OPINION — Last week, President Trump announced that the U.S. was giving six months’ notice that it would be pulling out of another international agreement, this time the 1992 Open Skies Treaty. At the same time, his administration’s top arms control officials continued the practice of sending mixed messages as to what Trump’s policies really are when it comes to arms control.
“We must confront the reality that countries such as Russia and China are, simply put, arms racing,” Marshall Billingslea, the newly appointed Special Presidential Envoy for Arms Control, told an interviewer at the Hudson Institute last Thursday.
Russia and China have been building and improving short-range and intermediate-range nuclear weapons, some of them hypersonic. “Russia is modernizing an unconstrained arsenal of thousands of so-called non-strategic nuclear weapons,” Billingslea said, “giving them greater accuracy, longer ranges, lower yields, all to fill various war fighting roles.” He also said, “Beijing has stubbornly refused to share any significant information about its plans, its capabilities, its intentions regarding its move to a triad of [nuclear] delivery vehicles—a launch on warning posture, an exploration of low-yield nuclear weapons."
Billingslea explained saying, “I think the Chinese are, in fact, doing certain things that are focused on the Russians, and the Russians are probably looking at that thinking, ‘Hmm, how are we going to deal with this?’”
Billingslea added, “The United States is modernizing our forces without significantly increasing our overall number of nuclear weapons. The same cannot be said of Russia’s and China’s projected upward trajectories.”
In saying that, he also threatened that President Trump was prepared to join in the nuclear race, unless Beijing and Moscow agree to new trilateral negotiations to create a whole new arms control regime.
“The president’s made clear,” Billingslea said, “that we have a tried-and-true practice here. We know how to win these races. And we know how to spend the adversary into oblivion. If we have to, we will, but we sure would like to avoid it. And so, that’s why this three-way arms control agreement to forestall a three-way race is so essential.”
Billingslea then backed Trump’s repeatedly stated position that any future arms control agreement must involve all nuclear weapons, not just strategic ones, and China must be a party.
“In our way of thinking, there isn’t such a thing as a non-strategic nuclear weapon in this day and age, if there ever was,” Billingslea said, adding, “We intend to subject all nuclear weapons to future arms control constraints.” He also said, “Russia must help bring China to the negotiating table.”
Billingslea did not deal with any of the complex issues raised with attempting to include both tactical and strategic nuclear warheads in a future agreement. He also did not say what kind of verification techniques would be needed, since most tactical delivery systems, and there are tens of thousands of them, are primarily used for conventional weapons.
These were among the complex issues raised last week by Billingslea and President Trump’s other top arms control diplomat, Dr. Christopher Ford, Assistant Secretary of State for International Security and Nonproliferation.
Billingslea, who served in the Pentagon during the George W. Bush Administration and until last month at Treasury dealing with terrorist financing, not only did the Hudson Institute website interview last Thursday, but appeared that same day with Ford before the State Department press to deal with the decision to leave the Open Skies Treaty.
One fact that emerged from both sessions was that Billingslea had reached an agreement to meet Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov, with their delegations, at a venue in Europe as soon as the pandemic recedes. The agenda, according to Billingslea, will include extension of the 2010 New START agreement, which runs out on February 5, 2021.
New START limits the number of U.S and Russian deployed strategic nuclear warheads and delivery systems and provides onsite verification systems but can be extended for five years by agreement and without either country’s legislatures taking further actions.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has been pushing for more than a year for the extension, but up until now, Trump has resisted. Billingslea’s remarks last week indicate that the U.S. wants more than a simple extension.
For example, Billingslea said, “The New START treaty suffers from some serious verification inadequacies, in my view,” citing as one example that “over the past decade, Russia has not been required to provide telemetry on any of their new systems under development. And they certainly have not.”
But Rose Gottemoeller, who helped negotiate New START in the Obama administration, pointed out last week in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, “The sharing of telemetry data, essentially flight test data for missiles, had an important function under START [the earlier 1994 arms treaty], because it was used to confirm the viability of the counting rules.”
However, she added, “In New START, we discarded the counting rules in favor of confirming declared warheads on the front of missiles through reciprocal inspections; in fact, we did not need telemetry.”
Billingslea also spoke of “exploitable loopholes with onsite inspection procedures and the length of time given before inspectors are allowed to the location in question.” Gottemoeller’s response was that subsequent negotiations between U.S. and Russian military teams jointly worked out inspections for deployed and non-deployed systems that “streamlined inspection procedures at a sufficient level of detail to be effectively implemented.”
She also noted that despite Billingslea’s worries, the Trump State Department last December 3, 2019, announced “We assess that Russia does still remain in compliance with its New START obligations.”
Despite that declaration, Billingslea emphasized last week that Russia cannot be trusted to adhere to negotiated agreements.
“When it comes to Russia, we have little reason to be confident. Russia’s track record is, to be frank, abysmal,” Billingslea said. He cited as a “clear violation of the chemical weapons convention,” Russian intelligence agents’ use of the deadly Novichok nerve agent in an 2018 assassination attempt on Sergei Skripal in the UK.
Dr. Ford picked up the same theme at the State Department press conference saying, “Russia’s violation of the Open Skies Treaty is just one instance in a pattern of Russian violations of its arms control nonproliferation and disarmament obligations and commitments that affect European security and affect the arms control architecture.”
Ford cited Russia’s “illegal sub-limit for flights over the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad,” as an illustration of non-adherence to the Open Skies Treaty. Under questioning, Ford said, “it’s not that they were entirely prohibited; it’s that there were unlawful restrictions on flight duration that were – or flight distance that were put over Kaliningrad. As this all – it has become clear that we have been reviewing our participation in the Open Skies Treaty, it is correct that a very slightly longer flight was, in fact, recently permitted.”
Ford also brought up that “Russia may be using imagery that is collected from Open Skies flights to support its new doctrine of targeting U.S. – and, I should add, European – critical infrastructure targets with conventionally armed precision-guided missiles.” He added, however, “Now, it’s not a violation of the treaty to collect imagery of civilian infrastructure, of course, but if a state party turns around and uses that imagery to support offensive military targeting, clearly that is nonetheless problematic.”
Ford said he was “not at liberty to go into some of the details of why we think that this is a concern under the Open Skies Treaty,” but The New York Times has reported that “Trump was angered “by a Russian flight directly over his Bedminster, N.J., golf estate in 2017.”
Last Thursday, Trump mixed-the-message by telling reporters, “There’s a chance we may make a new [Open Skies] agreement or do something to put that agreement back together…I think what’s going to happen is we’re going to pull out and they’re going to come back and want to make a deal.”
Arms control agreements are serious matters, and even more so when talking about nuclear weapons. There are questions about just how serious President Trump is about any of them.
There are just over eight months until New START provisions end. Billingslea’s statement during his Hudson interview that while the U.S. and Russia are at the “very early stage in the negotiations” over New START, “there will be plenty of time to look at the full range of options related to that treaty,” just does not ring true.
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