States),
but thanks to START, most of them are not ready to fire on a moment’s notice. START is really about controlling the systems that are used to deploy and deliver nuclear weapons.
On the other hand, on Feb. 6, Russia—and the U.S.—will be effectively free to start cranking out new bombs, new land-based missiles, and new submarine missiles without limit.
It would also end the START protocol, which currently gives both nations a robust system of inspections and access to facilities that make it very difficult for either side to line up a set of weapons unseen.
Considering both the number of weapons each side already controls, and the instability that Trump
(and Putin) have instigated over the last four years, sending
the world into Cold War II seems ridiculously risky.
Getting cooperation on a treaty extension may
take compromise on every side. Secretary of state nominee Antony Blinken is strongly supportive of additional sanctions against Russia, but those sanctions are unlikely to be
deployed in the midst of last-minute nuclear negotiations.
Of course, there is one thing that has already happened in 2021 that greatly lowered the threat of nuclear war. It happened on Wednesday.
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