David A. Cooper

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Although the strategic arms reductions required by the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) have long since been fulfilled, there are sound reasons to preserve aspects of this legacy treaty beyond December 5, 2009.1 While few have seen this as a top national security priority, there has been no real dispute about the desirability of trying to extend at least some START elements, most notably its longstanding verification provisions. If nothing else, these proven mechanisms underpin the standalone reductions in operationally deployed strategic warheads that the more recent Moscow Treaty requires by 2012.2 As then–Secretary of State Colin Powell noted in submitting the Moscow Treaty to President George W. Bush in 2002, “START’s comprehensive verification regime will provide the foundation for confidence, transparency and predictability in [these] further strategic offensive reductions.”3 Largely with the aim to preserve this transparency infrastructure, the Bush administration responded positively to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s call in 2006 for talks on a new treaty to replace START, which began in March 2007. However, this effort never produced a common understanding on the basic shape of a new agreement. Both sides agreed early on that they did not want to extend START per se. But whereas the United States simply wanted to enhance the Moscow Treaty with transparency measures drawn from, or, in some cases, going beyond START, Russia sought an entirely new treaty that would effectively supersede the Moscow Treaty. Its main goal was to shift the operative unit of account for Moscow Treaty reductions from deployed warheads to the START formula focusing on delivery systems.4 Fundamentally, the Bush administration viewed the Moscow Treaty approach as advantageous to U.S. interests, and therefore was unwilling to contemplate superseding this basic framework merely for the sake of extending verification measures.5

Document Type

Policy Brief

Publication Date

7-2009

Publication

Strategic Forum

Publisher

National Defense University Press

City

Washington, DC

Aligning Disarmament to Nuclear Dangers: Off to a Hasty START?

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