Don’t be fooled when President George W. Bush and Russian President
Vladimir Putin shake hands at their Moscow summit in Moscow week and
sell their nuclear weapons reduction treaty as the official end of
the Cold War. As with typical horror film clichés, the bad
guys are rarely vanquished on the first try. The heroes sit back and
relax, thinking they’ve saved the day, but the villains always
return to wreak havoc in sequel after sequel.
No matter which side anyone was on in the Cold War, nuclear weapons
were the bad guys for almost everyone. Their destructive power threatened
the entire world with annihilation and sparked a costly arms race
between the Soviet Union and the United States.
This week, Bush and Putin are proud to think they’ve eliminated
the bloated nuclear forces maintained by both sides long after they
were of any strategic value. But with the current war on terrorism,
we have found our sequel. Americans should demand that the cuts claimed
by Bush in this treaty are real and that such weapons don’t show
up in the hands of real-life villains such as al-Qaeda terrorists.
This new treaty commits the United States to reduce its strategic
nuclear weapons force to under 2,200 actively deployed warheads by
2012—down from the 6,000 warheads officials and most journalists
claim constitute the current force. Russia, which can hardly afford
to maintain and secure anything resembling its current arsenal, will
make similar reductions.
But neither of these figures comes close to capturing the full nuclear
arsenals, which are roughly 10,000 warheads in the United States—and
most likely more in Russia. That’s because many thousands of
tactical nuclear weapons on each side have never been addressed, and
remain unaddressed by this treaty—just one of several mistakes
ignored by Bush and Putin.
As it stands, the progress so praised by supporters of this treaty
is a sham in important ways. By failing to address the true and complex
threats to U.S. security, this treaty leaves Russia and the United
States worse off by creating a false sense of security in half-measures
and baby steps. Warhead reductions look good on paper, but they mean
nothing until those warheads are destroyed. Under this treaty, at
the insistence of the Bush administration, the strategic warheads
"eliminated" over the next decade will not be dismantled,
but stored as a hedge against future threats and able to be redeployed
on a moment’s notice.
Many experts say the storage-instead-of-destruction plan is a very
dangerous strategy. That’s because the greatest threat to us
isn’t a nuclear attack launched by Russia, but one launched by
terrorists groups or other would-be nuclear states, using stolen or
lost materials from Russia’s programs involving weapons of mass
destruction.
For years, Russia has not been able to guarantee control over its
biological, chemical and nuclear materials. And there is no doubt
that if this material falls into the hands of al Qaeda or like-minded
organizations, they will not hesitate to use these weapons against
American targets. No policy and no National Missile Defense system
would stop terrorists from detonating a radiological bomb in New York
or Washington. President Bush knows this is a serious threat—the
"shadow government" established after September 11th wasn’t
due to fear of a Russian nuclear attack. He must now do more to ensure
that Russia’s unstable nuclear forces are reduced and destroyed
by committing both sides to warhead destruction, not storage.
To prevent a Cold War sequel of catastrophic terrorism, Presidents
Bush and Putin need to go farther than the announced cuts in this
treaty. The Cold War is now more than a decade past, but its legacy
remains in the form of thousands of unneeded and dangerous nuclear
weapons, which will remain with us regardless of this new treaty’s
accounting gimmicks.
In future negotiations, President Bush must stop viewing each destroyed
warheads as one fewer in our nuclear arsenal in case of some unforeseeable
emergency. Instead, he should view it as another warhead that won’t
fall into the wrong hands and be used against U.S. citizens.
Until nuclear weapons are out of the reach of terrorists and verifiably
dismantled, Americans should be careful not to buy into any argument
that sells them a false sense of security.
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John Spykerman is coordinator of the Program on Global Security and
Disarmament at the University of Maryland.
