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Joe Biden has been inaugurated as the 46th President of the United States. His national security team is under pressure to quickly make calls on a variety of key nuclear and missile defense decisions, according to a top outgoing Pentagon official.
Rob Soofer served as deputy assistant secretary of defense for nuclear and missile defense policy since the early part of the Trump administration. He expects that there will be a wide-ranging review of nuclear and missile defense issues by the new Biden administration. However, he hopes that the technical reviews that are needed to keep existing programs on track will not be delayed by the policy review.
Soofer said that there is only a short time before the defense budget must be produced. The budget could be due by mid-March. He said, “They will likely alter President [Donald] Trump’s budget request for fiscal 2022 in some fashion. And I would hope that that they would wait until they conducted their Nuclear Posture Review and their Missile Defense Review before they took any precipitous steps with respect to the big modernization programs. I think anything that reflects dollars and cents for the FY22 budget is going to have to have near-term consideration. Funding for the Ground Based Strategic Deterrent and the nuclear certification of the F-35 — all these nuclear decisions are reflected in the budget request, and so in a sense they have to make a decision within months.”
Some policy issues such as questions about the no-first-use policy can certainly wait according to Soofer, but there is a near-term policy decision that has to be made. This involves the U.S. strategy for the New START nuclear treaty which expires early next month. The Biden administration has two options to discuss with Russia. These are a one-year extension and a five-year extension.
Soofer himself participated in negotiations with Russia over the past year. Based on those talks, he believes that there is a real opportunity to bring Russian tactical nuclear weapons into a new version of the New START agreement. He said, “In order to take advantage of that opportunity, the Biden administration should not extend the New START treaty for five years. If they do that, Russia will pocket that extension, walk away, and you’re never going to see [the Russians] again.”
Soofer’s views are not shared by some members of the arms control community. The Arms Control Association (ACA) issued a report on January 19 that focused on arms control priorities for the new Biden administration. Their report called for a five-year “unconditional” extension of the New START treaty.
The authors of the report said that “There is no evidence that Russia is desperate to extend the treaty or that a shorter-term extension of New START would make Russia more likely to negotiate a follow-on agreement. Nor is a one-year or two-year extension likely to be enough time to negotiate a new agreement. New START took ten months to negotiate and then about as long to bring into force. And that was at a time when the U.S.-Russia relationship was far less tense.”
Please read Part 2 next