The latest setback on nuclear arms control threatens one of the vital functions of the 2011 New START accord: the system of mutual inspections that provides confidence that the United States and Russia are abiding by the treaty’s weapons limits. Verification is eroding, and that is only the latest sign that nuclear dangers are rising.
The State Department said Tuesday that it cannot certify Russia is in compliance with the treaty, which limits the United States and Russia to 1,550 strategic warheads and 700 deployed missiles and deployed heavy bombers each. Both sides had agreed to suspend on-site inspections during the pandemic, but Russia has refused a U.S. request to restart them and also turned down a meeting of the treaty’s joint implementation body.
The United States will continue to monitor Russian strategic missile sites with satellites, but on-site inspections are also critical. Rose Gottemoeller, the chief negotiator of the treaty, explained in 2010 that on-site inspections provide “not only the ‘boots on the ground’ presence to confirm Russian data declarations” but also “insights into Russian strategic forces located at those facilities.” This means that U.S. and Russian officials can see the weapons directly and spot any signs the other side is violating the treaty. Reacting to the latest development, Ms. Gottemoeller, now a lecturer at Stanford University, wrote in the Financial Times that “Russia is beginning to tear at the fabric of the treaty.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin is most likely seeking leverage over the United States that he can use in any settlement of the war he launched against Ukraine. But his actions recklessly undermine strategic stability. Without inspections, confidence in both sides’ arsenals will wane. The United States is embarking on a major strategic nuclear modernization cycle, and Russia is in no position to compete. It is not in Mr. Putin’s interests to undermine New START, as he may be poking his own eyes out.
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End of carousel- D.C. Council reverses itself on school resource officers. Good.
- Virginia makes a mistake by pulling out of an election fraud detection group.
- Vietnam sentences another democracy activist.
- Biden has a new border plan.
The D.C. Council voted on Tuesday to stop pulling police officers out of schools, a big win for student safety. Parents and principals overwhelmingly support keeping school resource officers around because they help de-escalate violent situations. D.C. joins a growing number of jurisdictions, from Montgomery County, Md., to Denver, in reversing course after withdrawing officers from school grounds following George Floyd’s murder. Read our recent editorial on why D.C. needs SROs.
Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) just withdrew Virginia from a data-sharing consortium, ERIC, that made the commonwealth’s elections more secure, following Republicans in seven other states in falling prey to disinformation peddled by election deniers. Former GOP governor Robert F. McDonnell made Virginia a founding member of ERIC in 2012, and until recently conservatives touted the group as a tool to combat voter fraud. D.C. and Maryland plan to remain. Read our recent editorial on ERIC.
In Vietnam, a one-party state, democracy activist Tran Van Bang was sentenced on Friday to eight years in prison and three years probation for writing 39 Facebook posts. The court claimed he had defamed the state in his writings, according to Radio Free Asia. In the past six years, at least 60 bloggers and activists have been sentenced to between 4 and 15 years in prison under the law, Human Rights Watch found. Read more of the Editorial Board’s coverage on autocracy and Vietnam.
The Department of Homeland Security has provided details of a plan to prevent a migrant surge along the southern border. The administration would presumptively deny asylum to migrants who failed to seek it in a third country en route — unless they face “an extreme and imminent threat” of rape, kidnapping, torture or murder. Critics allege that this is akin to an illegal Trump-era policy. In fact, President Biden is acting lawfully in response to what was fast becoming an unmanageable flow at the border. Read our most recent editorial on the U.S. asylum system.
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The Russian and U.S. nuclear arsenals are now a fraction of the approximately 64,000 destructive warheads the two country held at the peak of the Cold War, which was more than enough to destroy life on Earth. The reductions resulted from a series of legally binding, verifiable treaties between the Soviet Union — and later Russia — and the United States. The negotiations were successful because both sides realized the dangers and viewed treaty limits as in their interests.
That arms control regime is disappearing. The Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty collapsed in 2019 over Russian violations. The United States withdrew from the Open Skies Treaty, a confidence-building measure, in 2020. No new negotiations have been launched. The countries’ existing strategic nuclear weapons remain on launch-ready alert. Meanwhile, no treaty has ever limited tactical or short-range nuclear weapons.
Adding a worrisome dimension is China. After many years of maintaining a nuclear arsenal in the low hundreds of warheads, China now appears to be heading toward at least 1,000 by the end of this decade and is building a land-sea-air triad of delivery vehicles similar to that of Russia and the United States. China has refused to join a multilateral negotiation to limit nuclear arms.
New START expires in less than three years. Without an effective successor treaty, all three nations might face pressure to kick off a new nuclear arms race, which could send the world back to the dangerous precipice on which it teetered during the Cold War — or beyond.