The New START (Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty) is going to be ratified today, unless something very surprising happens at the last minute. This is certainly a victory for President Obama. But is it a victory for those of us who want to eliminate nuclear weapons? I think not.
The treaty does do one good thing. It requires both Russia and the US to reduce their number of strategic nuclear missiles (“strategic” means that they can go a long way, so that one of the two countries can hit the other one with a missile; “tactical” weapons are those that won’t go as far) and launchers to 1,500 missiles and 700 launchers. That’s fewer than were permitted under the previous, never-ratified START treaty, so it’s a good thing.
That sounds great. Unfortunately, President Obama got the votes he needed to ratify the treaty by promising to expand the nuclear arms race in other ways. He commited himself to an $85 billion program of “modernization” (i.e., developing new, more powerful and active missiles to replace the ones the US has now), and he promised to proceed with a version of President Reagan’s “Star Wars” (aka “missile defense”) proposal.
As Alice Slater of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation put it, “. . . if the U.S. persists in developing its nuclear infrastructure with new bomb factories while threatening Russia with proliferating missiles, it’s unlikely that this modest New START will help us down the path to peace.”
From President Obama’s point of view, the important thing was to win the vote, even if winning required making commitments that actually hurt the cause of nuclear disarmament. What’s missing from this approach is a strategy that can really lead to the elimination of nuclear weapons. Instead, the emphasis of the US has been on nuclear nonproliferation, limiting the possession of nuclear weapons to states that have them already. This approach has failed. The number of nuclear states continues to grow. As I’ve said before, we cannot reasonably expect Iran, North Korea, or any other state to refrain from developing nuclear weapons unless the US is getting rid of its own.
For further reading on abolishing nuclear weapons, see The Challenge of Abolishing Nuclear Weapons, edited by David Krieger.