Will Arms Control Foes Take Aim at Another Treaty?

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/04/opinion/nuclear-test-ban.html

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With the United States, Russia and China pouring billions of dollars into modernizing their military arsenals, the risk of a new arms race grows while the arms control system that has held off the threat of nuclear annihilation grows weaker.

Russia has violated the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, which eliminated American and Russian missiles in Europe, since at least 2014, when the Obama administration accused it of deploying a cruise missile of illegal range. Because of that, President Trump said early this year that he would abandon the pact.

That ill-conceived move was applauded by John Bolton, Mr. Trump’s national security adviser and one of the arms control resisters who are now ascendant in the administration.

Mr. Bolton and fellow arms control opponents, in Congress and conservative think tanks, have also worked over the years to undermine the 1996 Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, an aim that arms control proponents fear may have been helped last week when a top American intelligence official leveled a new, unsubstantiated charge at Russia.

The treaty prohibits “any nuclear weapon test explosion or any other nuclear explosion,” of any size, regardless of the yield. Although the pact never took effect officially because the United States and seven other key countries didn’t ratify it, the major nuclear powers — the United States, Russia, France, Britain and China — along with India and Pakistan have abided by an informal testing moratorium since the 1990s. That has restrained the development of new nuclear weapons.

Lt. Gen. Robert Ashley, who heads the Defense Intelligence Agency, last week told the Hudson Institute that Russia “probably” was not in compliance and may be conducting very low-yield tests to develop new tactical nuclear weapons. If it resumed testing, other countries, including the United States and China, would have an excuse to do the same.

General Ashley didn’t substantiate the charge, and his agency has a reputation for promoting worst-case scenarios. Lassina Zerbo of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Organization, which monitors the treaty, said his group had detected no Russian testing.

Even so, there are fears that treaty opponents will use General Ashley’s claim to call for the pact’s dissolution.

They are certain to have support from Mr. Bolton, who has long disparaged arms control generally.

If the administration has evidence that Russia is testing weapons, it should share it with Congress and the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Organization. The two sides could visit their respective test sites, as the treaty calls for, to verify what activities are taking place. Of course, if the administration is worried about testing, it could also reiterate American support for the test ban treaty, which President Bill Clinton signed in 1996, by sending it to the Senate for ratification.

That would be an unlikely move by President Trump, who has embraced a “great power competition” with a greater reliance on the construction and strengthening of nuclear weapons.

He has yet to even set a date to negotiate an extension of the New Start Treaty, which mandated a reduction in both sides’ deployed strategic nuclear weapons and includes a strong system of data exchange and verification. It expires in 2021, and it appears Mr. Trump may delay that decision on renegotiation until 2020.

He’s also expressed interest in expanding the negotiations to include a broader range of weapons and bring in China, which has about 300 warheads, compared with roughly 4,000 each for Russia and the United States, and is not party to most major nuclear agreements. But while those moves may seem sensible, their more likely effect would be to make it impossible to keep New Start alive.

America has been a leader both in developing the world’s most lethal weapons and in trying to manage them while avoiding war. As long as major powers invest in more advanced systems, there remains a compelling need for the transparency, accountability, deterrence and stability that arms control agreements can offer.

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