The Arms-Control Dinosaurs Are Back. Why invite Russia to veto the nuclear progress we've been making on our own?

The Arms-Control Dinosaurs Are Back. By Marc A Thiessen
Why invite Russia to veto the nuclear progress we've been making on our own?
WSJ, May 19, 2009

When John Bolton served in the State Department during the Bush administration, he often walked the halls of Foggy Bottom wearing his trademark dinosaur ties -- a self-deprecating nod to those who thought his political views somewhat Jurassic. Today other dinosaurs have replaced him. The aging arms controllers who once haggled with Soviet officials are staging a comeback in the Obama administration.

This week in Moscow they'll pick up where they left off nearly two decades ago, sitting across the table from their Russian counterparts negotiating a renewal of the 1991 U.S.-Soviet Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (Start). One of the U.S. negotiators, Assistant Secretary of State Rose Gottemoeller, refers to herself as a "Sputnik baby." She told the Washington Post after initial talks in New York earlier this month: "We've all been looking around and chuckling and saying 'We're all over 50.'"

President Barack Obama's goal of "a world without nuclear weapons" notwithstanding, the State Department is reportedly scrambling to staff its arms-control bureau because so many arms-control experts have retired and there's no one coming up in the ranks to replace them. Apparently not many young policy wonks are aware that cutting nuclear deals with Moscow is again the fast track to a high-flying diplomatic career.

The Obama revival of arms control comes at an odd moment. The past eight years have seen the fewest arms-control negotiations in a generation and some of the deepest nuclear weapons reductions in history. Thanks to the work of the Bush administration, the U.S. nuclear stockpile is now one-quarter the size it was at the end of the Cold War -- the lowest level since the Eisenhower administration. When George W. Bush took office, the U.S. had more than 6,000 operationally deployed strategic nuclear warheads. Today, that number has been reduced to less than 2,200. The U.S. had originally planned to reach this milestone on Dec. 31, 2012, but instead met its goal this February.

How did the U.S. achieve such dramatic reductions so quickly? Answer: By abandoning traditional arms control. When Mr. Bush took office, he decided not to engage in lengthy, adversarial negotiations with Russia in which both sides kept thousands of weapons they did not need as bargaining chips. He did not establish standing negotiating teams in Geneva with armies of arms-control experts doing battle over every colon and comma. If he had done so, the two sides would probably still be negotiating today.

Instead, Mr. Bush simply announced his intention to reduce the U.S.'s operationally deployed strategic nuclear warheads by some two-thirds and invited Russia to do the same. President Vladimir Putin accepted his offer. These unilateral reductions were then codified in the 2002 Moscow Treaty, a three-page pact that took just six months to negotiate. By contrast, the Start treaty signed by President George H.W. Bush and Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev -- and now being revived by the Obama team -- is 700-pages long and took nine years to negotiate.

Even as he enacted massive reductions in nuclear weapons, George W. Bush took other actions to reduce nuclear dangers. His administration launched the Global Threat Reduction Initiative, which secured more than 600 vulnerable nuclear sites around the world and helped convert 57 nuclear reactors in 32 countries from highly-enriched uranium to low-enriched uranium, removing enough weapons-grade material from countries around the world for more than 40 nuclear bombs.

With G-8 leaders, Mr. Bush launched the Global Partnership Against the Spread of Weapons and Materials of Mass Destruction -- a $20 billion international effort to secure and dispose of nuclear and fissile materials and help former weapons scientists find new lines of work. The U.S. and Russia launched the Global Initiative to Combat Nuclear Terrorism, a coalition of 75 nations that is working to stop the illicit spread of nuclear materials. The U.S. and Russia also launched the Bratislava Initiative, which has secured nearly 150 Russian sites containing nuclear warheads and hundreds of metric tons of weapons-quality material.

Despite this record of achievement, the arms controllers see the Bush era as a dark age from which they must rescue the world. They are intent on reviving the antiquated and adversarial approach to arms reductions. As serious negotiations begin, Russia will use these negotiations on arms reductions as leverage to get the U.S. to give up its planned deployment of ballistic missile defenses in Poland and the Czech Republic. Unlike Ronald Reagan at Reykjavik, it is not clear that Mr. Obama would walk away from a deal to preserve these vital defenses.

In addition to a new Start treaty, the Obama administration also reportedly plans to press the Senate to approve the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), a fatally flawed agreement that was rejected by the Senate in 1999 because it would undermine reliability of our nuclear stockpile. Instead of pressing the Senate to act on the CTBT, the administration should be calling on Congress to restore the funding it eliminated last year for the Reliable Replacement Warhead program, which would allow us to develop new warheads without the need for nuclear testing and thus ensure the reliability of America's nuclear deterrent.

Mr. Obama will visit Moscow in July where he and President Dmitry Medvedev will discuss progress on their stated goal to "move beyond Cold War mentalities and chart a fresh start in relations." Bringing back Cold War-era arms-control negotiations is a strange way to do so. In the 21st century, arms-control agreements are as antiquated as cave drawings. We no longer need pieces of parchment and armies of arms-control aficionados to achieve deep reductions in nuclear weapons. This fact is lost on the Sputnik babies now inhabiting the State Department.

Mr. Thiessen served as chief speechwriter to President George W. Bush and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. In 2002, he traveled to Russia with Mr. Rumsfeld for the negotiations of the Moscow Treaty.