While the U.S. and Russia have been publicly crowing about their awesome new friendship for the past two years, Moscow’s been moving small, ground-based nuclear weapons closer to the borders of Washington’s easternmost NATO allies. What’s a little heightened nuclear tension between buddies, right?
As recently as this spring, the Russians have moved their tactical nukes to sites close to their Western frontiers, alarming the Baltic and Eastern European members of NATO, the Wall Street Journal reports. Russia’s longstanding position is that it won’t pull its tactical nuclear weapons behind the Ural Mountains until the U.S. gets its own small nukes out of Europe. True totals of Russian tactical nuclear weapons is a tightly-held secret, but the Federation of American Scientists estimated last year that Moscow has nearly 5,400 of them, with about 2,000 deployed.
The Russian nuke movement isn’t expressly forbidden by prior nuclear treaties; and the Journal notes that it “appeared to coincide” with the arrival of NATO missile defense systems near Russia’s European borders. At the NATO summit in Lisbon this month, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev endorsedbuilding a joint NATO-Russia missile defense system over the next ten years — a big NATO priority — but warned that if “universal” missile defense couldn’t be fielded, a “new round of arms race will start.” So it’s tense, but it’s not necessarily time to dig out that old Sting song out of the record crates.
But it also appears to solve a minor mystery in the Senate, where Republican opposition to a U.S.-Russia treaty on much larger nuclear weapons might end up dooming the accord. In September, James Risch, a Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, argued that a secret U.S. intelligence report on Russian nukes convinced him to put the treaty on hold. “You haven’t seen the stuff that I’ve seen,” Risch said. The Journal suggests Risch referred to the tactical-nuke movement.
The treaty, known as New START, doesn’t deal with tactical nuclear weapons from either side. Obama administration officials have told reporters on background throughout the year that they intend to hash out a subsequent treaty with Russia to limit so-called “tacs.” (WikiLeaks released a diplomatic this week confirming that the U.S. keeps tactical nuclear weapons in Germany, Turkey, Belgium and Holland.) That sets up a chicken-and-egg problem for Team Obama: it says it can’t talk tacs until New START gets ratified, but the tactical-nuke issue adds another political obstacle for New START in the Senate.
Update, 1 p.m.: For some fascinating background, check out Pavel Povdig’s post for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists on the NATO-Russian calculus for reducing or maintaining their tactical nuclear-weapons stockpile. Povdig, an expert in Russian nukes, observes that the Russian military devotes “more than 600 [tactical] warheads allocated to the country’s air defense,” a relic of Cold War decisionmaking, which leads him to conclude that “inertia left over from the Cold War seems to be the reason for the current composition of [Russia's] tactical nuclear forces.” But the poor state of Russia’s conventional military compared with the U.S.’s makes it difficult for Moscow to abandon its relative advantage in deployed tactical nukes, a “menace” ably captured by AOL’s David Wood.
Povdig’s bottom line is that NATO and Russia need to reach an accord to pull tactical nukes out of Europe. He doesn’t describe the contours of such an accord beyond the generic: it’ll need to have some kind of verification mechanism; it doesn’t have to require either party to declare how many tactical nukes it possesses; and it should put the tacs into storage before eventually destroying them. That reads like Povdig knows how hard reaching such a deal will be, so he just wants to get the anticipated stumbling blocks out of the way.
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