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Nikolai Sokov

There was nothing surprising about President George W. Bush's announcement on December 13 that the United States was withdrawing from the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty or about the mild Russian reaction to it. Both countries' positions and intentions had been announced many weeks in advance. Even before the Washington-Crawford summit last November, it had become clear that no compromise that would allow saving at least the appearance of the ABM Treaty was possible, media reports to the contrary notwithstanding. The last-minute attempt by the Bush administration to invite Russia to jointly abrogate the treaty failed as well. Thus, the announcement about the U.S. unilateral withdrawal was inevitable after Secretary of State Colin Powell's visit to Moscow on December 10.

Failed Attempt at a "Grand Bargain"

For several years, many experts believed that the United States and Russia could strike a "grand bargain"--exchange amendments to the ABM Treaty that would allow the United States to test defense weapons prohibited by that document for a START III agreement on reduction of strategic offensive weapons below the START I and II limits. This idea was particularly popular under the Clinton administration, and there was an attempt to resurrect it under the new Bush administration.

Following the July 2001 Bush-Putin summit in Genoa, the two governments intensified consultations on offensive and defensive strategic weapons, trying to determine whether a compromise on the ABM Treaty was possible. In early August, First Deputy Chief of the General Staff Yuri Baluevski arrived in Washington to discuss possible amendments, but the deal never materialized. American negotiators reportedly complained that the Russians wanted the right to approve or disapprove every future test. The Russians' story was different: they said Russia wanted an agreement allowing certain types of tests (not the right to approve each separate one), while the United States wanted sweeping amendments that would have effectively eliminated the ABM Treaty in all but name only. In any event, it is clear that the scope of amendments acceptable to each side did not match. The August talks effectively doomed the "grand bargain," although discussions between the two sides continued.

The Russian military's view of the proposed amendments was strictly instrumental. They perceived them as designed to allow the United States to continue testing for at least three more years, according to their calculation, without withdrawing from the ABM Treaty. After that, if research and development proceeded as planned, withdrawal would have become imminent. However, if--as many in the Ministry of Defense expected--the test program demonstrated either technical problems or excessively high costs, the United States would abandon or postpone the missile defense and the ABM Treaty would have remained in force. For the U.S. Department of Defense, however, only complete removal of all limitations once and for all seemed acceptable.

President George W. Bush also made it crystal clear that the United States was not interested in START III. Instead, he preferred to follow the example of his father former President Bush and pursue unilateral parallel reductions of strategic forces below the START I limit of 6,000 warheads without any treaty. His stance effectively eliminated the other part of the proposed "grand bargain".

The U.S. State Department and the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs continued to hope for a compromise, however. These hopes were reflected in leaks to the media, both in Washington and in Moscow, prior to the November summit: Scores of articles in the most influential newspapers suggested that the two presidents might strike a compromise. In fact, as late as a week before Colin Powell's visit to Moscow on December 10, the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs kept insisting, in interagency discussions, that it might still be possible to prevent the Untied States from withdrawing from the ABM Treaty. This was a minority view, however, and very few officials in Moscow expected any progress on ABM Treaty and strategic reductions issues during the Powell visit. The military in particular thought that after the August visit of Baluevski to Washington chances for an agreement that would be acceptable to both sides were effectively non-existent.

Failed Attempt to Orchestrate Joint Withdrawal

The most intense attempts to convince Russia to join the United States in abrogation of the ABM Treaty were made just prior to and during the November summit. Joint abrogation could have reduced the political price for the United States and possibly could have helped avoid the six-months waiting period, following notification of withdrawal, during which the United States remains bound by the ABM Treaty.

According to some reports, during a November 8th telephone conversation, George Bush offered Vladimir Putin the chance to join the United States in withdrawing from the ABM Treaty, warning that the United States would withdraw anyway. Putin, however, refused, indicating that Russia was not willing to share political responsibility for a step it did not support. Putin reportedly stated that the United States should bear all the costs of that decision. The joint withdrawal proposal was apparently raised again at the summit, but Putin again rejected it.

During the November 8 conversation, Putin also said that Russia would not initiate a major political crisis if (or, rather, when) the United States unilaterally withdrew from the treaty. This statement became a key point in the U.S.-Russian interaction on the subject and determined the subsequent developments. It effectively cleared the way for the U.S. withdrawal and became the reason why U.S. officials could subsequently predict with confidence that the Russian reaction would not be harsh.

Putin remained true to his word, and his statement immediately following the announcement about U.S. withdrawal from the ABM Treaty was quite restrained by all standards, especially compared to harsh statements made by Russian officials in 2000 and in even in early 2001. He called the U.S. decision "a mistake," praised the crucial role of the treaty for international security, but also insisted that the "existing level of the bilateral relations between the Russian Federation and the United States should not just be preserved, but also should be used for the early development of a new framework for a strategic relationship."

Putin's point about the political price the United States would pay became clear on the day of the U.S. withdrawal from the ABM Treaty as well. He immediately placed calls to key international players interested in the issue: China, India, and Spain (which currently presides in the European Union). Terse official reports about these conversations indicate that Putin carefully disassociated himself from the U.S. decision so that the United States could not claim even tacit Russian support.

What Next?

In the near future, the central point on Putin's agenda remains economic development and political integration into the Atlantic community. If he can, he will not allow U.S. withdrawal from the ABM Treaty to become an obstacle to the policy he has carefully shaped in the last several months. This agenda item will not come at the expense of Russia's developing relations with China and India, of course; still, the Western orientation is likely to dominate the agenda.

Putin's agenda will enjoy support or at least a neutral response from the military, which calculated several years ago that no feasible missile defense system that the United States might deploy in the next decade or even longer could undermine Russia's deterrence capability. It is expected that, in the view of the projected reduction of the U.S. strategic arsenal to the level of 1,700-2,200 warheads, Russia will only need between 1,000-2,000 warheads to maintain deterrence vis-à-vis the United States and other nuclear powers. To a large extent, the Russian threats to engage in large-scale arms modernization and deployment, which one could hear only a year ago, were dictated by hopes to use U.S. withdrawal from the ABM Treaty to boost spending for strategic forces rather than by perception of a real threat. Once it became clear that additional funds would not be allocated, the military's reaction calmed down as well.

The military has its own agenda, however, and Vladimir Putin is likely to support it, especially since it is unlikely to generate a crisis in relations with the United States and NATO. At the heart of this agenda is limited and, above all, cost-effective modernization of the dwindling Russian nuclear arsenal. The optimal restructuring of the arsenal, however, is prevented by START I. U.S. withdrawal from the ABM Treaty has long been considered by many within the Russian military and defense industrial establishment as a convenient and, indeed, welcome pretext to relax some provisions of START I or, if necessary, withdraw from it. A month before the summit, Minister of Defense Sergei Ivanov declared that if the ABM Treaty is a relic of the Cold War, then other arms control treaties, in particular START I and its verification regime, should also be considered similar relics. It is difficult to imagine a clearer statement of intentions.

START I, which was negotiated by the Soviet Union, has simply become too expensive, too restricting, and too unwieldy for the limited resources that Russia now commands. For example, the oft-promised MIRVing of the new Topol-M intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) is impossible unless it is declared a new type (it is currently declared as a modification of its predecessor, Topol), but that would be an expensive move. The verification regime dictated by START I is often cumbersome and expensive.

Although the two presidents reportedly considered START I verification mechanisms as the way to ensure transparency of deeper reductions, it seems possible that the Russian military could manage to do away with at least some START I provisions, including those pertaining to verification. Indeed, in Washington, Vladimir Putin strongly pushed for a new agreement that would codify new deep reductions; this proposal, at least in part, reflected the Russian military's desire to circumvent START I. The initial U.S. reaction was cool and apparently proceeded from the assumption that START I would remain in force. It is possible that a more positive attitude toward the new agreement, which Colin Powell expressed during his December 10 visit to Moscow, reflected the understanding that the future of START I is no longer assured. On the Russian side, the support for a new agreement apparently reflects better appreciation of the need for transparency, which might be the most significant change in the thinking of the Russian Ministry of Defense in recent years.

Conclusion

The optimal path for the U.S.-Russian interaction on nuclear weapons reductions following the abrogation of the ABM Treaty is to negotiate a new agreement that would codify and most importantly provide transparency for the reductions announced by the two presidents: George W. Bush proposed reducing the level of weapons to 1,700-2,200 while Vladimir Putin, in the statement following the U.S. announcement about the withdrawal from the ABM Treaty, offered 1,500-2,200. This will not be easy, of course, but the new agreement will certainly be considerably simpler than START I or even START II. Such a move is likely to mitigate the consequences of the abrogation of the ABM Treaty and will ease the two states out of START I without creating a new major international crisis. The benefits are certainly worth the effort.

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