START Compliance

The Pentagon is still working on how to make heavy bombers -- especially aircraft destined only for conventional, non-nuclear missions -- compliant with the follow-on Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, senior Defense Department officials told lawmakers this week.

Sen. Mark Udall (D-CO), during a May 4 Senate Armed Services strategic forces subcommittee hearing on implementing the New START Treaty, asked Air Force Gen. Robert Kehler, head of U.S. Strategic Command, how heavy bombers are being modified to make them compliant with the pact. Kehler responded:

Senator, you have to think about heavy bombers, I think, in three contexts. There is the context of those that are in the boneyard, essentially, that we don't want to have counted against any limits in the treaty, and that we will just take destructive measures to deal with.

Then there is the category of heavy bombers that will be dual-capable, nuclear-capable bombers that will also be available for conventional missions.

Then there is the category of them that we will not have nuclear-capable at all, but will be available for conventional purposes. That is the category that I think you are talking about. In that case, we will propose, for our own compliance review group, a series of steps that we would take that would make it clear that the bomber was not capable of carrying or delivering nuclear weapons, but still retained its full capability as a platform to deliver conventional weapons, to include precision-guided weapons that are conventional.

So we haven't gotten to the complete end of that string yet about approvals to represent it that way with the Russians. That is pending, and we believe we have a good way to do that that still allows them to be capable for conventional missions.

Principal Deputy Secretary of Defense for Policy James Miller, who also testified at the hearing, added the following:

As Gen. Kehler said, we are not at the end of that process yet, in particular for the B-52Hs that would be converted to conventional-only, which we plan to do. We are still working through exactly how that will be done and have not yet done an exhibition of that to the Russians.

We did do an exhibition of the B-1B bomber because we have been, as General Kehler knows as well, undertaking conversions of those to conventional for some time. And that first exhibition of the B-1 bomber, that will allow them to be non-accountable. That occurred just a few weeks ago.

As Inside Missile Defense reported in November:

New START allows each country to have 1,550 strategic nuclear warheads, with each deployed, nuclear-capable heavy bomber counting as one warhead toward that limit.

Under the treaty, each heavy bomber would be assigned a unique identification number that would be included in the paperwork both countries' share with each other that can be confirmed during inspections, according to a State Department fact sheet.

"The rationale for this 'discounted' attribution of one weapon for each heavy bomber is based on the fact that bombers are not fast-flying, first-strike weapons, and are thus considered to be stabilizing systems," according to a State Department "article-by-article" analysis of the treaty.

"What people have lost sight of is that the intrusiveness of the bomber inspections is also considerable and it actually is more intrusive in some ways than" this treaty's predecessor, Assistant Secretary of State for Verification, Compliance and Implementation Rose Gottemoeller told attendees of a Nov. 8 Arms Control Association forum.

"We have not had our bombers on strip alert for many years, [and] in fact our heavy bombers are largely devoted to long-range conventional missions," Gottemoeller said. "That's another reason that we felt confident that the bomber counting rule was an adequate representation of the continuing nuclear mission that is tasked to the bombers, but on a day-to-day basis, they don't really carry nuclear weapons at all."

Under New START, the verification regime for bombers "is very intrusive and allows for objects inside the bomb bay to be checked with radiation-detection equipment," according to Gottemoeller. "So, we can basically confirm on bomber inspections that the Russian bombers are not carrying nuclear objects, and it's the same, of course, for the Russian Federation -- at our bomber bases, they can use the same radiation-detection equipment and check our bombers as well. "It's kind of lost in the noise a bit, that the bomber inspections are very intrusive as well as the reentry vehicle on-site inspections," she continued.