THE THREAT OF RUSSIA

The strategic challenge that Russia poses to the United States today is quite serious. Russia is increasingly anti-democratic and hostile to the United States.  Xenophobia is widespread in Russia.  The Kremlin is currently encouraging nationalism and militarizing the country.  It constantly attacks the West.  And a sizable number of the Russian population sees neighboring countries as part of the Russian zone of influence.

Now this is not me speaking, this is taken from a recent statement by Alexei Kudrin, who until September of 2011 was the finance minister of Russia, and who has just been publicly offered a cabinet position by Vladimir Putin. 

The most serious aspect of the Russian threat to the United States is their nuclear use doctrine.  They have the lowest nuclear use threshold in the world.  Russia reserves the right to introduce nuclear weapons into conventional warfare, and they characterize this, amazingly, as "de-escalation" of the conflict.

In December 2012 the U.S. National Intelligence Council in a report stated, quote, "Nuclear ambitions in the United States and Russia over the last 20 years have evolved in opposite directions.  Reducing the role of nuclear weapons in U.S. security strategy is the U.S. objective, while Russia is pursuing new concepts and capabilities for expanding the role of nuclear weapons in its security strategy." 

In 2009 the then-commander of the strategic missile force, Lieutenant General Andrey Shvaichenko, outlined what Russian nuclear targeting was about.  And actually, there were two or three similar statements made by other generals in roughly the same time period. 

LtGen Shvaichenko made this statement:

"In peacetime they [he means the strategic nuclear missiles] are intended to assure deterrence of large-scale non-nuclear and nuclear aggression against Russia and its allies.  In a conventional war they ensure that the opponent is forced to cease hostilities on advantageous conditions for Russia by means of single or multiple preventive strikes against the aggressor’s most important facilities.  In a nuclear war, they ensure the destruction of facilities of the opponent’s military and economic potential by means of an initial massive nuclear missile strike and subsequent multiple or single nuclear missile strikes."

According to then-chief of the general staff General Nikolai Makarov in 2009, "The strategic nuclear force is for us a sacred issue."   And he said they will provide them whatever level of funding is necessary. 

Senior Russian officials, including both military and civilian, routinely make nuclear threats, including direct targeting threats against the United States and our allies and threats of preventive or preemptive nuclear attack.  That’s very common.  Indeed, Putin has done that on several occasions.

There are only two countries in the world that make these types of nuclear threats routinely, and they are Russia and North Korea.  In this regard, China is a poor third, but it’s apparently catching up because it has just dropped "no first use" from its white paper on national security that was released recently. 

Russia routinely exercises its strategic nuclear forces very openly against the United States in a variety of conflicts, scenarios ranging from strategic nuclear exchanges to theater nuclear exchanges.  Russian strategic nuclear forces engaged in a major exercise two weeks before the U.S. presidential election in 2012, when the Kremlin announced a strategic nuclear exercise in which Putin personally directed the nuclear missile launches. 

Russia has virtually eliminated its reduction of legacy nuclear forces.  Information that was released by the State Department – this is Russian data – in April of 2013 indicate that the number of Russian delivery vehicles actually increased in the two years that New START has been in effect.  The number of warheads has declined by 57, but that’s apparently just the result of different counting rules that were used in New START compared to the original START Treaty.  New START rules don’t count in New START submarines going into overhaul.

Russian nuclear modernization programs are amazingly broad by post-Cold War standards.  Russia has actually announced the complete modernization of its strategic missile force, both submarines and ICBMs, by 2021.  Putin, in April 2012 announced the procurement of 400 new ICBMs by 2020.  Russia is in the process of developing and deploying several new MIRV’ed strategic missiles, both ICBMs and SLBMs, including a new heavy ICBM.  And they’re currently deploying a new long-range nuclear ALCM.

Reportedly, the new Russian heavy ICBM will carry 10 to 15 warheads.  In May 2012 Russia announced the testing of a "new" ICBM.  This is apparently the Yars-M, which the commander of the Strategic Missile Forces has just announced will be deployed this year.

The Russians are also talking about something called the Avangard.  Now this may or may not be the same missile as the Yar-M, or it may be a further development of the Yar-M.  The title of the missile, or the name of the missile, Yar-M, translates into a major modernization or improvement of the MIRV’ed version of the SS-27, which the Russians initially deployed in 2010.  So they’re already modernizing a missile that’s only three years old, which is amazing.

They’ve announced that they’re going to develop and deploy a new heavy bomber, a stealthy B-2-like bomber.  Recent press reports suggest that the first one will be available in 2020.  Now we don’t really know whether that’s the first prototype or the first production airplane, but in any event in the 2020s they’re going to be introducing a major new bomber.

They’re in the process of introducing the new Bulava SLBM and the new Borei-class submarine.  This year they announced that the fifth and sixth of these submarines will be laid down this year.  That’s literally the first time since the end of the Cold War that more than one ballistic missile submarine has been laid down in a single year.

They’ve also announced there will be what they call fifth generation missile submarine carrying both ballistic and cruise missiles that will be available by 2020.  And the Russians have announced the development – and press reports say the decision has been made to deploy – a rail mobile ICBM, apparently another version of the SS-27. The problem is that the New START Treaty doesn’t say a word about rail mobile ICBMs and this is clearly, at least in the Russian view, in my view as well, not limited by the New START Treaty.

So we are seeing a major modernization program.  In comparison, US Acting Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Rose Gottemoeller, summed up what we are doing.  And this is a direct quote.

"We are not modernizing.  We are not modernizing.  That is one of the basic – basics I would say — principles and rules that have been part of our nuclear posture review and part of our policy."

And that’s a remarkably candid description of current policy, which at best only partially modernizes our force and replaces systems when they’re 40 to 80 years of age, literally.  And we have not yet committed to continuing the ICBM force beyond 2030. 

What is the administration’s reaction to this unprecedented in the post-Cold War period enhancement of Russian nuclear capabilities?  Basically, it’s more nuclear reductions.  We’re making nuclear reductions, according to the information released by the State department, much faster than is necessary to comply with the New START Treaty.

We are pursuing minimum modernization programs and we’re going to do more arms control.  What is this new arms control known to be about?  Well, the administration describes it as an intent to negotiate with the Russians further reductions in deployed strategic nuclear systems and limits on both non-deployed nuclear weapons of all types and tactical nuclear weapons.

According to press reports, they are considering numbers in the 300 to 1,100 range for deployed nuclear warhead.  Recent reports have suggested about 1,000.  The State department advisory committee said 700.

There are press reports, including in the New York Times, that they intend to evade advice and consent, that the US is going to propose to the Russians a political commitment, non-legally binding.  And I think the obvious reason for this is they don’t expect a good outcome in this negotiation of something that could get serious Congressional support. 

I suspect they will have big problems with the Russians in doing this.  The Russians have repeatedly announced they have no interest in post-New START nuclear arms control.  This includes Sergei Lavrov, the Foreign Minister, who said this three times during the Russian ratification procedures relating to the New START Treaty.  He said also that they intend to increase their number of delivery vehicles and deployed nuclear warheads.  And he gave dates for those developments.

Assuming the Obama administration somehow or other gets the Russians to agree to anything like near-term nuclear negotiations, the question is can they come up with anything that meets their objectives or anything that is remotely verifiable?  I’m very pessimistic on both of those issues.  Their desire to evade Congressional oversight suggests that they don’t expect to come out with something that’s any good or in any real sense of the word "verifiable."

We have two basic problems with verification of the type of agreement the administration has announced that it has been trying to achieve.  The first one is the old problems, how do you count deployed nuclear warheads and delivery vehicles? 

We have a very poor base for this in the New START Treaty because everything is degraded that was in the original START Treaty, which in turn was never designed to deal with numbers this low.  And the cheating potential is significant as you have with what is apparently going to be proposed to the Russians.

The number of inspections has been reduced considerably.  The types of inspections have been reduced.  The number of notifications have been considerably reduced.  Almost the entire mobile ICBM verification regime that was in the START Treaty is gone in New START.  The telemetry regime is virtually gone in the New START Treaty.

So for the old problems, we have a seriously degraded verification potential and there’s no indication the administration will seek to try to fix any of these problems.  One of the biggest traditional problems is the administration – as Paula DeSutter, the former Assistant Secretary of State for Verification and Compliance has pointed out – we’ve got the same regime as in the old START Treaty for counting warheads despite the fact that the Russians violated it from day one in the START period to the end of the expiration of the START Treaty.

On top of this we have the much more difficult problem of counting nuclear weapons or tactical nuclear weapons.  That problem is really two-fold.  First, we don’t really know how many nuclear weapons or tactical nuclear weapons the Russians have.  Estimates are – including the administration’s estimates – are ten-to-one Russian advantage over the US in this area. Undersecretary of Defense for Policy James Miller says they have from 2,000 to 4,000 tactical nuclear weapons.  Now the problem with that is that Russian sources very frequently have much higher numbers.

So we start out by not really knowing what they have.  And another big problem is, how small have they gotten?  We know what they were in the 1980s.  We were really doing a lot of work on Russia in the 1980s.  We knew they had very small nuclear weapons, 155-mm nuclear shells, nuclear backpacks, small strategic nuclear weapons.

We have pretty good information from Russian statements and Russian press sources that they’ve gotten smaller since the end of the Cold War, but we don’t really know how much smaller.  But let’s assume best case they’re no smaller as they were in the 1980s. 

Now we are starting out with the problem of trying to monitor and control things which are one to two orders of magnitude smaller and lighter than anything that has been subject to strategic arms control monitoring under any previous treaty. 

Worse than that, we have no experience whatsoever in doing this sort of thing because of the fact that Russia has rejected every proposal that we’ve every made to establish any form of transparency or verification regime relating to or involving such nuclear weapons.  So we’ve got a real problem.

How is the administration setting about to deal with this?  We do know, if you track their statements, that they very rarely talk about "verification."  They talk about "transparency."  Now transparency is a much lower standard because almost anything can be deemed to be transparent whether or not it has any serious effect in giving you a verification capability.

You hear some really goofy statements out of the senior levels of the State department verification bureau about verifying nuclear weapons numbers by social media.  Basically, they’re going to fail in their efforts with the Russians.  I don’t even think that it’s technically possible to do some of the things that they claim they’re going to do.

Which all means – and this is what is truly scary – that the Obama Administration expects to fail re arms control with Russia.  That’s why they’re talking about evading Senate oversight.

Dr. Mark Schneider is the senior analyst with the National Institute for Public Policy.