'Bittersweet' START

The Senate's approval of the follow-on Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty this afternoon by a 71-26 vote is somewhat "bittersweet" for arms control, according to an essay just published by the Monterey Institute's Center for Nonproliferation Studies. The pact, according to analysts Nikolai Sokov and Miles Pomper, "will aid strategic stability and international disarmament, bolster President Barack Obama's international and domestic standing, and further contribute to the effort to 'reset' U.S.-Russian relations on a more constructive path."

However:

Nonetheless, the issues raised during its consideration, the concessions granted to win its approval, and the closeness and urgency of the vote, indicate the limits and nature of the arms control and disarmament opportunities that the Obama administration will be able to undertake in the final two years of the president's first term. Indeed, those opportunities will narrow even further next year when Republicans will hold five more seats in the Senate and a few of the minority of Republicans who supported the treaty will have retired. The result is that President Obama's effort to build a world free of nuclear weapons, announced with much fanfare in Prague less than two years ago, is likely to be sidetracked for the time being, if not shelved altogether.

One setback to that effort may have occurred even before senators cast their new vote on the treaty in the weapons complex. In seeking to win Republican support, Obama pledged to devote well over $180 billion over 10 years to the modernization and maintenance of the complex that manufactures US nuclear weapons and the missiles, bombers, and submarines that deliver them a sizable investment that may lead some states to question the sincerity of the administration's pursuit of nuclear disarmament.

The second casualty is likely to be US ratification of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT). The United States is among a handful of countries that still must ratify this ban on nuclear weapons tests for it to enter into force. In his Prague speech, Obama had pledged to again seek Senate ratification of the treaty. In 1999, the Clinton administration had failed to convince a Republican-controlled Senate to muster the required two-thirds majority for approval. With the Republican minority growing and becoming even more ideological, the Obama administration is unlikely to want to tempt defeat again. Moreover, in agreeing to the modernization pledges as part of the New START ratification process, administration officials have already traded away what was seen as their potential trump card in any CTBT negotiation with Senate Republicans.

Finally , the conditions, understandings, and declarations attached to the treaty's resolution of ratification as well as proposed (if defeated) amendments to the treaty itself, indicate the pressure and limits Obama administration officials would have to operate within should they seek to carry out their desire for a more ambitious series of cuts in the US and Russian nuclear arsenals. New START in many ways merely retains the status quo. The reduction in nuclear weapons it entails is very modest—to 1,550 warheads from 2,200 in the 2002 Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty (SORT, also known as the Moscow Treaty). The new treaty also does not solve any of the truly contentious issues that dominate the US-Russian arms control agenda—missile defense, conventional long-range weapons, uploading capability, nuclear weapons stockpiles, or non-strategic nuclear weapons, which negotiators have expressed a willingness to tackle, but which were postponed until the next stage. Essentially, the main purposes of New START are two: first, to restore the transparency and verification regime that expired with the expiration of START I in December 2009; and, second, to provide a stable and predictable environment for negotiating a new, more ambitious treaty. Given the modest goals of New START, the drama surrounding ratification in the United States is nothing short of perplexing and demonstrates that emotions and politics, rather than impassioned analysis, dominated debates.