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"[Arms Control Today] has become indispensable! I think it is the combination of the critical period we are in and the quality of the product. I found myself reading the May issue from cover to cover."

– Frank von Hippel
Co-Director of Program on Science and Global Security, Princeton University
June 1, 2018
US-Russia Nuclear Arms Control

Eau de Cologne

Spurgeon M. Keeny, Jr.

Taking advantage of the fortuitously timed G-8 summit in Cologne, Presidents Clinton and Yeltsin made a concerted effort to put the bitter U.S.-Russian confrontation over Kosovo behind them with the promise of renewed progress on the stalled strategic arms control agenda. Whether they have the will and ability to translate the encouraging rhetoric into action during the limited time available to both of them remains to be seen.

In their joint statement, the presidents committed their governments to "do everything in their power to facilitate the successful completion of the START II ratification process in both countries." They also reaffirmed their commitment to the ABM Treaty, which they recognized as a "cornerstone of strategic stability" that is of "fundamental importance" in achieving further reductions in strategic offensive arms. And, in reaffirming their commitment to their joint Helsinki statement of March 1997, they agreed to begin later this summer "discussions" on both further nuclear reductions under a START III agreement and "possible proposals for increasing the viability of the [ABM] Treaty."

The presidents were right in emphasizing the critical importance of START II ratification. Although conventional wisdom now holds that there is little chance that the Duma will act on the treaty in the foreseeable future, the Duma was prepared twice in the past six months to act favorably on ratification. The votes were aborted, however, by the pre-Christmas bombing of Baghdad and the pre-Easter bombing of Yugoslavia, which the overwhelming majority of Duma members and their constituents considered unacceptable actions reflecting U.S. disregard for Russian views. If the United States really attaches high priority to START II ratification, it can influence its prospects by acts designed to gain Duma support, such as increasing financial support, eschewing further expansion of NATO and, above all, avoiding actions perceived as deliberately hostile to Russian interests.

The net impact of the decision to initiate "discussions" on START III and the ABM Treaty is hard to predict. Discussions on START III, with its lower ceilings on forces, should help START II ratification by responding to Duma concerns about START II force levels that would require expensive modernization efforts by Moscow. But the fact that the discussions will apparently include measures to improve transparency and ensure the irreversibility of the reduction process—while excellent arms control measures—will require protracted negotiations, probably delaying any agreement until the next administration and thereby reducing the favorable impact on early ratification of START II.

The discussion of U.S. proposals to amend the ABM Treaty, however, presents a much more difficult, and probably intractable, problem. Moves to relax the constraints of the ABM Treaty run exactly counter to the overarching objective of reducing the levels of strategic nuclear arsenals. While Russia is obligated by the treaty itself to listen to U.S. proposals to amend the treaty to make possible a limited U.S. national missile defense (NMD), Moscow continues to oppose any changes to the accord. Despite U.S. arguments about the need to maintain the "vitality" of the treaty in a world of emerging rogue nations, it will not be easy to convince Russia that North Korea presents a clear-and-present danger to the sole remaining superpower. Rather, it will be perceived by Russia as a first step to a more robust NMD system that would threaten the retaliatory capability of a reduced Russian strategic force, which is the stated objective of many NMD advocates.

Clinton has emphasized that no decision has been reached on NMD deployment and that any system "must be operationally effective, cost-effective and enhance our security." When making a deployment decision next June, Clinton stated that, in addition to reviewing flight tests, cost estimates and evaluation of the threat, progress in negotiating any necessary amendments to the ABM Treaty would be considered. As the architecture for a system capable, at least on paper, of effectively defending every square foot of all 50 states has not been determined, the Pentagon will undoubtedly press for maximum relaxation of treaty constraints. If Russia does not accept this approach, the architecture should be modified to provide a system consistent with the existing provisions of the ABM Treaty—even though the system might not cover the Aleutian and Hawaiian Islands. Or more rationally, the president should defer entirely a deployment decision since none of the criteria he has set will have been met by next summer.

The new joint statement has certainly served as welcome eau de Cologne to cover the foul state of U.S.-Russian relations after Kosovo. The resulting atmosphere could be the first step in an improved relationship. But daunting problems stand in the way of achieving the promise of the Cologne rhetoric. There is little hope that these barriers will be overcome unless Clinton and Yeltsin, despite domestic distractions, actually treat the problem as a highest national priority without any further delay.

Kerrey Amendment on Nuclear Reductions Defeated

On May 26, the Senate defeated an amendment to the fiscal year (FY) 2000 defense authorization bill that would have removed the provision, in effect since 1998, barring U.S. nuclear arms reductions below START I levels until START II enters into force. Nevertheless, the Senate's version of the defense bill (S. 1059), which was approved on May 27, allows the U.S. Navy to remove the four oldest Trident ballistic missile submarines from service—a move that could save about $5 billion to $6 billion through FY 2005. However, the House version (H.R. 1401), which had not been voted on as of the end of May, mandates that those four boats fulfill their nuclear roles unless certain conditions have been met. The status of the Trident force will have to be resolved in a House-Senate conference.

Under S. 1059, the United States cannot retire or dismantle any of the following strategic nuclear delivery systems until START II enters into force: 76 B-52H bombers, 14 Trident submarines, 500 Minuteman III ICBMs and 50 MX ICBMs. (The House version specifies 18 Trident submarines.) Concerned that this provision forces the Russians to sustain a larger nuclear arsenal than they can control, Senator Bob Kerrey (D-NE) offered an amendment to delete it from the bill—a measure that failed by a 56-44 vote. Those in favor of keeping the restriction, such as Senator Bob Smith (R-NH), argued that it is needed in order to maintain pressure on the Duma to ratify START II.

Although welcoming the Senate's decision to reduce the number of Trident submarines, the Clinton administration said on May 24 that it wants the provision mandating START I levels to be repealed because it "unnecessarily restrict[s] the president's national security authority and ability to structure the most capable, cost effective force possible."

Arms Control in 1999

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Annual Arms Control Association
Membership Meeting and Luncheon

Friday March 26, 1999

The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

The Arms Control Association's annual membership meeting and luncheon was held Friday, March 26, 1999 at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, DC. The day included a panel discussion on arms control issues in 1999 (panelists listed below) and an address by John D. Holum, acting under secretary of state for arms control and international security affairs. Below are links to rush transcripts of the proceedings. Final, edited versions of both the panel discussion and the lunch address appear in the March 1999 issue of Arms Control Today.

The Panelists:

(Click on the underlined names of the participants to jump directly to their portions of the transcript in the March 1999 issue of Arms Control Today.)

  • Spurgeon M. Keeny, Jr., President and Executive Director of the Arms Control Association
  • John Rhinelander, former legal advisor to the U.S. SALT I delegation that negotiated the ABM Treaty
  • Matthew Bunn, Assistant Director of the Science, Technology and Public Policy Program, Harvard University
  • David Albright, Director of the Institute for Science and International Security
  • Daryl Kimball, Executive Director of the Coalition to Reduce Nuclear Dangers
The presentations were followed by a brief period of questions and answers which is included at the end of the transcript.

 

The Luncheon Address by John D. Holum:

John D. Holum served as Director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA) from 1993 until it's integration into State Department on April 1, 1999. In December of 1997 he simultaneously took on the role of Acting Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Affairs, the position he currently holds. As director of ACDA, Holum served as the principal adviser to the Presient and the Secretary of State on the full range of arms control, non-proliferation and disarmament matters.

Previously, Mr. Holum served on the policy planning staff in the State Department from 1979 to 1981, working on arms control and legal issues. From 1965 to 1979, he was a member of Senator George McGovern's staff, serving as legislative director and managing the Senator's work on the Foreign Relations Committee.

Jump to the transcript of Holum's presentation and question and answer period. (From the March 1999 issue of Arms Control Today.)

Description: 
ACA Annual Membership Meeting

Country Resources:

NATO Strikes Against Yugoslavia Cloud U.S.-Russian Arms Control

 Craig Cerniello

DRAMATICALLY underscoring Russian anger at NATO air strikes against Yugoslavia, Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov turned his plane around over the Atlantic and canceled a March 23–25 visit with Vice President Al Gore in Washington to discuss a broad range of issues, including arms control. Yet the degree to which the air strikes, which began March 24, will impede U.S.-Russian progress on arms control remains unclear, as setbacks on START II and "Y2K" cooperation were balanced by progress on the highly enriched uranium (HEU) purchase agreement and the Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE) Treaty. (See CFE story.)

START II Delayed—Again

Primakov, recognizing that the NATO air strikes had poisoned the political climate for START II ratification, asked the Duma on March 26 to postpone its consideration of the treaty. The next day, the Duma overwhelmingly adopted a 16-point resolution condemning NATO's military action and recommending that the Russian government "temporarily revoke" the draft START II resolution of ratification submitted by President Boris Yeltsin only days earlier.

On March 16, the START II ratification process—sidetracked by the U.S.-British air strikes against Iraq in December (see ACT, November/December 1998)—had resumed when the Duma forwarded to Yeltsin the resolution of ratification produced by International Affairs Committee Chairman Vladimir Lukin and Defense Committee Chairman Roman Popkovich. Under Russian legislative procedures, only the president can submit ratification bills to the Duma.

Also on March 16, Primakov warned on national television that if Russia failed to ratify START II, the United States would withdraw from the ABM Treaty, creating the possibility of a new arms race.

On March 17, the Duma almost unanimously approved the first "reading" (an initial step in the legislative process) of a separate bill guaranteeing funding for Russia's strategic nuclear forces through 2010. Popkovich had argued that resolving such financial issues was necessary for ratification of START II. Two days after the vote, the Duma announced that it would debate START II ratification on April 2.

Yeltsin submitted the Lukin-Popkovich bill to the Duma on March 22, clearing the way for its approval. When NATO air strikes against Yugoslavia began on March 24, however, momentum for START II ground to a halt.

Despite their opposition to the NATO action, Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov and Defense Minister Igor Sergeyev defended START II during the special March 27 Duma session on the Balkan crisis. During his sixth annual address to the nation on March 30, Yeltsin also expressed Russia's continuing support for the START process.

Y2K Cooperation on Hold

On March 26, an official from the Russian Ministry of Defense told Interfax that in response to the NATO air strikes, it would cease cooperation with the U.S. Defense Department on the so-called "Y2K" problem, whereby computers mistakenly interpret the digits "00" as 1900 instead of 2000. Malfunctions caused by this problem could have serious consequences in areas such as early warning.

During a February 18-19 meeting of the Defense Consultative Group—a regular forum for discussions between the Defense Department and Ministry of Defense—the United States had proposed creating a temporary joint early-warning center in Colorado Springs to help monitor foreign ballistic missile launches during the transition to the new millennium (roughly mid-December 1999 through mid-January 2000). The United States also offered to work with Russia about management techniques and key technologies that could be used to combat Y2K-related problems.

The United States and Russia have already agreed to create a permanent joint early-warning center on Russian territory. The center is part of an agreement made at the Moscow Summit in September 1998 for the two nations to share, on a continuous and real-time basis, early-warning information on the worldwide launches of ballistic missiles and space-launch vehicles. (See ACT, August/September 1998.) Because of the complexity of the negotiations over implementation of the summit agreement, however, this permanent center will not be completed in time to deal with the Y2K problem.

Prior to the NATO air strikes, Russia had responded positively to the U.S. proposal for a temporary joint early-warning center. A Defense Department spokeswoman stated that despite the March 26 Ministry of Defense statement, the department has not received any official communication from Russia regarding cancellation of Y2K cooperation and is still making preparations for the Colorado Springs facility.

Nuclear Redeployment Rejected

As a gesture of defiance toward the NATO air strikes, the Ukrainian parliament adopted a resolution on March 24 calling upon the government to abandon its non-nuclear status. (Ukraine returned the last of its strategic warheads to Russia in 1996.) Just two days later, however, President Leonid Kuchma said Ukraine would not reconsider the nuclear option. These developments came about one month after Ukraine destroyed the last of its 130 SS-19 ICBMs in accordance with START I.

In Belarus, which likewise transferred its last strategic warheads to Russia in 1996, speculation about the restationing of nuclear weapons has persisted for quite some time, especially in connection with NATO enlargement. Responding to these latest rumors, President Alexander Lukashenko said on March 25 that "Minsk has not asked for the return of nuclear weapons" and no state will be allowed "to wave Belarus at the West like a big stick."

Progress on HEU Implementation

Though the cancellation of Primakov's U.S. visit forced the postponement of the formal session of the Gore-Primakov Commission, U.S. Energy Secretary Bill Richardson and Russian Atomic Energy Minister Yevgeny Adamov did co-chair a meeting of the commission's newly established Nuclear Policy Committee.

On March 24, Richardson and Adamov signed an agreement facilitating implementation of the 1993 HEU accord, under which the United States is to purchase, over a 20-year period, Russian low-enriched uranium (LEU) that has been blended down from 500 metric tons of HEU removed from dismantled nuclear weapons. Russia had threatened to terminate the purchase agreement because it believed that it was not being fairly compensated for the natural uranium component of the LEU deliveries, worth approximately one-third of the $12 billion deal. (See ACT, August/September 1998.)

The new agreement, which calls for the United States to buy the natural uranium from the 1997–1998 Russian LEU shipments, was made possible by the simultaneous completion of a commercial contract between Russia and three Western companies (Cameco, Cogema and Nukem) for the future purchase of the Russian natural uranium.

National Missile Defense, The ABM Treaty and the Future of Start II

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The Brookings Institution

Wednesday, January 27, 1999

 

The Panelists:

(Click on the photos of the participants to jump directly to his or her portion of the transcript published in the November/December 1998 issue of Arms Control Today.)

Spurgeon M. Keeny, Jr., President and Executive Director of the Arms Control Association; former Deputy Director of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency.

John Pike, Director of the Space Policy Project at the Federation of American Scientists. Author of over 200 studies and articles on space and national security, and co-author of The Impact of U.S. and Soviet Ballistic Missile Defense Programs on the ABM Treaty.

John Rhinelander, Senior Counsel at the law firm of Shaw, Pittman, Potts & Trowbridge; former legal adviser to the U.S. SALT I delegation that negotiated the ABM Treaty.

Susan Eisenhower, Chairman of the Center for Political and Strategic Studies and President of the Eisenhower Group, Inc. She has written and spoken extensively on U.S.-Russian relations. Q&A The presentations were followed by a question and answer period, click to procede directly to that portion of the transcript.

 

From the invitation:

The panel will address Secretary Cohen's recent announcement on the U.S. national missile defense program and its implications for the ABM Treaty, Russian ratification of START II and further progress in reducing strategic nuclear arms. These issues were central to Secretary Albright's meetings in Moscow this week.

[Jump to the Transcript]

 

Press Conference Briefing Materials:

Description: 
ACA Press Conference

Country Resources:

Jump-START: Retaking the Initiative To Reduce Post-Cold War Nuclear Dangers

On February 25, the Committee on Nuclear Policy released a report, entitled Jump-START: Retaking the Initiative to Reduce Post-Cold War Nuclear Dangers, to address the current impasse in strategic nuclear arms control exemplified by Russia's delay in ratifying START II. Nuclear dangers inside Russia are expanding too quickly to be addressed by the formal treaty negotiation process alone, argues the committee. To supplement treaties such as START II, it calls for parallel, reciprocal actions by the United States and Russia in three areas: force levels, alert status, and fissile material and warhead controls.

The committee's specific recommendations include: reduction to 1,000 deployed strategic nuclear weapons on each side within a decade (with a later goal of 1,000 total nuclear weapons on each side); cradle-to-grave transparency on all U.S. and Russian warheads and fissile materials; elimination of the launch-on-warning option and massive attack options from nuclear war plans; and consolidation of Russia's weapons-usable materials into the smallest possible number of locations.

The Committee on Nuclear Policy was formed in 1997 by project directors of several independent non-governmental organizations dealing with nuclear weapon policy issues. Its members include scholars, scientists and researchers, as well as retired military leaders and national lawmakers. (See list of committee members.)


Introduction

The Berlin Wall fell a decade ago. The Cold War ended almost nine years ago. The old nuclear standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union has been transformed. Nevertheless, the nuclear arsenals and attitudes of the United States and Russia still reflect Cold War postures. Worse still, terrifying new nuclear dangers have emerged as these postures are maintained in the face of Russia's on-going economic collapse.

If the notion of either side launching a deliberate, massive nuclear attack against the other is wildly unrealistic, why have the nuclear doctrines of the United States and Russia not changed? Why are thousands of nuclear weapons on both sides still on hair-trigger alert even though they no longer target each other's territory? If Presidents Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev could agree that a nuclear war could not be won, and must not be fought, why have the United States and Russia not moved faster in the post-Cold War period to reduce the risk of a nuclear exchange precipitated by a breakdown of authority or miscalculation?

One answer may be that the formal treaty negotiation process, used by the United States and the Soviet Union/Russian Federation to manage their Cold War nuclear rivalry, has not dealt effectively with new post-Cold War realities. The START II Treaty, signed in 1993, aims at force levels (3,000–3,500 deployed strategic warheads) that are no longer appropriate for today, let alone for the 21st century. Russian Defense Minister Igor Sergeyev has stated publicly that Russia is likely to have no more than 500 deployed strategic warheads by 2012 for economic reasons. Yet, START II still has not gone into force because of opposition in the Russian Duma, where it has languished for the past six years. Moreover, formal negotiations for a follow-on START III pact (with further reductions to levels between 2,000 and 2,500) are likely to be time-consuming and, according to the Clinton administration, cannot begin until START II is formally approved by the Duma.

Treaties have served U.S. national interests well, but the pace of this process simply has not kept up with the expansion of nuclear dangers inside Russia. Senior Russian officials have publicly acknowledged that 70 percent of Russia's early warning satellites are either past their designed operational life or in serious disrepair. Senior Russian military officials also have acknowledged that 58 percent of Russia's ballistic missiles are well past their operational life span. Vast amounts of bomb-making materials—plutonium and highly-enriched uranium [HEU]—are poorly protected. These grave conditions invite catastrophic accidents or proliferation.

Neither the United States nor Russia has been willing, in recent years, to complement the slow and cumbersome process of treaty negotiations with actions that could be implemented far more rapidly. The time has now come to supplement treaties with parallel, reciprocal, and verifiable steps to reduce these dangers; dangers that directly threaten vital U.S. national interests.

Following a careful and painstaking examination over the past few months of the formal treaty negotiating process, the Committee on Nuclear Policy has concluded that the START process must be augmented with immediate, parallel, and reciprocal actions. The Committee strongly calls upon the Clinton administration to: reduce nuclear forces to levels far lower than currently envisioned under a START III treaty; take the majority of U.S. forces, alongside Russia, off hair-trigger alert; and, secure, monitor and greatly reduce fissile materials and warhead stockpiles. Concerted effort to achieve these goals could pave the way for formal negotiations at a later date and lock in these initiatives with treaties.

The Committee acknowledges the Reagan, Bush and Clinton administrations' efforts to advance the START process. Even before the end of the Cold War, Presidents Reagan and Gorbachev acted prudently to end the U.S.-Soviet strategic rivalry by declaring that a nuclear war must never be fought. They followed up that declaration with the elimination of an entire class of nuclear weapons in Europe by signing the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty.

Presidents Bush and Gorbachev continued to pull back from the strategic competition by concluding the START I Treaty in 1991, obligating the United States and the Soviet Union to deploy no more than 6,000 strategic nuclear weapons. President Bush and Russian President Boris Yeltsin kept that momentum going, agreeing to further reduce deployed strategic forces by half in START II.

The Clinton administration has made great strides in implementing START I. The U.S. arsenal has now dropped below 7,000 accountable warheads. The administration persuaded Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan to allow ex-Soviet nuclear warheads to be removed from their territories, and to join the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) as non-nuclear weapons states. The administration worked hard to get START II ratified by the U.S. Senate, and successfully engaged President Boris Yeltsin at Helsinki by outlining a START III framework in 1997. The Clinton administration's efforts to secure the indefinite extension of the NPT and the completion of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) are equally laudable. All of these efforts have contributed to reducing nuclear dangers of the 21st century.

These notable achievements can be nullified, however, if Russia's continued decline leads to vastly increased nuclear dangers. The Committee believes strongly that more can and must be done to radically reduce the number of U.S. and Russian nuclear weapons, reliance on them, and the political value attached to them. While the Committee supports effective nuclear treaties, and the START process, it believes that new impetus is required to reduce nuclear dangers.

After meeting with Clinton administration officials, and with Russian civilian and military leaders, the Committee crafted, and now proposes, a set of initiatives to serve as the basis for supplementing the formal treaty negotiating process—initiatives similar to those undertaken by Presidents Bush and Gorbachev in 1991. Keenly aware of the threat posed by a quickly disintegrating Soviet Union—one nuclear power dangerously on the verge of splitting into multiple nuclear powers—President Bush moved creatively and boldly. In September 1991, he announced that the United States would withdraw to its territory U.S. non-strategic, or tactical, nuclear weapons—artillery shells, short-range missiles, gravity bombs and nuclear weapons aboard U.S. surface naval vessels. He also ordered a thousand U.S. warheads deployed on strategic bombers and ballistic missiles that were slated for dismantlement under START I be taken off alert, even before the treaty was ratified. He further proposed new negotiations on strategic reductions.

President Gorbachev responded in kind, withdrawing all tactical weapons from Warsaw Pact nations and non-Russian republics, removing most categories of tactical nuclear weapons from service and designating thousands of nuclear warheads for dismantlement, while taking several classes of strategic systems off alert. The Soviet president also agreed to the negotiations that Mr. Bush proposed, which resulted in START II.

Mr. Bush's action successfully paved the way for larger nuclear reductions by taking the initiative to reduce an immediate nuclear threat. So, too, should the Clinton administration now take a similar leadership role in advancing creative and bold new steps to address newly pressing nuclear dangers within Russia. The Committee is convinced that such an approach provides the much-needed flexibility for adapting to the pace of the political, economic and military realities of the post-Cold War period.

Part I: Nuclear Dangers

Consider the following scenarios. Russian strategic rocket forces commanders, unable to reach their ailing president, come dangerously close to launching Russian missiles because an aging early warning radar erroneously indicates their country is under nuclear attack by the United States. A Russian nuclear weapons designer, who has not been paid for nearly a year, sells his services to Iran or Libya. A worker at a facility in one of Russia's once-closed "nuclear cities," now suffering severe economic conditions, delivers enough bomb-grade plutonium or uranium for one or two weapons to a terrorist organization or a rogue state.

These are no longer the scenarios of science fiction. They are real and present dangers that are no longer improbable. The following anecdotes demonstrate just how imminent these dangers are.

• January 1995, a scientific rocket launched by Norway was mistaken for a missile attack on Russia by the West due to a malfunction of Russia's aging early warning system. The Russian president's nuclear briefcase containing Russian forces' launch codes was activated for the first time before the Norwegian launch was deemed peaceful.

• September 1998, five soldiers from the 12th Main Directorate at Novaya Zemlya—Russia's only nuclear weapons test site—killed a guard at the facility, took another guard hostage and tried to hijack an aircraft. The soldiers seized more hostages before being disarmed by other Ministry of Defense forces and Federal Security Service commandos.

• September 1998, a 19-year-old sailor went on a rampage on an Akula-class nuclear-attack submarine, killing seven of his fellow sailors. He barricaded himself inside the torpedo bay for 20 hours, threatening to blow up the submarine with its nuclear reactor. He either committed suicide or was shot by Russian security forces. Russian officials insisted there were no nuclear weapons on board at the time, but unofficial accounts suggest otherwise.

• September 1998, a Ministry of Internal Affairs sergeant at the Mayak facility, where over 30 tons of separated weapons-usable plutonium is stored, shot two fellow soldiers and wounded another before escaping heavily armed. The incident led President Boris Yeltsin to order a review of nuclear security at the site.

• September 1998, a team of U.S. experts visiting Moscow was shown a building containing 100 kilograms of highly enriched uranium—enough for several nuclear bombs—that was completely unguarded because the facility where the fissile material was stored could not afford the $200-a-month salary for a security guard.

• September 1998, some 47,000 unpaid nuclear workers joined in protests at various locations around Russia over what the workers' trade union said was over $400 million in back wages owed to the nuclear sector.

• December 1998, the Chief of the Federal Security Service (FSB) in the Chelyabinsk region told Itar-Tass that FSB agents had prevented the theft and illicit appropriation of 18.5 kilograms of nuclear materials suitable for use in nuclear weapons from one of the nuclear facilities in the Chelyabinsk region.

• Today, Ministry of Internal Affairs guards at several nuclear facilities have left their posts to forage for food. Others have been reluctant to patrol facility perimeters because they did not have winter uniforms to keep them warm on patrol.

• Today, at some nuclear facilities, entire security systems—alarms, surveillance cameras, portal monitors, etc.—have been shut down because electricity was cut off to the facilities for non-payment of bills.

• Today, in hundreds of silos across Russia, sit over 20-year-old ICBMs, with service lives of only ten years, that are so unstable they pose risks of catastrophic proportion to life and the environment.

These examples represent only the tip of a nuclear iceberg. Clearly, time is of the essence. Waiting on the START process not only exacerbates these dangers for Russia but increases the risks of a nuclear accident, unauthorized launch, or nuclear materials falling into hostile hands. Waiting for the Duma to ratify START II also weakens the NPT, which requires a good faith effort toward meeting nuclear disarmament obligations.

The Committee on Nuclear Policy calls on the Clinton administration to lead, and, to engage Russia in parallel, reciprocal, and verifiable measures to reduce post-Cold War nuclear dangers. The Committee calls on the administration to establish a new nuclear relationship with Russia for the post-Cold War era.

Part II: Recommendations I. Deep Reductions

Russia can no longer afford to maintain the huge nuclear arsenal that it inherited from the former Soviet Union, and its civilian and military leadership have publically acknowledged that Russia will not be able to deploy the forces allowed under START II or START III. Because of serious concerns over safety and control of Russia's arsenal presented above, and because both Russia and the United States have arsenals well in excess of that needed to deter an attack, the United States should:

• Supplement formal arms control treaties with parallel, reciprocal, and verifiable reductions;

• Immediately declare U.S. intention to reduce, alongside Russia, to 1,000 deployed strategic nuclear weapons within a decade;

• Offer cradle-to-grave transparency on the status of all U.S. and Russian nuclear weapons as the basis for reciprocal reductions;

• With reciprocal verification, subsequently reduce to 1,000 total nuclear weapons on each side;

• Seek agreement from the other nuclear weapons states on a ceiling on their current deployment levels and begin multilateral talks on reductions once the United States and Russia reach 1,000 total nuclear weapons.

Rationale

The formal treaty process is stalled. There is no telling when START II will be ratified by the Russian Duma. The Clinton administration's posture of waiting for the Duma to act before proceeding to negotiate START III is untenable. Even if the Duma did act, it is highly unlikely that START III negotiations would result in a complete agreement before Presidents Clinton and Yeltsin leave office. That means more time lost.

Supplementing the formal treaty process with parallel, reciprocal, verifiable, and deep reductions serves U.S. national security interests. By proposing reductions down to 1,000 deployed strategic weapons, well below currently proposed START III levels, the United States opens the door for Russia to move more quickly in the direction that it has to go anyway. Willingness by the United States to cooperatively reduce strategic forces down to this level sends a signal that Washington seeks a new post-Cold War nuclear relationship with Moscow. Consequently, Russia may be more likely to agree to greater openness and transparency on its weapons, which the United States must insist on for deep reductions. The Committee advocates this positive-sum tradeoff: Russia secures rough parity at lower levels, while the United States secures transparency in Russia needed to make reductions irreversible.

Cradle-to-grave transparency, the tracking and accountability of every warhead from its production to its dismantlement and destruction, must be the linchpin of a deep reduction regime so as to make it maximally verifiable and irreversible. Russia has been less than enthusiastic about greater openness for its nuclear holdings. This must change, and is more likely with the offer of parallel deep reductions.

Agreement between the United States and Russia to reduce to 1,000 deployed strategic weapons would also include an agreement to second stage reductions down to 1,000 total weapons, which would include the tactical nuclear weapons that concern the United States and our European allies. In return for addressing Russian concerns of asymmetry at the strategic level, Moscow must shed light on its inventory of tactical nuclear weapons, which are aging and reaching obsolescence, in any event. Reductions to 1,000 total weapons on each side coincide with the proposed limit called for in the 1997 report by the National Academy of Sciences, The Future of Nuclear Weapons.

Moreover, bilateral reductions to this level would then pave the way for five power nuclear negotiations to deal with residual nuclear forces. This reduction regime could also reap major non-proliferation benefits. It moves the P-5 states significantly toward meeting their nuclear disarmament obligations under the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

II. Removing the Hair-Trigger

That a large, powerful and unstable Russian nuclear arsenal is also on hair-trigger alert, capable of being launched within a few minutes of an attack warning, greatly heightens the risk of an accidental or unauthorized launch. U.S. forces are equally poised for quick launch. Neither the United States nor Russia can be secure with so many nuclear weapons on hair-trigger alert. No other single measure would more clearly signal the end of the mutual suspicion carried over from the Cold War than taking these weapons off quick launch status. The Committee calls on the United States to:

• Immediately stand down, alongside Russia, nuclear forces slated for destruction under START II;

• Declare its intention, with a parallel, reciprocal commitment from Russia, to eliminate the launch-on-warning option from nuclear war plans;

• Begin discussions among the five nuclear weapon states on verifiably removing all nuclear forces from hair-trigger alert;

• Declare its intention, with a parallel, reciprocal commitment from Russia, to verifiably eliminate massive attack options from nuclear war plans.

Rationale

Despite the 1994 Clinton-Yeltsin pact not to aim nuclear missiles at each other, U.S. and Russian forces still are loaded with their wartime targets that can be reactivated within seconds for Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs) and minutes for Submarine-Launched Ballistic Missiles (SLBMs). Therefore, if a launch order were sent under current circumstances, 4,000 ICBM warheads (2,000 on each side) could be on their way to their targets within a few minutes and another 1,000 SLBM warheads could be en route to targets shortly thereafter.

Presidents Clinton and Yeltsin also agreed in 1997 at their Helsinki summit to "de-activate" missiles slated for destruction under START II by 2004. The dangers posed by having so many weapons on hair-trigger alert demand that these missiles be stood down immediately. An immediate stand down would reduce the number of weapons on hair-trigger alert from 2,500 (on each side) currently to 500—the number Russia would retain on quick-launch under the START II provisions.

The stand down could be monitored by national technical means, as well as by existing extensive rights for random, short-notice missile inspections under START I. Above all, the stand down would benefit U.S. national security interests and the safety of its citizens. This action would also achieve a major psychological benefit by breaking with the Cold War psyche. So, too, would the declaration to eliminate the launch-on-warning option. The declaration could be implemented by procedural changes similar to those that now preclude the launch of U.S. missiles directed at China. Like the existing de-targeting declaration, these procedural changes could not be readily verifiable. Confidence in and verifiability of the declaration could be achieved gradually as transparency arrangements and other de-alerting measures, such as removing warheads from missiles, are implemented.

The alert levels of French and British nuclear forces are low. China does not appear to have strategic nuclear forces on alert. Including the forces of these nuclear weapons states in talks to verifiably remove all nuclear forces from hair-trigger alert is pivotal to Russia's acceptance of such a move.

The elimination of massive attack options goes to the heart of transforming Cold War postures. Taking this step would be the first material acknowledgment that a deliberate, premeditated, mutually suicidal bombardment is both implausible and unthinkable. The Committee believes that launch-on-warning postures and massive nuclear targeting options are no longer suitable in contemporary circumstances.

III. Fissile Material and Warhead Controls

Central to U.S. security is ensuring that nuclear weapons and the essential ingredients to make them do not fall into hostile hands. With the escalating economic crisis in Russia, immediate action is needed to consolidate, secure, and account for all stockpiles of nuclear warheads and weapons-usable nuclear materials. A comprehensive accounting and monitoring regime for warheads and fissile materials is critical to the verification of the deep reductions the Committee proposes, and, to making them irreversible. This regime would also provide an urgently-needed defense against the proliferation of nuclear weapons and fissile materials to other states or sub-national groups. The Committee calls on the United States to:

• Help install modern security and accounting systems and provide resources and incentives for sustaining effective security at all Russian nuclear facilities;

• Help consolidate Russia's weapons-usable materials into the smallest possible number of locations;

• Help shrink the Russian nuclear weapons complex;

• Promote alternative employment in Russia's nuclear cities;

• Build a cradle-to-grave transparency and monitoring system for all warheads and fissile materials;

• Negotiate reductions in fissile material stocks in excess of that needed to support a 1,000-warhead stockpile;

• Triple current funding for fissile materials controls.

Rationale

With nuclear guards walking off their posts to forage for food and thousands of workers with access to fissile materials striking to protest months of unpaid wages, improving the security at Russia's nuclear facilities is warranted on an emergency basis. The expanded scope of assistance that the Committee proposes is essential not only to control missiles and launchers as in the past, but also to expand controls over nuclear warheads and fissile materials.

Fissile materials are stored at over 100 buildings located in over 50 different sites throughout Russia and the former Soviet Union. It is essential to consolidate this material at as few sites as possible. It is equally essential that all remaining facilities are equipped with modern security and accounting systems, and are provided with the resources and incentives necessary to sustain security well into the future, including a new focus on the "human factor" to help instill a new safeguards culture.

The sheer size of Russia's vast nuclear weapons complex poses a monumental challenge in controlling and safeguarding fissile materials and warheads. In Russia's ten "nuclear cities," tens of thousands of nuclear scientists, engineers and technicians, are in dire economic straits. An investment of roughly $500 million over the next five years by the United States—with Russian contributions as well—could be used to downsize this giant complex and provide alternative employment to its workers who might be tempted not only to steal fissile materials, but also sell their services to others.

Cradle-to-grave transparency needed to achieve deep reductions requires a credible, detailed exchange of data on stockpiles of warheads and fissile materials. Reciprocal monitoring of sites where warheads are stored pending dismantlement would be required as well. Relaxing nuclear secrecy would require a major change in psychology, particularly on the Russian side. Russian transparency will be difficult to secure unless the United States is willing to make the kinds of reductions in its arsenal that Russia is now forced to make because of its economic crisis, and to permit equivalent transparency.

Both to ensure that excess warheads are dismantled as rapidly and as safely as practicable, and to increase the incentive for Russia to accept cradle-to-grave transparency, the United States should provide financial assistance to defray Russian dismantlement costs, including costs to increase its dismantlement capacity if necessary.

To avoid having to secure vast stockpiles of excess fissile materials indefinitely, and to make deep reductions irreversible, the Committee calls on the United States and Russia to agree on a level of plutonium and highly enriched uranium stocks sufficient only to maintain the maximum 1,000 total warhead-stockpile. While en route to this fissile material stockpile, the United States and Russia should move as quickly as possible to establish arrangements to transform current excess fissile material stocks into forms that would make it far more difficult to ever convert them for use in weapons again. As a first step, the United States could offer to purchase additional amounts of Russia's HEU from weapons that have been blended down to non-weapons usable form, with the proceeds going back into consolidating and improving security at fissile material storage cites. The United States could also offer Russia financial incentives to blend down all its excess HEU to less than 20 percent as quickly as possible, thereby reducing risks of proliferation.

The United States could encourage the conversion of excess plutonium to forms that are no more weapons-usable than the plutonium in commercial spent fuel, using the method preferred by each side that could be implemented quickly and with stringent safeguards and security throughout the process.

As the United States and Russia reduce their stockpiles of fissile materials, it is vitally important to ensure that no new materials are being produced. The Committee calls on the United States and Russia to establish transparency at each other's enrichment plants to ensure that no additional HEU is being produced. The two countries should also complete the conversion of Russia's plutonium production reactors so that they no longer produce weapons-grade plutonium. These measures would provide valuable experience and impetus for concluding an international fissile material cutoff treaty.

The expanded scope and level of effort proposed by the Committee would require a tripling of the funds currently spent on fissile materials controls in Russia. The cost to address this threat is small compared to the cost and risk of failure to control fissile materials in the former Soviet Union.

Finally, effective management of a new U.S.-Russian nuclear relationship also involves addressing differences over the issue of ballistic missile defenses (BMD). Members of the Committee have strongly held views on the utility of BMD. Many members seriously question the efficacy of a national missile defense (NMD) and seek to maintain the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty as the cornerstone of U.S.-Russian strategic stability. Others are inclined to support a limited nmd, if combined with deep cuts in offensive weapons. Realizing that another significant debate over defenses and the ABM Treaty is in the offing, the Committee agreed on a set of criteria by which to evaluate objectively any NMD proposals and against which a deployment decision should be weighed. The Committee believes that national missile defense deployment proposals should:

• Have a clearly defined, achievable mission;

• Prove missile defense technologies under repeated, rigorous testing;

• Be affordable;

• Be cost effective at the margin;

• Be pursued in a balanced fashion along with other measures to reduce nuclear threats;

• Have an overall impact that should reduce nuclear dangers, taking into account their potential impacts on nuclear arms reductions and non-proliferation.

Conclusion

The Committee does not believe that the START process of formal treaty negotiations is irrelevant, or that it should be jettisoned. The Committee believes, however, that the START process should be supplemented with new initiatives to directly address the new nuclear realities and risks of the post-Cold War period. The Committee calls on the Clinton administration to break the current six-year logjam on START II ratification; radically reform the management of the U.S.-Russian nuclear relationship; and, to take the lead in reducing both reliance on nuclear weapons and the political value attached to them.

To continue to rely solely on the stalemated START process is to needlessly increase the costs and risks of maintaining U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals at levels well in excess of what is needed to deter an attack. The Committee's initiatives for deep reductions, removing nuclear forces from hair-trigger alert, safeguarding fissile materials and warhead controls, not only would reduce these costs and risks, but could also set the stage for a larger, more cooperative multilateral security framework for the 21st century.

Prior to the disintegration of the Soviet Union, President Bush responded quickly and successfully to an immediate nuclear danger. Immediately following the disintegration of the Soviet Union, Senators Sam Nunn and Richard Lugar acted quickly to harness U.S. funds and expertise to consolidate scattered Soviet warheads under Russian control and to destroy the delivery vehicles for those warheads. Even more far-reaching measures, to be implemented just as quickly, are now needed by the United States to respond to even greater post-Cold War nuclear dangers.


Committee on Nuclear Policy
Jesse James, executive director, The Henry L. Stimson Center

Alexi Arbatov, Center for Political and Military Forecasts

Bruce Blair, The Brookings Institution

Matthew Bunn, Harvard University

Adm. Eugene Carroll (U.S. Navy, Ret.), Center for Defense Information

Joseph Cirincione, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

Sen. Alan Cranston, State of the World Forum

Amb. Jonathan Dean, Union of Concerned Scientists

Harold Feiveson, Princeton University

Trevor Findlay, Verification Research, Training and Information Centre

Cathleen Fisher, The Henry L. Stimson Center

Gen. Andrew J. Goodpaster (U.S. Army, Ret.)

Amb. Thomas Graham, Jr., Lawyers Alliance for World Security

Peter Hayes, Nautilus Institute

Wade Huntley, Nautilus Institute

John Isaacs, Council for a Livable World

Rebecca Johnson, The Acronym Institute

Daryl Kimball, Coalition to Reduce Nuclear Dangers

Andrew Krepinevich, Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments

Michael Krepon, The Henry L. Stimson Center

Ken Luongo, Russian-American Nuclear Security Advisory Council

Robert Manning, Council on Foreign Relations

Will Marshall, Progressive Policy Institute

Robert S. McNamara

Alistair Millar, Fourth Freedom Forum

Harald Müller, Peace Research Institute, Frankfurt

Janne Nolan, The Century Fund

Christopher E. Paine, Natural Resources Defense Council

Alexander Pikayev, Carnegie Endowment Moscow Center

Daniel Plesch, British American Security Information Council

Ben Sanders, Programme for Promoting Nuclear Non-Proliferation

Annette Schaper, Peace Research Institute Frankfurt

Lawrence Scheinman, The Monterey Institute

Stephen Schwartz, Educational Foundation for Nuclear Science

Leon Sigal, Social Science Research Center

John Simpson, Programme for Promoting Nuclear Non-Proliferation

Clifford Singer, University of Illinois

John Steinbruner, The Brookings Institution

Adm. Stansfield Turner (U.S. Navy, Ret.)

Frank von Hippel, Princeton University

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A Comprehensive Transparency Regime For Warheads and Fissile Materials

 Steve Fetter

U.S.-Russian efforts to limit nuclear forces largely have ignored their most fearsome components—the nuclear warheads. Arms control agreements have instead focused on limiting the number of deployed delivery vehicles and their launchers: ballistic missiles and their associated silos, mobile launchers or submarines; and long range bombers. START II limits the number of warheads that can be mounted on delivery vehicles, but is silent on non-deployed warheads. Presidents George Bush and Boris Yeltsin announced in 1991 that certain tactical warheads would be withdrawn and dismantled, but these initiatives were not legally binding and neither side could confirm that the promised reductions actually took place.

Nor have arms control agreements included restrictions on stockpiles of fissile materials—plutonium and highly enriched uranium (HEU)—the essential ingredients of all nuclear weapons. Control and accounting for these materials is the foundation for verifying compliance with the nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Fissile materials are the most difficult part of a nuclear weapon to produce, and the size of stockpiles held by the nuclear-weapon states places an upper limit on the number of warheads they could manufacture.

The focus on delivery vehicles is understandable. They are much easier to count and far more difficult to hide than warheads or fissile materials. Delivery vehicles are also expensive, typically costing 10 times more to produce and maintain than the nuclear warheads they carry. In addition, the number and characteristics of a nation's delivery vehicles are more accurate measures of the operational potency of its nuclear arsenal than are the size of its warhead or fissile material stockpiles.

In the future, however, it will become increasingly important to complement limits on delivery vehicles with restrictions on warhead and fissile material stockpiles, for several reasons. First, limits on warheads and fissile materials would make arms reductions far more difficult and time-consuming to reverse. Large stockpiles of non-deployed warheads or fissile materials create the potential for rapid and large-scale "breakout" from treaty obligations. The United States plans to maintain over 5,000 strategic warheads (and nuclear components to build another 5,000 warheads) in storage after START II is fully implemented, in addition to the 3,500 deployed warheads permitted by the treaty.<1> This has generated concern in Russia that the United States could increase the size of its strategic force very rapidly by simply replacing warheads that had been removed from missiles and bombers under START II. Although the breakout potential of Russia would be considerably smaller than that of the United States after START II is fully implemented, the United States is concerned about the durability of Russian democracy and the possibility of a return to hostile relations. Both countries would benefit if agreed reductions in nuclear arsenals were made as irreversible as possible.

Verified limits on warheads and fissile materials would also lay an essential foundation for much deeper reductions in nuclear arsenals. At the high force levels permitted by START I and START II, the stability of the nuclear balance is relatively insensitive to the total number of warheads each side possesses, and the breakout problem is not acute. But as the number of deployed warheads moves from 3,500 to 1,000 or less, uncertainties about the total number of warheads—and the amount of fissile material available to make new warheads—would loom much larger. At that point, it will be essential to have in place a system for limiting warhead and fissile material stockpiles. The time to begin building that system is now.

Second, unlike strategic weapons, most tactical warheads lack unique nuclear delivery vehicles or launchers. Verified limits on warheads are the only way to build confidence that existing commitments to reduce tactical nuclear weapons have been implemented. Additional restrictions on tactical warheads will become more important as the number of strategic warheads is reduced, because the distinction between "strategic" and "tactical" warheads is hazy. For example, U.S. B61 tactical bombs are nearly identical to the B61 strategic bomb, and the W80 warhead on the tactical sea launched cruise missile is nearly identical to the W80 warhead on the strategic air launched cruise missile. If strategic warheads are limited, their tactical counterparts should be limited as well.

Agreed limits on the number and deployment of tactical nuclear warheads would also be a useful confidence building measure in the wake of NATO expansion. The United States is concerned about the fate of Russia's huge stockpile of tactical warheads and about Russia's increased reliance on tactical nuclear weapons to offset the conventional forces of NATO and China. Russia is worried about the deployment of U.S. tactical warheads in an expanded NATO. Both sides would gain from greater transparency regarding tactical nuclear weapons.

Third, limits on warhead and fissile material stockpiles and associated transparency measures could help reduce risks of theft or unauthorized use. Transparency measures would build confidence that warheads and fissile materials are secure. If security is lacking, transparency measures would help identify shortcomings and facilitate U.S. Russian cooperation toward improving safeguards. Merely compiling the necessary data and preparing for inspections could deter or detect threats to the security of warheads and fissile materials. In the longer term, reductions and centralized, monitored storage would make stockpiles easier to safeguard.

The need to begin to build a transparency regime for warheads and fissile materials is recognized in the March 1997 joint statement of Presidents Bill Clinton and Yeltsin issued in Helsinki, which calls for a START III agreement that includes "measures relating to the transparency of strategic nuclear warhead inventories and the destruction of strategic nuclear warheads… to promote the irreversibility of deep reductions including prevention of a rapid increase in the number of warheads." The presidents also agreed to "explore, as separate issues, possible measures relating to…tactical nuclear systems, to include appropriate confidence building and transparency measures," and to "consider the issues related to transparency in nuclear materials."

The Helsinki statement is, in some respects, a step backward from joint statements issued in 1994 and 1995, which directed experts on both sides to immediately begin negotiating cooperative measures to ensure the transparency and irreversibility of nuclear arms reductions, including exchanges of data on warhead and fissile material stockpiles. Russia effectively ended these negotiations in 1995 when it refused to complete an agreement for cooperation that would allow the parties to exchange sensitive information. The Russian government has never explained publicly why it broke off the talks. Perhaps the Helsinki agreement will breathe new life into this process.

The Helsinki statement could be interpreted in a very circumscribed way. For example, transparency measures might be restricted to certain strategic warheads, or to only those strategic warheads that are to be removed under a START III agreement. The significance of such half way measures would be limited, except as first steps toward a more comprehensive regime. Little would be gained by verifying the elimination of a few selected warheads if other warheads in the stockpile could take their place or if new warheads could be produced to replace them. The security benefits of transparency measures would be far greater if they applied to all warheads—tactical as well as strategic, reserve as well as deployed.

A comprehensive set of transparency measures for warheads and fissile materials will raise difficult technical and political challenges that could take years of hard work and negotiation to resolve. For this reason, it probably is best to divide the Helsinki agenda into two parallel tracks: one dealing with warhead and fissile material transparency, and a START III track that establishes a lower limit on deployed strategic warheads. By having START III operate within the technical framework of the existing START agreements, it should be possible to sign a START III accord while Clinton and Yeltsin are still in office.

At Helsinki, the presidents agreed to begin negotiations on START III immediately after START II enters into force. (This commitment was subsequently modified and will become effective when the Duma ratifies START II.) It appeared that this would happen in December 1998, but the U.S. attack against Iraq prompted the Russian Duma to postpone ratification yet again. The announcement in January 1999 by Secretary of Defense William Cohen that the United States would seek to re-negotiate the ABM Treaty to allow the deployment of a national missile defense (NMD) casts further uncertainty over the future of START II. The Clinton administration understands the importance of preserving the U.S. Russian arms control process, however, and there is a good chance that the parties will begin negotiations on START III sometime this year. If and when this happens, the United States should be ready to describe and promote a vision for a comprehensive transparency regime.

Building a Transparency Regime

A comprehensive transparency regime would have several components, including initial and ongoing declarations; inspections to gain confidence in the accuracy and completeness of the declarations; and measures to confirm the dismantling of warheads and the disposition of warhead components.

Declarations.

The first element in a transparency regime would be an initial declaration of nuclear warhead and fissile material inventories, updated at agreed intervals. This is especially important because estimates by national intelligence agencies are highly inaccurate. For example, a CIA official testified in 1992 that Russia had 30,000 nuclear warheads, "plus or minus 5,000."<2> Subsequent statements by Russian Minister of Atomic Energy Viktor Mikhailov that the Russian stockpile peaked at 45,000 warheads in 1986 cast doubt on the CIA estimate and emphasized further the difficulty of estimating warhead stockpiles by national intelligence alone.<3> The value of agreed limits on stockpiles or agreements to dismantle a certain number of warheads would be diminished considerably if the initial inventory could not be established with greater accuracy.

In June 1995, the United States proposed a modest stockpile data exchange agreement, as called for by the U.S.-Russian joint statement just one month earlier. The proposed agreement called for exchanging data, on a confidential basis, on total current inventories of nuclear weapons and fissile materials, as well as the total number of nuclear weapons dismantled each year since 1980, and the type and amount of fissile material produced each year since 1970. Unfortunately, then Russian Assistant Minister of Atomic Energy Vladislav Balamutov reportedly rejected the proposal as "too comprehensive."

Although the June 1995 proposal represents a useful starting point, declarations ultimately would have to be considerably more comprehensive to achieve the goals set out above. The information to be exchanged should include the location, type and serial number of every nuclear device; the location and serial number of each fissile component recovered from a dismantled warhead; total inventories of plutonium and HEU; and a detailed inventory for each facility for bulk fissile materials. For stored warheads or warhead components, the location would be a particular storage facility; for deployed warheads, it would be the corresponding launcher. The serial number could serve as a unique identifier for each item, or special "tags" could be used for this purpose.

Unique identifiers or tags would have three key advantages. First, tags make it easier to certify the completeness of a declaration, because the discovery of an untagged warhead or canister would constitute an unambiguous violation. Second, it would not be necessary to inspect or count each and every controlled item to gain confidence in the accuracy of the declaration. Inspectors could authenticate the tags in a randomly selected sample of items, thereby reducing the inspection effort and its degree of intrusiveness. Third, tags would allow a chain of custody in which individual warheads could be tracked from deployment sites to storage bunkers to dismantlement facilities. Similarly, canisters containing warhead components could be tracked from dismantlement facilities to storage sites to facilities for the civil use or disposal of the material.

A tagging scheme could make use of existing surface features (at sufficiently high magnifications all surfaces have a unique "fingerprint") or several different kinds of applied tags, such as bar coded labels or plastic holographic images overlaid by a tamper proof tape. Tags are used by the UN Special Commission (UNSCOM) in Iraq to log and track items which could be used both for civilian and military purposes, by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to safeguard civilian nuclear materials, and by the U.S. military to track weapons.<4> These tags require that inspectors have physical access to the tag, but it is possible to imagine tags that could be authenticated outside of a container or at a distance.<5> The use of tags for verification, while not yet applied to warheads, is provided for in START I.<6>

Although certain technical issues would have to be worked out, there should be no problem in instituting an effective tagging system for canisters containing warheads, warhead components or fissile materials.

To provide confidence that the declaration is accurate and complete, it also would be helpful to have information on the history of warhead and fissile material stockpiles and the facilities used to produce them. For warheads, one could begin by exchanging data on the aggregate number of warheads produced and dismantled each year, or, better still, the date of assembly or disassembly of each device. For fissile materials, the annual production and consumption of plutonium and HEU by facility would be useful. A detailed description of the warhead production complex would be valuable in this context, and would help in designing transparency measures to validate the declaration.

The Department of Energy (DOE) has taken an important step toward increased transparency by publishing a report that summarizes U.S. plutonium production and use from 1944 through 1994.<7> The report provides a comprehensive accounting of plutonium inventories at each DOE facility, including the sum of the quantities of plutonium in the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile and in pits at the Pantex warhead assembly/disassembly facility in Texas. It also provides a summary of the production of plutonium at DOE sites, small acquisitions of foreign plutonium and removals of plutonium from the stockpile. A similar report on the production and use of U.S. HEU is in preparation. As a first step toward a formal data exchange, the United States could fund, through the Cooperative Threat Reduction program or U.S.-Russian lab-to-lab programs, the generation of comparable reports by Russia.

It is important to begin exchanging such data as soon as possible. There is no need to wait until transparency measures are worked out completely. Early declarations would build confidence and would stimulate both governments to ensure that their accountancy systems are accurate and understandable. In the case of historical information, such as the rates of production of nuclear weapons or fissile materials many decades in the past, it is important to assemble this data today, while the personnel who were involved in these operations are still available to resolve any discrepancies or uncertainties that might arise.

Inspections.

The second element of a transparency regime would be inspections to confirm the accuracy and completeness of the declarations. There would be no need to count warheads deployed on strategic missiles, since these would be covered by the START agreements. Nearly all other warheads are in storage, so inspections would mostly involve visiting a particular storage facility and checking that the declared number of warheads is present—no more, no less. Alternatively, inspectors could randomly select a small number of warheads for inspection and verify that their serial numbers matched those listed in the declaration. If a random sample of 20 or 30 warheads turned up no undeclared or bogus warheads, then one could be highly confident that the declaration was accurate.<8>

There are, however, two key problems in confirming the declarations. The first is knowing that an object which is declared to be a warhead of a certain type really is a warhead of that type. This could be dealt with by developing "fingerprints" or templates of warhead types, and using random sampling to confirm that a particular warhead is an authentic warhead of the declared type. For example, Russia could present one or more SS 18 ICBM warheads for fingerprinting, or warheads could be selected from a deployed missile by U.S. inspectors. A set of agreed characteristics could be measured: length and diameter; mass and center of gravity; the relative strength of neutron emissions or gamma-ray emissions at certain points; or heat output. A fingerprint of this type would be extremely difficult to spoof. To protect sensitive weapon design information, an automated system could be devised to give a simple "yes" or "no" answer to the question: "Is this an SS 18 warhead?"<9> A similar system is being developed by U.S. and Russian laboratories to confirm the authenticity of plutonium pits placed in a U.S. funded storage facility now under construction near Chelyabinsk.

A second problem is demonstrating that the declaration is complete—in other words, that there are no hidden or undeclared stockpiles of warheads or fissile material. Challenge, or anytime anywhere, inspections are often mentioned as one way to detect undeclared stockpiles if they exist, but a well designed plan to hide warheads or materials would give few clues about where to look. A better approach is to exchange detailed historical information on the nuclear stockpiles as part of the initial declaration. These records could be examined for internal consistency and for consistency with the current stockpile declaration, and they could be compared to archived intelligence information.

In some cases, inspections might be able to confirm the completeness of the declaration. For example, measurements of isotope ratios in the permanent structural components of plutonium production reactors can verify, at least approximately, declarations of the total production of plutonium at that reactor. Knowing the amount of plutonium produced would, in turn, validate declarations about the production of warheads.

Dismantling.

Once a baseline warhead inventory is established, agreed reductions can be achieved by confirming that a certain number of warheads have been dismantled. This could be accomplished rather easily by demonstrating that the warhead had been removed from the stockpile and that the corresponding fissile components—in particular, the plutonium pit—had been placed in a monitored storage facility.<10> For example, Russia could verify that a U.S. warhead had been removed from the storage area and delivered to the dismantling area at Pantex, and that some days later a pit had been placed in the storage area. The fingerprinting procedures described above could be used to show that the object to be dismantled was an authentic warhead of a given type. Intrinsic gamma-ray signatures might also be used to verify that the pit which is subsequently placed in storage was taken from a warhead of that type. It may even be possible to determine whether the pit was taken from a particular warhead (for example, by irradiating the warhead with a burst of neutrons and measuring the fission-product gamma-ray signature of the pit some days later). Again, sampling could be used to minimize the number of warheads or pits that are subjected to detailed examination. Components containing plutonium or uranium would be stored pending their ultimate disposition under mutual monitoring; other components could be destroyed or recycled, as agreed by the parties.

Another method would use perimeter-portal monitoring at the dismantling facility. The portal would be equipped with a system to verify the authenticity of warheads entering the facility and to detect fissile materials exiting the facility. A third method would track the warhead and its components through the dismantling process. Although this is often considered excessively intrusive, it may be possible to protect sensitive information. The monitoring party could, for example, track the warhead up to the disassembly cell, track the fissile components from the disassembly cell to the storage area, and verify that the disassembly cell contained no warheads or warhead components either before or after the disassembly procedure. Monitoring could be done by on site inspectors, or remotely using secure video links or radio beacons.

Disposition.

If reductions are to be truly irreversible, a comprehensive transparency regime must also provide confidence that components from dismantled warheads and other excess fissile materials would not be available to rebuild nuclear arsenals. The goal should be to render these materials at least as unattractive for use in nuclear weapons as is fresh or spent civilian reactor fuel.<11>

In the case of HEU weapons components, transparency measures have already been negotiated to provide confidence that the low enriched uranium that the United States is purchasing from Russia for civilian reactor fuel is derived from dismantled warheads. Disposing of plutonium pits will be more difficult. The plutonium could be used to fabricate mixed oxide fuel elements for civilian reactors, but the resulting fuel would be more expensive than uranium fuel, and neither country has facilities to fabricate plutonium fuels. Alternatively, the plutonium could be mixed with vitrified high level radioactive wastes. In either case, IAEA type safeguards could provide assurance that no plutonium had been diverted.

Manufacture.

Finally, in addition to monitoring the elimination of warheads and the disposition of fissile materials, it would be important to have confidence that new warheads or fissile materials are not being produced. In the case of fissile materials, this could be done by applying IAEA type safeguards to plutonium-production reactors, reprocessing facilities and uranium-enrichment plants. Indeed, the United States favors such measures as part of a multilateral agreement to end the production of fissile material for weapons or outside of safeguards—the so called fissile material cutoff treaty proposal now before the UN Conference on Disarmament.

Gaining confidence that additional warheads are not being manufactured will be more difficult, since warhead maintenance and remanufacture will continue as long as nuclear weapons exist. Transparency measures on fissile materials provide assurance that a large number of additional warheads could not be produced without detection. Additional confidence could be obtained by requiring a strict balance between the number of warheads and pits entering and exiting a warhead maintenance or remanufacturing facility.

Some worry that the monitoring party would learn of vulnerabilities in the force by observing maintenance and remanufacturing activities. If, for example, Russia observed that all the U.S. Trident warheads were being rebuilt, it might conclude that that system had a major reliability problem. Even so, it is difficult to see how that knowledge would confer a significant and usable military advantage, since Russia would not know the actual potency of the warheads. The United States plans to maintain a mix of warheads in the stockpile, so that the failure of any one system would not cripple the deterrent capability of the overall force.

Conclusions

A comprehensive transparency regime for nuclear warheads and fissile materials would have a number of important advantages. A transparency regime would build confidence that agreed reductions in strategic and tactical nuclear forces are irreversible, lay the foundation for much deeper reductions in nuclear forces, and facilitate efforts to reduce the risks of theft or unauthorized use of nuclear warheads and fissile materials.

Although a comprehensive transparency regime will present numerous challenges, the task is manageable if both sides do the necessary technical work and negotiate in good faith. This work should begin immediately. We cannot afford to wait until negotiations begin, or until political agreement has been achieved, to work out the details of verifying declarations or the dismantling of warheads. Unlike past arms control agreements, which were discrete events, we should think of increased transparency as a continuous process, in which we constantly increase the exchange of more detailed information and find ways to corroborate that information. This process is an essential component of a long term program to reduce the size and salience of nuclear arsenals, as well as a vital element of the effort to improve U.S. Russian relations.


NOTES

1. The warheads held in reserve for possible redeployment include approximately 550 B61 and B81 strategic bombs; 1,450 W80 cruise missile warheads; 1,500 W62 and W78 Minuteman warheads; and 1,900 W78 Trident warheads. In addition, the United States plans to hold over 5,000 plutonium "pits" in reserve. Thomas B. Cochran, personal communication based on unclassified and declassified Department of Energy documents, 4 March 1999.

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2. "Testimony of Lawrence Gershwin before the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee," May 6, 1992.

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3. William J. Broad, "Russian Says Soviet Atom Arsenal Was Larger Than West Estimated," The New York Times, September 26, 1993, p. A1.

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4. A specific tamper tape system used in Iraq and in the United States is the so called "CONFIRM" seal. This is a tape placed over a unique identifier. The tape is an adhesive, imbedded with microscopic beads of colored glass in several strata forming a specific design (such as the UN logo). The tape is see through and is read through reflected light.

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5. Tags that can be read remotely are available commercially. See, for example, the Argus tag produced by Aquila Technologies, described at http://www.aquilagroup.com.

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6. Annex 6 to the Inspection Protocol of START I, which describes procedures for associating unique identifiers with mobile missiles or their launch canisters, defines a unique identifier as "a non repeating alpha numeric production number, or a copy thereof, that has been applied by the inspected Party, using its own technology."

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7. U.S. Department of Energy, "Plutonium: The First 50 Years," DOE/DP 0137, February 1996.

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8. Assume that 10 percent of the warheads at a particular site have invalid tags. If the total number of warheads at the site is large (greater than 400), the probability that a random sample of 20 warheads would include at least one invalid warhead is 88 percent; for a sample of 30 warheads, the probability is 96 percent. The general formula is P = 1 - (1 - F)n, where F is the invalid fraction, n is the number sampled, and P is that probability that the sample contains at least one invalid warhead. The probability is greater if the total number of warheads is small; for example, if the site contains only 50 warheads, the probability that at least one of 20 would be invalid is 93 percent. The general formula in this case is P = 1 - [(N - M)!(N - n)!]/[(N - M - n)!N!], where N is the total number of warheads and M = FN = the number of invalid warheads.

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9. The Controlled Intrusiveness Verification Technology (CIVET) system developed at Brookhaven National Laboratory accomplishes this task with a high resolution gamma ray detector and a special purpose computer without permanent memory.

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10. These options are reviewed in Department of Energy, Office of Arms Control and Nonproliferation, Transparency and Verification Options: An Initial Analysis of Approaches for Monitoring Warhead Dismantlement, Washington, DC: Department of Energy, May 19, 1997.

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11. National Academy of Sciences, Committee on International Security and Arms Control, Management and Disposition of Excess Weapons Plutonium, Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1994.

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Steve Fetter is an associate professor in the School of Public Affairs at the University of Maryland in College Park and a member of the Arms Control Association Board of Directors.

National Missile Defense, The ABM Treaty And the Future of START II

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On January 27, 1999, the Arms Control Association (ACA) held a press conference to assess the impact of Secretary of Defense William Cohen's January 20 announcement concerning the funding of preparations for the deployment of a national missile defense (NMD) system.

Cohen announced the administration's plan to commit additional funding to its NMD program to permit a deployment decision in 2000, and suggested the United States' willingness to withdraw, if necessary, from the ABM Treaty. The ACA briefing coincided with Secretary of State Madeleine Albright's three-day trip to Moscow to ease the growing strain in U.S.-Russian relations.

Following the December 16–19 U.S.-British strikes against Iraq, the Russian Duma delayed its vote on START II ratification, just as a favorable vote seemed imminent. Cohen's NMD announcement further complicated the already testy relationship.

Panelists included Spurgeon M. Keeny, Jr., president and executive director of ACA; John Pike, director of the Space Policy Project at the Federation of American Scientists; John B. Rhinelander, ACA vice-chairman and former legal advisor to the U.S. SALT I delegation that negotiated the ABM Treaty; and Susan Eisenhower, chairman of the Center for Political and Strategic Studies and member of the ACA Board of Directors.

The following is an edited version of their remarks.

 

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  • See additional materials from the press conference briefing book.
  • Duma Drafts Resolution Then Postpones Vote on START II

    Craig Cerniello

    ANGRY AT the December 16–19 U.S.-British military strikes against Iraq, the Russian Duma, or lower house of parliament, postponed a planned vote on START II ratification in the final weeks of December. Although the Duma has placed START II on the agenda for its spring 1999 session, which begins on January 12, no date has been set for a vote on the treaty.

    Submitted to the Duma by President Boris Yeltsin in June 1995, START II has been held up by concerns about specific treaty provisions, NATO enlargement and U.S. adherence to the ABM Treaty. After Yevgeny Primakov's appointment as prime minister last September, however, the outlook for ratification improved considerably.

    Following closed-door hearings during which First Deputy Prime Minister Yuri Maslyukov made a strong appeal for the treaty, the Duma announced on November 10 that it had ordered the relevant committees to prepare promptly the necessary documents for ratification.

    Subsequently, Vladimir Lukin, chairman of the Duma's international affairs committee, and Roman Popkovich, head of the defense committee, produced a draft resolution of ratification, providing the best indication to date that the Russian parliament was now ready to seriously consider the treaty.

    The draft resolution of ratification— published December 9 by the Russian-based PIR Center—does not change the terms of START II, but does give insight into key Russian concerns about the treaty and its implementation. Most significantly, it stipulates that Russia will not allow START II to enter into force until the U.S. Senate has approved the September 1997 package of agreements signed in New York. This package, which the Clinton administration has yet to submit to the Senate, includes a protocol extending the START II implementation period by five years, a memorandum of understanding identifying the successor states to the former Soviet Union under the ABM Treaty, as well as two agreed statements establishing a "demarcation line" between permitted theater missile defense (TMD) systems and restricted ABM systems. (See ACT, September 1997.)

    This linkage to the September 1997 agreements could seriously delay START II implementation because key Senate Republicans, such as Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Jesse Helms (R-NC), have already declared their opposition to the ABM portion of the package.

    In addition, the draft resolution outlines the "extraordinary events" under which Russia would have the right to withdraw from START II. These include U.S. violation of START II or withdrawal from the ABM Treaty; a destabilizing buildup of strategic nuclear forces by states that are not parties to START II; deployment of nuclear weapons on the territories of new NATO member-states (Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic); deployment by any state of weapon systems that could interfere with Russia's early-warning capabilities; and extraordinary economic or technical events that would prevent Moscow from fulfilling its START II obligations. The resolution also calls upon Russia government to provide adequate funding for its strategic nuclear forces under the treaty—a major concern given Moscow's financial difficulties.

    Upon receiving assurances from Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov that the Duma would vote favorably on the treaty by the end of the year, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright announced on December 9 that she would travel to Moscow in January to begin negotiations on START III. That agreement would limit each side to no more than 2,500 deployed strategic warheads by the end of 2007.

    After the United States and Britain launched air strikes against Iraq on December 16, however, Sergei Prikhodko, President Yeltsin's deputy chief-of-staff for foreign affairs, stated, "You can forget about START II ratification." Russia blasted the military action as a flagrant violation of international law and recalled its ambassador to Washington. On December 22, Vladimir Ryzhkov, first deputy speaker in the Duma, stated that while START II is on the agenda for spring 1999, there is "no guarantee" that the treaty will be ratified at that time. While Albright is scheduled to visit Moscow on January 25–27, the United States has no plans to begin START III negotiations due to the Duma's decision to postpone START II ratification.

    Duma Drafts Resolution Then Postpones Vote on START II

    Don't Stop START II

    Spurgeon M. Keeny, Jr.

    After coming within a hairbreadth of Russian ratification, START II is now in serious jeopardy because of the U.S. bombing of Iraq and provocative U.S. statements on the deployment of a national missile defense (NMD). If, as a consequence, the Russian Duma fails to act soon on START II, there will be little prospect of further progress on nuclear arms reductions during the remainder of the Clinton administration and quite possibly the loss of past arms control accomplishments as well.

    After years of delay, the Duma was scheduled on December 25 to ratify START II. The world was denied this long-awaited Christmas present, however, when the United States on December 16 launched intensive strikes against Iraq in response to Saddam Hussein's denial of UNSCOM inspections. The Duma postponment of the vote on START II reflects the strong disapproval across the spectrum of Russian political opinion of the U.S. actions, which were perceived as being taken in disdainful disregard of strong Russian objections. Nevertheless, the Duma announced that consideration of START II would resume in March, albeit under a cloud.

    The Russians were then treated on January 20 to Secretary of Defense Cohen's announcement that advance funding would be provided to support NMD deployment should such decision be made in June 2000. Accepting uncritically the dubious proposition that a rogue-state ICBM threat will soon exist, Cohen stated that the decision to deploy now depends solely on demonstration of the necessary technology. And, if Russia would not agree to modify the ABM Treaty to accommodate the as-yet-undefined NMD system, Cohen said the United States could simply withdraw from the treaty. As the specific architecture of the system has yet to be defined, the modifications that Cohen has in mind are not clear. However, given the technically demanding, politically driven requirement that protection must be provided for all 50 states, all of the substantive articles of the treaty would have to be amended to permit deployment.

    The timing of this announcement could not have been worse for START II. All Duma factions saw it as a blatant attempt to repudiate the fundamental bargain on which strategic nuclear reductions are based: namely, the ABM Treaty would prevent either side from deploying defenses to challenge the deterrence provided by the other side's offensive forces. In fact, the Duma had already included as a condition of START II ratification that U.S. violation of or withdrawal from the ABM Treaty would constitute a basis for Russian withdrawal from START II. To Russians, the idea that the United States, in response to the future possibility of a minimal nuclear threat from a weak, isolated North Korea, was prepared to repudiate the ABM Treaty at the ultimate cost of tens of billions of dollars was too irrational to be credible. Despite U.S. disclaimers, deployment of even a limited NMD system appeared in Moscow to be the first step in developing a defense to negate Russia's deteriorating strategic forces that would be further constrained by START II reductions.

    With bitter memories of NATO expansion still fresh, these developments fed Duma suspicions of U.S. motives. Some Duma members were encouraged to argue that Russia would be better off without START II so that it could retain its SS-18 missiles (each with 10 high-yield warheads) and put three warheads on each new TOPOL-M missile.

    Whatever value one places on a defense against the highly unlikely emergence of a credible rogue-state ICBM threat or on U.S. military actions against states such as Iraq and Serbia, that value pales in comparison with the importance of Russian ratification of START II and the commitment to follow-on negotiations on START III. These treaties would reduce—by about 75 percent from present levels—the number of deployed Russian strategic warheads. In addition they would eliminate all Russian land-based MIRVed missiles, which are particularly dangerous because their high value as targets encourages a precarious launch-on-warning posture. However unlikely a U.S.-Russian conflict may appear today, Russia remains the only country that can threaten U.S. survival.

    The window of opportunity for START II is rapidly closing. The Duma's interest in the treaty will disappear as campaigning for its fall elections begins. Any prospects for favorable Duma action will be dealt a final blow if there are further provocative U.S. actions such as air strikes in the Kosovo crisis or invitations to any of the Baltic states to join NATO at the alliance's 50th anniversary celebration in late April.

    President Clinton must move immediately to give START II the overriding priority it deserves in the U.S. national security process and avoid foreign policy actions that could result in the Duma's indefinite deferment of START II ratification.

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