Russia

U.S. and Russian negotiators, with a push from Presidents Barack Obama and Dmitry Medvedev, have concluded the most important strategic nuclear arms reduction treaty in nearly two decades. The New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START), which will be signed in Prague April 8, puts Washington and Moscow back on the path of verifiable reductions of their still-bloated Cold War nuclear arsenals and renewed cooperation on other vital nuclear security priorities.

The treaty would limit each side to no more than 700 deployed strategic nuclear delivery vehicles and 1,550 deployed strategic warheads, which is 30 percent below the existing warhead limit. Just as importantly, New START would replace the 1991 START verification regime, which expired last December, with a more effective and up-to-date system to monitor compliance for the 10-year life of the new pact. (Continue)

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's visit to Moscow provides a critical opportunity to tie up the few loose ends on the negotiations for the New START treaty between the United States and Russia.

Contradicting earlier statements by a Russian official, Moscow’s new military doctrine, approved by President Dmitry Medvedev Feb. 5, does not elevate the role of nuclear weapons in the country’s national security policy. According to the document, nuclear weapons are reserved for “preventing the occurrence of nuclear wars and military conflicts with the use of conventional weapons (large-scale war, regional war).”

Russian Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev told Izvestia in an October 2009 interview that the new doctrine would significantly lower Russia’s nuclear threshold by assigning nuclear weapons to “local conflicts” and providing for pre-emptive nuclear strikes.

The New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) promises to lock in significant reductions in U.S. and Russian strategic arsenals by establishing lower ceilings on deployed weapons. The treaty’s verification provisions are means to that end--providing confidence that the sides are complying with those lower limits. Although the goal is to establish the high confidence levels maintained during the 15 years of the original START (1994-2009), the successor agreement will achieve that goal with more focused and up-to-date methods, including innovative verification provisions for deployed warhead ceilings. START’s multilayered limits and the elaborate verification measures flowing out of them were born of the Cold War. New START verification can be streamlined in accordance with the new, simplified limits and in response to post-Cold War realities. In assessing the new treaty, it is critical that verification provisions be judged by how well they fulfill their core function.

A Russian proposal for a new European security treaty has drawn support from some former Soviet states, but Western government leaders and others have reacted coolly to the plan.

The text of the draft treaty was published Nov. 29 on the Kremlin’s official Web site, which said the pact would “finally do away with the Cold War legacy.”

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev sent the draft to the heads of state and international organizations in the Euro-Atlantic region. The proposal came ahead of the Dec. 1-2 ministerial council of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) in Athens, as well as the first meeting of the NATO-Russia Council since the 2008 Georgian-Russian war. Russia had initially threatened to cancel the NATO meeting over what it said was the alliance’s refusal to consider the draft.

Panelists: Linton Brooks, Steven Pifer, and Daryl Kimball