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In Russian President Vladimir Putin’s speech Tuesday, he announced that because the United States was being mean and blocking Russia’s vision of “manifest destiny,” Russia would suspend its participation in the New START treaty (Vladimir Putin Uses ‘Historic’ Speech to Whine, Suspend the New START Treaty, and Whine Some More). The important point is that he suspended the treaty; he didn’t withdraw from it.
What he means by that is that he expects the US to continue to abide by the treaty and implies that Russia will reciprocate. What he did was stop the mutual verification inspections. Without the verification process, all we have is Russia’s word.
Let’s take a look at this treaty, how it came about, and what Putin’s actions mean.
The Obama Administration negotiated the treaty. The Senate approved it by a vote of 71-26 on December 22, 2010. Unfortunately, thirteen quislings decided to polish Obama’s knob rather than do what was right for America.
The Quislings Who Got Us Here
Alexander (R-TN)
Bennett (R-UT)
Brown (R-MA)
Cochran (R-MS)
Collins (R-ME)
Corker (R-TN)
Gregg (R-NH)
Isakson (R-GA)
Johanns (R-NE)
Lugar (R-IN)
Murkowski (R-AK)
Snowe (R-ME)
Voinovich (R-OH)
The History
The New START treaty covers ICBM silos, ballistic missile submarines, strategic bombers, and the number of deployed nuclear warheads. While the US was given more delivery systems, Russia came away with nearly 10% more warheads. We needed the nuclear-capable bombers and submarines for conventional missions. It is unclear why Russia needed or was given superiority in the number of warheads.
The New START treaty was set to expire in February 2020. So when President Trump came into office, one of Putin’s requests on their inaugural phone call was for an extension of the treaty.
Donald Trump has told Vladimir Putin he does not want to renew a 2010 arms control treaty that limits the number of strategic nuclear weapons the US and Russia can deploy.
Trump angrily denounced the New Start treaty in a 28 January phone call to the Russian leader, according to sources briefed on the call.
That Putin asked for an extension to the treaty four years in advance shows he was gaining some advantage.
In 2019, President Trump withdrew from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty due to persistent Russian violations stretching over a decade (Trump Announces the US Is Leaving a Treaty Russia Is Violating and You Can Guess What Happened). This left New START as the only arms control agreement between the US and a corrupt, untrustworthy, and moribund Russia. Then Joe Biden was [s]elected president. One of his first acts was to extend the New START treaty by five years (The Biden Administration Has Been in Office for Less Than 72 Hours and They Are Already Kissing Putin’s and Xi’s Butt).
In January 2023, the supine Biden State Department announced that Russia was violating the New START treaty by refusing to allow US inspectors access to facilities covered by the treaty or to attend the required bilateral meetings.
The Current Kerfuffle
When Putin announced the “suspension” of the treaty, an act the treaty does not provide for, he gave a litany of reasons. First, the US was mean to Russia. Ukraine had attacked Russian strategic bomber bases necessitating aircraft evacuation to the Russian Far East; see The War in Ukraine Heats up as Drones Attack Russian Airbase Only 100 Miles From Moscow, Putin’s War, Week 44. Drones Strike Russian Strategic Bomber Base…Again…and Prigozhin Makes His Move, and Putin’s War, Week 48. The Logjam Breaks and the Leopards Are About to Roam the Ukrainian Landscape). The US was mean to Russia. Putin wants to include the nuclear forces of the UK and France in the treaty. And lastly, the US was mean to Russia.
Joe Biden couldn’t be bothered to respond (Biden’s Response to Russia Suspending START Treaty Shows Just How Much Trouble We Are In).
The Russian Foreign Ministry has released a statement accusing the US of other violations.
Moreover, serious changes in the security landscape are also due to the fact that the consolidation of Western countries on anti-Russian grounds is increasingly affecting aspects of their nuclear policy. In particular, NATO members, who have been practicing the so-called “joint nuclear missions” for decades and have openly declared the North Atlantic bloc a “nuclear alliance” for some time, are increasing the emphasis on nuclear weapons in NATO-wide conceptual guidelines, and declare their focus on further strengthening and increasing the combat readiness of the capabilities “assigned” to NATO in this area. There are calls for the expansion of the bloc’s nuclear infrastructure and its eastward expansion. The direction of these efforts against our country is not hidden.
In this context, the factor of the combined nuclear arsenal of the three NATO nuclear powers, namely the United States, Great Britain and France, capable of being turned against Russia, is of particular importance in the current conditions. In this sense, it is very symbolic that all the countries of the North Atlantic bloc, including great Britain and France, have clearly demonstrated their involvement in the PROBLEMS of the START Treaty by issuing a joint statement in which they completely block the approaches of the United States. This political act confirms the validity of Russia’s position on the need to perceive the nuclear potentials of the three Western nuclear states in aggregate and take this factor into account in the process of limiting and reducing nuclear weapons, as well as when considering the future of the START Treaty.
For many years, Washington has ignored the relationship between strategic offensive and strategic defensive weapons, which is also fixed in the START Treaty. The fundamental importance of this relationship is clearly referred to by the statement on anti-ballistic missile made by Russia in the context of signing and ratifying the Treaty. Our document unequivocally emphasizes that the START Treaty can operate and be viable only in the absence of a qualitative and quantitative build-up of US missile defense systems. Nevertheless, Washington defiantly continues to take actions going in a diametrically opposite direction. Against the background of the general aggravation of the military-strategic situation, this factor is of increased importance.
The most important thing for assessing the situation with the implementation of the START Treaty is the fact that Washington has long and significantly violated the central provisions of the START Treaty on quantitative restrictions on the relevant weapons of the parties. This is due to the illegitimate unilateral exclusion from the Account under the Treaty of more than 100 units of US START, which Washington renamed so that they ceased to fall under the treaty definitions, or declared re-equipped, without giving the Russian side the opportunity to reliably verify the compliance of the results of such re-equipment with the requirements of the START Treaty, i.e. to fulfill the procedure expressly provided for by the Treaty. This clear and direct violation has been repeatedly pointed out.
In addition, the US attempts to “probe” the protection of a number of Russian START facilities declared under the Treaty have become blatantly provocative and extremely risky. The armed attacks on them, undertaken by the puppet regime in Kiev, were carried out with the obvious military-technical and information-intelligence assistance of Washington.
Against this background, we consider the height of cynicism to be the US demand to immediately provide them with access to these and other strategic facilities of Russia, hiding behind the provisions of the START Treaty on inspection activities. This is particularly puzzling in conditions when the anti-Russian restrictions imposed by Washington previously violated the operability of the procedures provided for in the Treaty related to verification activities. As a result, the ability of the Russian side to freely and on a fully equal basis to carry out control measures on the territory of the United States was undermined, which created obvious unilateral advantages for the American side.
These assessments have been repeatedly communicated to the American side and have invariably been accompanied by a call for Washington to take measures to rectify the situation, taking into account Russia’s concerns. Instead, Washington continued to purposefully pursue malicious steps to undermine Russia’s security. The stakes in the total hybrid war unleashed against our country by the Americans are being raised.
Bottom Line
Arms control treaties are just spank-bank material for academics and diplomats. They may be exciting, but they aren’t real. Nations that have no intention of going to war with one another have no need for them. Nations with aggressive intent will cheat, so making a treaty with them is both a waste of time and a dangerous self-deception.
The Birkenstock brigade of the nuclear disarmament movement brings up a rational point. Why do the US and Russia maintain arsenals necessary to obliterate each other several times over?
What he ignores, in my view, is the counterargument. If we can already obliterate each other on an exponential scale, what difference do a few more warheads make, and, more importantly, why would either side make them?
Another reason that we should withdraw from this treaty is because it allows Russia to be a stalking horse for Communist China. When we signed onto the INF treaty, one of the boneheaded moves made by the Reagan Administration that really had no purpose beyond trying to keep the Nuclear Freeze movement from befouling itself, we proceeded to destroy the weapons systems covered by the treaty. When the USSR collapsed, our policy of trying to make Russia feel good about itself resulted in our extending a treaty with a nonexistent nation to cover Russia. Russia proceeded to do what Russia does and cheat. While we ceased the development of intermediate-range nuclear weapons, China was not covered by the treaty and continued to develop its arsenal.
Russia’s point about including the nuclear forces of the UK and France in the treaty has a certain truth, but we should demand that China be part of the deal also. (Not that they’d agree, or we could trust them.)
Finally, it is demeaning for the United States to make arms control treaties with Russia. Russia is not a “peer competitor.” It is a dying, bankrupt sh**hole. Yes, it has nukes but we know from long experience that no treaty will ever restrain Russia from expanding or even using that arsenal. Arms control treaties with Russia do not limit Russia because Russia cheats. However, they do force us into a false scenario where Russia is cast as our only possible opponent while excluding the threat posed by China.
I hope Putin will do for us what we don’t have the courage to do for ourselves: bail out of this crap treaty. What I fear will happen is that Biden will, again, kowtow to Russia for fear of the kompromat they hold on Hunter and lock us into an inferior strategic position by pretending that Russia is a great power.