Part 1 of 2 Parts
I grew up during the Cold War and used to have nightmares about my hometown being nuked. We had to hide under our desks for drills in school. Time passed and the Cold War ended. The tens of thousands of nuclear warheads in the U.S. and Russia were reduced to a few thousand by various international treaties. Now we are near the end of the most recent arms-reduction treaty between the U.S. and Russia. The Trump administration seems to be moving towards a new nuclear arms race in his second term if he is reelected.
The New START strategic arms-reduction treaty was signed into effect by President Obama in the U.S. and President Medvedev in Russia in 2010. It will expire on February 5th of 2021 if not renewed or renegotiated. Trump has shown no interest in extending the treaty unless the Russians make certain concessions. The concessions that Trump is asking for have nothing to with the New START treaty and the Russians have no interest in granting the U.S. such concessions.
There have been reports that Trump’s arms-control envoy, Marshall Billingslea, recently asked senior U.S. military officers how long it would take to bring the few thousand nuclear warheads we have out of storage and load them on to submarine-based missiles and strategic bombers if the New START treaty is allowed to lapse. The U.S. currently has about one thousand seven hundred and fifty nuclear warheads on long range missiles and long-range bombers. Russia has about fifteen hundred nuclear warheads deployed. Both countries also have a few thousand extra nuclear warheads in storage.
One analyst suggested that Billingslea deliberate made his request public was because the Trump administration wanted to create an “incentive for the Russians to sit down and negotiate.” Billingslea has made other comments that are consistent with this idea. Last spring. He said, “We know how to win these [arms] races, and we know how to spend the adversary into oblivion.”
If it is true that Trump was making such a threatening move to create a bargaining chip, he has a weak position to enter negotiations. First, with the economy hammered by the Covid-19 pandemic, the U.S, is in no position to spend an opponent into oblivion with out spending itself into oblivion also.
Second, Russia has a bigger stockpile of nuclear warheads than the U.S. They have about two thousand seven hundred in storage versus the two thousand that the U.S. has in storage. The Russians have also been upgrading some of their nuclear missiles. Under the terms of the New START treaty, Russia is obligated to discard old missiles as soon as new versions are deployed. If the New START treaty elapses without being replaced, the Russians could just add the new missiles and expand their deployed arsenal. On the other hand, the U.S. is not planning on deploying any new missiles or bombers until 2030.
To put it another way, anything that Trump threatens to do, Putin can also do and Putin can do more in addition. It would appear that Trump’s threatening posture is self-defeating.
Please read Part 2 next