By Peter Huessy, Warrior Nuclear Weapons Analyst
America’s nuclear arms agreements with the USSR and then Russia have been both bad and good. Our efforts with China have not gone beyond the discussion stage. The Cold War ended with the collapse of the Soviet empire, but subsequent deep defense cuts and failure to sustain and enhance our deterrent has left the United States facing the prospect of two nuclear armed peer enemies in Russia and China, with combined nuclear arsenals approaching some ten thousand nuclear weapons, despite the current 90% reductions secured between the United States and Russia’s strategic (long-range) nuclear weapons .
Behind the probable reversal in nuclear reductions, lies an original erroneous set of assumptions reflected in US nuclear posture reviews. The 2023 Congressional Strategic Posture Commission’s pragmatic America’s Strategic Posture highlighted differences in “understandings of the threats” with the Biden Administration’s 2022 Nuclear Posture Review, highlighted by Keith Payne’s tightly reasoned NIPP Information Series Issue No. 577. .
The 2022 NPR assumed greater cooperation between Russia, China and the United States in addressing nuclear matters, especially preventing terror organizations or terror sponsoring states from acquiring nuclear weapons. .But Moscow nearly always cheats on treaties of all kinds, including nuclear agreements. And Beijing has a spotty record complying with what few treaties they ratify.
For example, currently Russia has not allowed the required New START inspections for the past few years. Similarly, the Outer Space Treaty (1967) prohibits nuclear weapons based in space. 136 countries are now parties or signatories, including Russia and China. The OST is threatened by Putin’s recently revealed “Sputnik,” which would base a nuclear weapon in orbit. China’s Xi’s claims hegemony over the Moon and Mars, which might also lead to China placing nuclear weapons in space, contrary to the OST’s mandatory peaceful use of space requirement.
Both nations are members of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (1968). However, according to the late Tom Reed’s “The Nuclear Express,” China in 1982 decided to deliberately help Pakistan and North Korea secure nuclear weapons contrary to their NPT commitments, while Russia also helped North Korea with its nuclear related missile programs, again contrary to the NPT requirements.
Now the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks I (1972 and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (1972) reflected Soviet leader Brezhnev demand that all US missile defenses be limited to a small 100 interceptor force protecting Washington, DC or alternatively a US ICBM site, while codifying not nuclear reductions but an agreed upon multi-fold increase in allowable deployed strategic long range nuclear weapons. This achieved two Soviet goals: leaving the US open to coercive nuclear threats and banning effective missile defenses. By 1979, the two nations had agreed to SALT II, but the treaty was subsequently withdrawn by the Carter administration as it could not pass muster with the US Senate. It allowed the US and the USSR to further build offensive strategic forces to over 10,000 deployed warheads, albeit with some modest restrictions on the number of nuclear armed missiles that each could have multiple warheads. The first treaty that actually reduced nuclear weapons was the 1987 Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces Treaty which eliminated an entire class of intermediate range ballistic missiles. The Soviets SS-20s in Europe and Asia were deployed in the 1970s as a means of created division within NATO which Moscow assumed would not be able to agree to a counter deployment. However, President Ronald Reagan was able to deploy US Pershing and GLCM missiles, surprising Moscow, and then leading to the treaty. However, over time, Russia was caught repeatedly cheating, so the U.S. officially withdrew from the agreement in 2019.
With the end of the Soviet empire and dissolution of the USSR, the Bush administration put together what was termed Presidential Nuclear Initiatives (1991), which were unilateral initiatives to radically reduce holdings of both tactical nukes and those US strategic nuclear programs not allowed under the START II agreement. While promising to match the US reductions, the Russians did in part but then pushed to develop new battlefield weapons by a Yeltsin Presidential decree in April 1999. Russian theater nuclear weapons now number at least 1900, although their theater/battlefield weapons stockpile may exceed 4000.
The first treaty reducing strategic nuclear arms was the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty I (1991), proposed initially by President Reagan in the fall of 1981. Although it did not apply to tactical nuclear weapons, it did reduce allowable strategic nuclear weapons by at least fifty percent to 6000, and allowed 1600 missiles and bombers, fully a third cut in what were known as strategic nuclear delivery vehicles or SNDVs.
During the Senate debate on the treaty, Senator Dan Coats (R-IN) noted Russia was then currently deploying over 13,000 strategic nuclear warheads, all allowed by the previous SALT agreements. For the most part, Russia did reduce its nuclear weapons as required by the treaty as verification rules using national technical means were relatively robust and allowed the US to have confidence in Russian compliance.
The START II (1993) agreement followed, part of Reagan’s original reductions proposals. It was signed by President’s Yeltsin and Bush in January 1993, and did reduce allowable warheads to 3500 and most importantly banned all multiple warhead ICBMs, a key ingredient of Russian coercive military power. While the US Senate ratified the agreement, the Russian Duma understand it would largely undercut Moscow’s heavy missile leverage, a point made by Mikhail Gorbachev in a New York Times op-ed in 1996. The Duma cleverly added a provision to the agreement requiring all missile defense research and development to remain in the laboratory and not deployed. This 1999 provision was unacceptable to the US Senate and never agreed to.
Between the START II agreement and the next reductions deal in 2003, the Senate considered whether to ratify the 1996 Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. ): By a vote if 48-51, the Senate rejected the treaty with opponents explaining the lack of verifiable technology to determine whether cheating was being undertaken, especially very low yield nuclear tests, which were banned worldwide. Currently the head of the Nevada test site explained, the US does not test and has no plans to test, while it is widely thought that both Russia and China have repeatedly tested at very low yields.
The Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty, (the 2003 Treaty of Moscow) lacked the detail of previous reduction agreements but could rely on the still in force START I verification measures. The offensive reductions were down to the 2200 level, some one-third lower than the START II levels, but with compliance not enforced. The key to the agreement was the companion elimination of the ABM Treaty which the Bush (43) administration had jettisoned, reversing the 1972 SALT and ABM Treaty where a ban on missile defenses was accompanied by an agreed upon buildup of nuclear weapons, proving that allowing defenses did make nuclear reductions impossible.
In 2010, the administration sent the New START agreement to the US Senate for advice and consent. However, future nuclear weapons such as cruise missiles and drone submarines were not banned, nor were theater nuclear systems regulated. As part of the agreement with the Senate, a classified codicil was added to the defense bill laying out the entirety of the agreed upon nuclear modernization effort to also go forward.
Reductions were nominally to 1550 wa
rheads, but bomber weapons only counted as “one” irrespective of the number of cruise missiles or gravity bombs carried. When those allowable warheads were added to the nominal 1550 allowed, New START would allow some 1800-2100 warheads to be deployed, nearly identical to the level allowed by the Moscow or SORT agreement.
This would appear to indicate what Moscow wanted was breathing space from 2003-2026 (when the New START agreement expires) to allow a full-up Russia modernization effort to take place and allow Russia to not match US force capability but actually exceed US nuclear assets, a point that the Posture Commission’s recent report does seriously consider.
Despite nearly a 90% reduction in allowable and deployed nuclear warheads achieved from SALT I through New START, the US now faces the prospect of a reversal of sorts where some 10,000 nuclear warheads may be deployed by both Russia and China by 2035-45, including strategic and tactical nuclear weapons, a possible projected outcome detailed in the past year by four nuclear experts including Rick Fisher of the International Assessment and Strategy Center, Mark Schneider of NIPP, Christopher Yeaw of the University of Nebraska and James Howe of Vision Centric. :
In summary, the reasons the US proposed the various nuclear agreements in the past 50+ years vary but can be categorized as follows.
- The assumption of the 1991 Presidential Initiatives was that if the US goes first, current adversaries will reciprocate.
- The critics of START I and II and INF assumed that the Reagan nuclear buildup would trigger a counter Soviet effort and limit any deal on nuclear weapons reductions. While Gorbachev initially increased SS-20 missile deployments, increased troop strength in Afghanistan, walked out of the arms talks over opposition to SDI, and increased assistance to Cuba and Nicaragua, Reagan eventually prevailed and secured the INF zero-zero formula and eventually major reductions by 1991 and 1993 under the following administration. Peace through strength worked, contrary to widespread opinion otherwise.
- Opponents of proliferation see the NPT as a guarantor of sharply limiting the spread of nuclear weapons when in fact China and Russia have actually facilitated the spread of nuclear programs to Pakistan and North Korea and thus consequently to Iran, Libya, Syria and possibly Iraq. Furthermore, there continues to be an undercurrent of blame to be placed on the US for a supposedly hostile policy that compels North Korea to seek security in nuclear weapons.
- The US seeks nuclear arms control in part to balance calls for nuclear modernization, as the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Senator Menendez (D-NJ) has explained. But as the former HASC Chair Representative Smith (D-WA) correctly noted, if arms control agreements are necessary to companion with nuclear modernization, an adversary could refuse to enter arms deal and as a result compromise US nuclear modernization.
- The START II process underscored the continued Russian objective of killing all US missile defenses, as the Duma tried to restrict all US missile defense work to the laboratory. However, when the US withdrew from the ABM treaty, Moscow still agreed to reductions from 6000 to 2200 and then 1550 warheads under the 2002 Moscow agreement and then the 2010 New START agreement.
- While New START achieved modest reductions from the SORT or the Moscow treaty, the extent to which the objectives of the United States are concentrated on achieving “global zero”, the United States may miss out on more stabilizing objectives such as eliminating multiple warheads land based ICBMs, as was contained in the START II agreement, but which the Duma rejected, clearly illustrating the objective of the Russian leadership and the Rocket Forces which is to use nuclear forces to bully adversaries and as Putin has explained, “escalate to win.” It may be that eliminating all nuclear weapons is impossible given the current state of the world, but banning multiple warheads may not be a pipedream in that in January 1993 Yeltsin and Bush did sign such a deal with STRAT START II. .
- While not reflected in any of the nuclear arms deals signed by American Presidents in the past 50 years, there is a strain of deterrent thinking that believes conventional arms are sufficient to retaliate against an enemy nuclear attack. A corollary to this thinking is the often-stated idea that nuclear weapons can be used to deter but they should never be used for “war fighting,” even if solely for retaliation. An additional part of such thinking is a third part, and that is if one is going to retaliate, holding at risk an adversaries weapons is highly destabilizing, and only cities should be targeted, although some disarmament think tanks appear to believe no nuclear weapons should be used even in response to a nuclear attack, leading to the unsettled realization that nuclear deterrence could be seen by our adversaries as only a bluff.
- As the Posture Commission explained, our adversaries see nuclear weapons not as a deterrent to prevent aggression, but as weapons to be used for blackmail and coercion, to actually allow aggression such as by Russia in Ukraine to be successful.
Conclusion
Arms reduction efforts between the U.S. and our superpower adversaries have never been as successful as disarmament advocates have hoped. But as the Reagan and the Obama eras showed – arms control is consistent with and requires nuclear modernization. Indeed, more accurate, reliable, and survivable platforms enable smaller inventories needed for deterrence.
Given the breathtaking expansion of Russia’s and China’s modernized arsenals, combined with their cooperative military near-alliance., the U.S. has to understand the extent to which arms control extends US deterrent capability and the extent to which our adversaries see arms deals to undo the very deterrent we believe we are building.
In the conflict-ridden environment of Cold War II, further domestic nuclear reduction pleas, spurned by our adversaries, would be quixotic and unwise. Arms control priorities should be nuclear counterterrorism, counterproliferation, and damping of excessive adversary buildups. America needs to press forward on our triad and NC3 modernization, low yield near-parity, overall arsenal rightsizing, effective missile defense, acquisition reform, supply chain robustness – and we need to reject wrong-headed ideas that impede all these initiatives such as calling into question the very deterrent we rely upon for our security.
About the Author: Peter Huessy is a senior fellow at NIDS and CEO of Geostrategic Analysis. Peter Huessy is the Senior Nuclear Weapons analyst, Center for Military Modernization. Huessy has a Masters Degree in International Relations from Columbia University and a BS in East Asian Studies from Yonsel University in Seoul, South Korea.
