Nuclear Reset - Program on Strategic Stability Evaluation (POSSE)

196<strong>Nuclear</strong> <strong>Reset</strong>: Arms Reduction and NonproliferationHowever, since Washington had stopped pursuing the goal of restrictingspecific Russian arms and programs, Russia found itself withno bargaining chips it could exchange for U.S. concessions (suchas counting rules, restrictions on strategic systems reconfigured forconventional arms, etc.). Furthermore, the Democratic administrationhad to prepare for strong Republican opposition to ratificationof the Treaty. Moscow, for its part, did not find it necessaryto make concessions on the verification regime (continuous monitoringin Votkinsk, ban on encoding telemetric information, etc.). Sinceit had its reasons, primarily political, for wanting to conclude the newTreaty (Obama’s election campaign promises, his Nobel Prize, andthe NPT Review Conference), the United States accepted this position.Time was also a factor: since START-I was to expire in December2009, the schedule of negotiations had to be accelerated.The new Treaty illuminates a most important and congruent featureof the nuclear policies pursued by both Moscow and Washington:neither of them for the foreseeable future intends to make real reductionsin the numbers of strategic arms below the levels set by the 2002Moscow Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty (1,700-2,200 warheads).The lower number of warheads under the New START Treatyactually only reflects the fact that the rules for counting weaponson heavy bombers have changed. Taking the figure of 1,120 cruisemissiles (warheads) as the realistic carrying capacity of the 56 deployedU.S. B-52 heavy bombers, for example, under the conditionalcounting rules established under START-I these bombers would becounted as having 672 warheads; now, this number will be reducedto 56. Similarly, the number of armaments that Russia’s 77 deployedTu-160 and Tu-95ms heavy bombers could realistically carry (over850) will go to 77.Moreover, there were specific concepts of a strategic operationaland economic nature behind such innovations. The fact that the twosides agreed in a way to reduce the “weight” of their heavy bomberssomewhat reflects their vision of the role such weapons would performin strategic operations by the nuclear triad during an exchangeof massive nuclear strikes, which during the Cold War had beenconsidered as the main form of strategic nuclear operations. The roleof heavy bombers before, during, and after massive ICBM and SLBMstrikes has never been defined with any particular clarity.Nevertheless, the following considerations should be noted withregard to future arms reductions. Over recent years, four well-known