Arms Control Returns as Farce

On Thursday, March 25, the newspapers announced on their front pages a U.S.-Russian nuclear arms agreement. A slow news day, maybe, I thought. This sort of thing would have deserved front page coverage before 1991; now it may still, but that's not so evident. During the Cold War, strategic arms control was bound up with a very serious and dangerous competition. Now it isn't. That's why, too, since politics always trumps hardware in subjects like this, we could only have real arms control when it was politically marginal, and when it was not politically marginal we couldn't have it. The way the Cold War ended proved this, but a lot of people do not seem interested in that proof. They prefer their earlier illusions about arms control. Some habits die hard, and America's leading journalists apparently have not got the message, or learned the lesson. That seems to apply, too, to the Obama Administration.

The Washington Post's coverage was noteworthy for its balmy idiocy. The writers, in this case someones named Mary Beth Sheridan and Philip P. Pan, wrote, inter alia, that: "The pact appeared to represent President Obama's first victory in his ambitious agenda toward a nuclear-free world." It is no such thing. If the editor told the reporters to go find something to praise Obama for, to help save his otherwise disastrous foreign policy, OK, one can understand that. But to link this agreement to this nutty, bumper-sticker slogan of a non-policy is just silly.

The actual reporting also made, just by the way, no sense. The article went on, "Each side will reduce its most dangerous nuclear weapons--those deployed for long-range missiles--from a ceiling of 2,200 to between 1,500 and 1,675. And the two militaries will make relatively small cuts in the number of jets and land- or submarine-based missiles that carry nuclear warheads and bombs." No number was given.

This sentence is so screwed up that it will take me several sentences so show how.

First of all, nuclear weapons are not dangerous unless they go off--i.e., are detonated, and it's not at all likely that any U.S. or Russian weapons will be detonated, now or probably ever. It's just as sensible, more so really, to describe a nuclear weapon as potent as it is to describe one as dangerous. Ms. Sheridan driving her car while talking on her cell phone is actually more dangerous than a nuclear weapon for any practical purpose.

Next, a weapon is not more dangerous because it is long-range. If a tac-nuke goes off near someone, they are going to be very dead, just as dead as if they were hit by something bigger from farther away. Long-range weapons may be more strategically consequential in some respects (and not in others), but that is quite a different matter. The nukes most likely ever to be used are tactical nuclear weapons, of which the Russians still have a whole damned lot in Europe. These are arguably more dangerous precisely because they are more apt to be used. The treaty does not cover them, at all.

And the language used!! Er, "warheads deployed for long-range missiles. . ."?! How about "deployed on" maybe? Jets? I think some of our bombers actually make their way across the sky with propellers. The Russians have been concerned with nukes on an F-18?

Next, the statement makes it seem as though what has been agreed is mainly a reduction of warheads, not launchers. It's sure news to me if these negotiations have done that. It is not possible to verify warhead reductions. These sorts of negotiations, going back 40 years, have always been about numbers of warheads married to deployed delivery vehicles. So what is this article even talking about?

It also makes it seem that more weapons will be taken down than launchers. Though I have not yet seen the treaty text, that is not my understanding of the agreement or, as you'll see in a moment, that of the New York Times. I think deployed weapons are down to 1,550 or thereabouts, and launchers down to 800. The latter is not "a relatively small cut." It is significant.

There is also an intimation here that a warhead and bomb are two different things. They are not. Yes, some warheads can be independently guided even after leaving their delivery vehicles. But they are still just bombs; they fall, because they have no engines.

It is hard not to conclude that Ms. Sheridan and Mr. Pan do not know what they are talking about, and neither does their editor. Shame on the Washington Post for getting a front page, top-of-the-fold story so messed up.

Compare the New York Times. The NYT describes the agreement this way: ". . .the two sides agreed to lower the limits on deployed strategic warheads by more than one-quarter and launchers by half. . ." Now, since there can be more than one warhead per launcher, this makes sense. Compare it to the Washington Post's language, above, which, as I have said, makes no sense. But the NYT, true to form, this time under the bi-line of Peter Baker and Ellen Barry, claims that the deal represents "perhaps the most concrete foreign policy accomplishment for Mr. Obama since he took office 14 months ago and the most significant result of his effort to `reset' the troubled relationship with Russia."

Wow, what an editorial.

First, it's not really a foreign policy achievement; if it's anything, it's a national security policy achievement. Except that it isn't, because the agreement is almost meaningless. The Administration thinks it will help the upcoming NPT Review Conference achieve something practical, but it won't because the Review Conference itself can't achieve anything practical, not at a time when real proliferation threats are being left unaddressed in practice. It's nice to have the deal done before the NPT Review Conference, yes; not to have it done would be embarrassing, like not having an energy bill before Copenhagen, for example.

But we'll have to wait to see what the Administration had to pay for that accomplishment. Just agreeing to negotiate these reductions with the Russians, and letting the Russians know we needed it done before a date certain (in May), gave Moscow free leverage over the terms, and they have dragged it out for many months just to screw with us and take advantage at the margins. The fact that the Russians announced the deal and the White House was taken by surprise is also a little worrisome; it suggests that perhaps this was another Russian pressure ploy to get their way on a few remaining details at the last minute. The Russians cannot resist this kind of gamesmanship against a weak and clueless White House. I think it may even be genetic. Well, we'll see how the story plays out; maybe I am being cynical, but maybe not. Stay tuned to to this blog.

The real problem here is the Administration's decision to privilege arms control in the relationship with Russia. I can see a reason for this, of course; it makes the Russians feel our equal, for this is the only area in which they are, more or less, our equal. It salves their wounded imperial pride. The idea seems to have been, OK, we play nice with them here and they'll be more agreeable in other areas. I think the Administration believed that finishing the deal would be quick and easy, since there wasn't really that much to do, and the new atmospherics would pay off in other areas. This makes at least theoretical sense.

Ah, but the NSC lead man on Russia, Michael McFaul, said recently that the Administration refuses to play the linkage game, even though the Russian leadership wants to. Well, this U.S. use of arms control in the Russia reset business seems sort of contradictory, then: What is it, if not a version of linkage? Maybe they're only saying this now because the deal took much longer and was much harder to do than they thought. In any event, if the promotion of arms control to the top of the U.S.-Russia agenda was meant to cause pliancy in Moscow, where is that pliancy? Where have the Russians been agreeable at all? With regard to Iran? Georgia? Search me. McFaul is right; there's no linkage, at least not in our direction.

I would rather have made reductions in the U.S. arsenal unilaterally, and invited the Russians to undertake a parallel unilateral action. We are capable of deciding how many of these weapons we need without all the pomp and circumstance of formal negotiations, and we know that Russian numbers are going to come down anyway for financial and technical reasons. There was no reason to negotiate any of this, except for symbolic purposes. Indeed, the numbers I would have chosen aren't too far off from 1,550 deployed warheads and 800 launchers. For reasons I'd rather not write about in public, I'd say 1,200/700 would be OK, but 1,550/800 is close, so let's not be picky. Too much lower than that and we might tempt third parties we would be foolish to tempt, and hence, by the way, one aspect of the foolishness of the nuclear-free world stuff, and one more reason why this agreement is NOT a step in that direction. (If the deal had taken both sides down to, say, 500/300, that would have been such a step and that would have been dangerously bad.)

The Administration is also claiming a major advance in verification protocols. We'll see if that turns out to be true once the text is available for public inspection. Even if it is true, that could have been negotiated separately from the numbers.

So let's for a moment credit, just for the sake of argument, the NYT view that this post-START II deal is the Obama Administration's most important achievement in foreign policy. Now what does that say? A superfluous agreement whose manner of negotiation negated the diplomatic impact it was supposed to have on Russian behavior is the most important foreign policy achievement of the Administration? Yikes. And gosh, maybe it is!