President Barack Obama is urging Russia to move decisively beyond
the cold war paradigm by negotiating a new round of arms reductions
that would slash the numbers of nuclear weapons deployed by the US
and Russia by one-third. It's a bold proposal that builds on a lot
of historical success in the field of arms control. But it's not
likely to be met with much enthusiasm in Moscow, where President
Vladimir Putin has made anti-Americanism a central theme of his
third presidential term, and the Russian military is extremely
dubious about any further cuts in their already-overstretched
nuclear deterrent. Why is Obama proposing this idea now? He's
pitching it as part of the Global Nuclear Zero, a grand scheme
supported by Mr. Obama and about 300 other world leaders to promote
policies that will decrease and eventually eliminate atomic weapons
from the Earth.
Even if it should prove unrealizable, it's an alluring idea that
Obama may hope will focus public support and drive practical efforts
to reduce the nuclear danger and build greater trust - especially
between the US and Russia, who still own well over 90 percent of the
world's existing nuclear weapons. During the cold war, the US and
USSR signed a series of landmark arms-control treaties that tamed
the nuclear "balance of terror" and went a long way toward
stabilizing relations between two confrontational superpowers that
held enough mega-tonnage between them to destroy the world many
times over.
Early in his first term, Obama ended a long diplomatic chill with
the Russians by engaging them in successful negotiations for the New
START strategic arms reduction accord, which cut nuclear missile
forces on both sides by almost half. Obama hopes to repeat that hat
trick and arrest the current slide in US-Russia relations by
enticing Moscow into a new, publicly popular round of nuclear arms-
slashing. How many nuclear weapons are there? Under the terms of
the New START treaty, the US and Russia are each allowed 1,550
strategic nuclear warheads, which means weapons that have
intercontinental reach because they're based on long-range bombers,
submarines, and missiles. Under Obama's fresh proposal, both sides
would have to scale down to about 1,000 each.
But that's just the tip of the atomic iceberg. In addition, both
sides maintain hundreds of "tactical" nuclear warheads, which are
much harder to identify because they tend to be small and portable:
for use in artillery shells, depth charges, short-range missiles,
and other ordnance that's difficult to distinguish from conventional
counterparts. According to the nonpartisan Arms Control Association,
the US has about 500 of those, deployed on ships and at US military
bases around the world, while Russia maintains around 2,000.
Seven other nuclear-armed powers, who have never been included in
any arms control deals, hold significant numbers of warheads and
increasingly sophisticated means of delivering them. …
