What To Watch Out For In The START Treaty

The presidents of the United States and Russian Federation signed the new START agreement (Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty) in Prague yesterday. It limits the operational deployments of the US and Russia to 1,550 warheads, and also restricts deployed delivery systems (missiles, submarines, bombers and so on) to 700.

This is an important political moment for the Obama administration and its ‘reset’ agenda with Moscow, but I doubt that it will actually change the actual strategic balance between the two countries. Russia is already largely in compliance with the treaty; all that remains to be done is to strike some weapons from the roster. This does not mean that the treaty is meaningless. It will affect Moscow’s strategic modernization, especially given the uniquely Russian tendency to extend the operational life of any weapons system until it is entirely devoid of any combat effectiveness whatsoever. It does mean that the actual weapons mix deployed by Moscow (assuming budgets and all other things are equal) will consist of more new ones and less old ones. And, as previously stated, that’s not quite such a dramatic shift.

Other issues to look out for:

- ICBMs and other missiles with non-nuclear warheads. The US has expressed some interest in using submarine-based launchers for such purposes. This makes the Russians nervous, since there’s not much difference between (or way to tell the difference between) an ICBM with a couple tons of TNT strapped on, and one with a nuke. From satellite, an ICBM launch looks like a launch – there’s no way to tell what is actually being launched.

- How many warheads on each missile? This is an old issue, but it hasn’t gone away: the Russian R-36 design can put roughly ten warheads into orbit. For some perspective, the R-36 was test-flown in the early 1960s.

- Missile defense. The new treaty doesn’t deal with the US BMD program at all. The Russians put out a signing statement, warning that they will pull out of the new agreement if they perceive BMD to be a threat.

–Evan Johnson