Global Beat Syndicate: Making Asia a Priority, Not a Threat

Cooperate with Russia on Nuclear Security

It’s time to reverse the record of U.S.-Russian distrust

By Leon V. Sigal

November 28, 2001.

NEW YORK -- Cooperating with strangers has become the watchword in Washington since September 11, and for good reason. The United States cannot track, disrupt, or destroy the Al Qaeda network without help from others -- bases, intelligence, police work.

President Bush also wants help from Russia. The question is, will he cooperate with Russia in return? This question goes beyond the immediate issue of stopping Al Qaeda. The main threat to U.S. survival remains the spread of nuclear arms, and the principal danger comes from Russia, not Iraq or North Korea or Iran or Al Qaeda.

With the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the threat that nuclear war could arise out of a superpower conflict in Europe or elsewhere evaporated. Instead, new nuclear dangers came to the fore. They persist to this day.

First and foremost is the danger of nuclear leakage: that a few bombs' worth of nuclear material, neither fully accounted for nor thoroughly secured, could be smuggled out of Russia. A second is the danger of nuclear accident because Russia lacks the capacity to maintain the thousands of warheads and launchers it has. Third is the danger of unauthorized nuclear use as Russia relies on nuclear forces to counter threats along its borders and maintains those forces on hair-trigger alert. Fourth is the danger of a nuclear brain drain: with hundreds of nuclear scientists and technicians at the mercy of the market, some may be tempted to sell their know-how to the highest bidder.

Dealing with the new nuclear dangers in Russia should have been the overriding foreign policy objective of the United States since 1989. It has not been.

The best way to reduce those dangers is to cooperate with Russia. Cooperation cannot be confined to nuclear matters alone, but must extend to many other aspects of our relationship. Yet from the time that Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in Moscow until now, the United States has not tried cooperation in any comprehensive or sustained way. Failure to do so has cost dearly.

The United States did little to help Gorbachev gain politburo acquiescence to a unified Germany in NATO or arrange an end of empire in Eastern Europe. Similarly, the United States failed to give Gorbachev the political cover he sought for his retreat from Afghanistan -- an international agreement on Afghanistan, backing for an internal political settlement there, or cessation of the U.S. supply of arms to the Afghan resistance. Instead President Reagan and Bush, with bipartisan support in Congress, kept up the pressure throughout 1987, 1988, and 1989, paving the way for the eventual triumph of the Taliban.

As with Putin today, skepticism about Gorbachev's aims and his chances of achieving them reigned supreme among the conservative realists who held office in the Reagan and Bush years. It also prevailed in the foreign policy establishment.

Ronald Reagan was a notable exception. Neither realist nor conservative, he was a true believer who thought of the world in ideological terms, as a contest between freedom and communism. By 1986, over the opposition of most administration officials, he was ready to declare victory over the "evil empire" and cooperate with Gorbachev in disarming. In an exchange of letters culminating at Reykjavik, Reagan and Gorbachev agreed on deep cuts and eventual elimination of nuclear arms, only to have others in his administration prevail on him to reverse course.

George H.W. Bush had enough political leeway to follow in Reagan's footsteps, but if Reagan was a nuclear radical, the elder Bush was a nuclear conservative. He thought Reagan had gone too far in questioning deterrence, in valuing defense over offense, and in contemplating nuclear abolition. He wanted to restore the old nuclear verities, and he was in no hurry to negotiate with Mikhail Gorbachev, who, like Reagan, seemed all too eager to call those verities into question.

The most widely accepted of those verities, however untrue, was that American nuclear arms offset a Soviet advantage in conventional forces. That motivated the Bush administration to slow talks on limiting strategic arms to a standstill while first seeking cuts in Soviet conventional forces. Trying to retain a firm foothold in Europe, the administration insisted on retaining more troops than the Soviets, making an accord more difficult to reach.

As a result, a START accord was delayed. The treaty was not signed until July 31, 1991. By then it was too late. The centrifugal forces unleashed in the Soviet Union had already loosened central control over its vast and dispersed nuclear infrastructure, a risk we still live with. Yet a National Security Council study group chaired by Condoleezza Rice failed to draw the obvious implications.

In 1990, capitalizing on the Army's eagerness to rid itself of its nuclear arms and the Navy's desire to remove them from surface ships, then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell proposed unilateral withdrawal of all but a few dozen U.S. tactical nuclear arms based overseas. To his credit, President Bush accepted Powell's recommendation over the objections of Defense Secretary Dick Cheney. But the withdrawal, scheduled for early August 1990, was put off when Iraq invaded Kuwait. It was not carried out until a few weeks after the August 1991 coup in Russia, when Moscow reciprocated. But even today, missiles armed with thousands of nuclear warheads remain on hair-trigger, ready to launch at a moment's notice.

Under President Clinton, the United States resisted deeper cuts in nuclear arms -- cuts that Russia was -- and still is -- ready to accept. Instead, it adopted what it called the "hedge strategy" against the remote possibility of resumption of the Cold War. Congress was grudging in providing aid for Russian disarming. The administration even wanted to circumvent Russia with oil and gas pipelines, crimping its source of hard currency. Washington's rush to expand NATO eastward in violation of understandings with Moscow, only fueled a reaction in Russia, making broader security cooperation politically precarious.

For the Bush administration, the consequence is that today Americans still live under the shadow of a potential loss of nuclear control in Russia.

Leon V. Sigal, an analyst for Foreign Policy in Focus, is director of the Northeast Cooperative Security Project at the Social Science Research Council in New York. He is the author of Hang Separately: Cooperative Security between the United States and Russia, 1985-1994.