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    Scott Ritter: Reimagining Arms Control After Ukraine Archived Message

    Posted by sashimi on March 1, 2023, 4:03 am, in reply to "Scott Ritter: The Red Scare 2.0: Russophobia in America Today"

    28 February 2023

    Lede: Having used arms control to gain unilateral advantage over Russia, the
    cost to the U.S. and NATO in getting Moscow back to the negotiating table will
    be high.

    (quote)
    U.S.-Russian arms control is in a state of extreme distress.

    The U.S. withdrawal from the foundational Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty in
    2002 undid the functional and theoretical premise of mutually assured
    destruction (MAD) that provided logical equilibrium to the fundamentals of
    nuclear deterrence theory.

    Similarly, the Trump administration's precipitous termination of the
    Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty in 2019 attacked both elements of the
    "trust but verify" maxim that governed issues of compliance verification that
    made arms control viable in the first place.

    The last remaining arms control agreement that places limits on the strategic
    nuclear arsenals of both the U.S. and Russia is the New Strategic Arms Reduction
    Treaty (START).

    Signed in 2010, and extended for five years in 2021, the treaty will expire in
    2026. It places restrictions on the number of deployed nuclear warheads each
    side is permitted to have (1,550), as well as vehicles (missiles, bombers,
    submarines) to deliver these warheads (700).

    Equally important to the numerical caps is the compliance verification regime
    mandated by the treaty, which includes the right of each side to conduct up to
    18 on-site inspections per year. Up to 10 of these inspections can be done at
    operational bases where nuclear delivery systems are based. Inspectors there can
    visually confirm the presence of nuclear warheads by randomly selecting missiles
    for inspection.

    On Hold
    The compliance verification aspects of New START have been on pause since early
    2020, when public health concerns generated by the Covid-19 pandemic compelled
    both countries to cease inspections and the bi-annual convening of the Bilateral
    Consultative Committee (BCC) which oversaw the handling of any treaty
    discrepancies identified by either party.

    When the pandemic began to wane in early 2022, efforts to restart treaty
    compliance verification and consultations were stymied by the political fallout
    from the Russian invasion of Ukraine. European Union sanctions banning
    overflights of Russian aircraft prevented Russia from carrying out on-site
    inspections of U.S. strategic nuclear facilities.

    Issues of reciprocity drove Russia to deny U.S. inspectors access to Russian
    strategic facilities. And the BCC process was put on hold due to Russia's
    concerns over the publicly-stated U.S. policy objective of achieving Russia's
    "strategic defeat" in Ukraine.

    The Russian posture became official policy when, at the end of his Feb. 21
    address to the Russian Federal Assembly, Russian President Vladimir Putin
    announced that: "Russia is halting, putting a stop on its participation in the
    strategic weapons control agreement. I would like to reiterate, we are not
    exiting the agreement. We are putting a hold on it."

    His reasons mirrored previous Russian statements regarding U.S. behavior. "We
    know," Putin said, "that the West is directly linked to the attempts of [the]
    Kyiv regime to attack our strategic aviation basis. The NATO specialist helped
    in directing unmanned aircraft to attack these facilities. And they want to
    inspect our facilities? Today this is just nonsense."

    Putin again laid out his concerns regarding the official U.S. and NATO stance
    towards Russia:
    Previous Message

    "I'd like to emphasize that [the] U.S. and NATO are directly stating that their
    objective is to strategically defeat Russia. And after that, are they thinking
    that they're going to just tour our facilities, military facilities? Recently,
    we've passed a law to put the new strategic defense facilities in areas
    [sic]. Are they going to visit those as well?"


    The answer, it seems, is "no."

    The Future of Arms Control
    Where does this leave U.S.-Russian arms control? Dormant, but not yet
    dead. Resuscitating it, however, will require effort on the part of the U.S. and
    its NATO allies. Having made the choice to use arms control as a vehicle for
    gaining unilateral advantage over Russia, the cost for getting Russia back to
    the negotiating table will be high.

    There are four primary issues that any future arms control agreement must, from
    the Russian perspective, address: missile defense; inclusion of U.K. and French
    nuclear forces; resurrection of the INF treaty and additional verification
    measures designed to signify good faith on the part of U.S. negotiators.

    Missile defense was supposed to be part and parcel of the 2010 New START
    negotiations. The Obama administration convinced then-Russian President Dmitry
    Medvedev that strategic nuclear forces and missile defense must be treated as
    separate issues, and that the U.S. would in good faith seek to address Russian
    concerns once New START was ratified.

    The U.S. lied by installing defensive missiles, with offensive capabilities, in
    Romania and Poland. The end result is that Russia has become locked into a
    treaty arrangement that sought to limit its nuclear deterrence forces at the
    same time as the U.S. was installing missile-killing technology on Russia's
    borders.

    Any future arms control agreement must address Russian concerns regarding
    missile defense if it is to have any hope of seeing the light of day.

    In his address, Putin declared that, "Before we come back to the discussion of
    this [New START], we need to understand what France and the U.K. are trying to
    do and how we are going to take into account their strategic arsenals."

    From the very inception of negotiations on the reduction of U.S. and Soviet (and
    later, Russian) stockpiles, Russia has tried to include the British and French
    nuclear arsenals into the mix. The U.S. has steadfastly refused. Linking
    U.S. and NATO objectives to Russia's "strategic defeat" has made it impossible
    for Russia to consider any future arms control discussion that does not include
    the nuclear weapons of these two NATO stalwarts in the overall equation.
    (/quote)
    -- Cont'd at https://consortiumnews.com/2023/02/28/scott-ritter-reimagining-arms-control-after-ukraine/

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