46

Emporium Current Essays

At a press talk in Washington on February 7, US vicepresident announced that the United

States was planning to start negotiations with Russia on yet another Strategic Arms
Reduction Treaty, START In. The announcement came after Al Gore's meeting with
Russian Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin who was on an official visit to the United
States, START In will now be on US President Bili Clinton's agenda for his next month's
summit with Russian President Boris Yeltsin in Helsinki.

American's latest arms control proposal has come in the wake of years-long US failure to
secure START II ratification from the Russian State Duma. Signed in 1993, START II
was ratified in January last year by the US Senate. There are three reasons why the
Russian Duma has not ratified this treaty. First, the Duma's nationalist members
consider the treaty "discriminatory and unequal." In their opinion, START II allows
the United States to retain key components, of its strategic arms while it denies the same
to Russia. Due to this, they belie, the United Stated will gain strategic superiority over
Russia if reductions proposed under START II are implemented, as scheduled, by 2003.
The treaty proposed no more than 3,000 strategic arms for Russia and no more than 3,500
strategic arms for the United States.

Secondly, after downgrading much of its conventional arms strength in view of Jhe end
of the Cold War, Russia now considers nuclear weapons as the only remaining pillar of its
national security. On February 12, Kremlin Security Council Secretary Ivan Rybkin in an
interview with an official Russian newspaper stated categorically that Russia could use
nuclear weapons first if under sufficient threat from a conventional army. "If an aggressor
unleashes a conflict against us with conventional armaments, then, as part of our decisive
reply, we can use nuclear weapons," he said.

And, the third reason why the Russian parliament has not ratified START II are the
officially expressed Russian concerned about American attempts to expand NATO. For
some years, the United States has been floating the idea of expanding NATO by including
Central and East European states like Poland and the Chech Republic. This initiative is
commonly known as the US

Emporium Current Essays

47

Partnership for Peace initiative. But Russia looks at it as an American-led Western move
to bring into the Western sphere of influence a region which not long ago formed part of
the Soviet bloc. One obvious American motive behind the START In proposal is that,
once negotiations on further cuts in strategic arms between the leaders of the two
countries begin, the Russian parliament will find little or no justification for hedging on
the START II agreement. So, in a way, the US arms control proposal aims at securing the
implementation of START II instead of initiating a new process of drastic reduction in
US-Russian strategic arms.

Russian hard-liners are quite justified in pointing out anomalies in START II. The treaty
was negotiated and signed at a time when Russia's international position was weak and,
internally as well, its situation was troublesome. And when START I was concluded, both
domestically and globally, Russia stood on a much weaker footing, as it was facing the
negative fail-out of the Soviet collapse. In such circumstances, its leader Mikhail
Gorbachev could not bargain effectively in the strategic arms reduction talks. Thus the
outcome of the talks was not in favour of Russia. The Americans succeeded in retaining a
considerable portion of their sea-based strategic force, particularly the Submarine-
Launched Ballistic Missiles and long-range bombers. Traditionally, in both areas, the
United States had a clear-cut advantage over the former Soviet Union, whose main
strategic strength rested on the heavy, landbased ballistic missiles, the SS- 18s and the
land-based mobile ballistic missiles, the SS-24s and SS-25s.

' Traditionally, the land-based heavy Inter-Continental

Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs) haA-e formed the core of the Russian strategic capability. It is
in this area that START II discriminates. It aims at eliminating the entire Russian arsenal
of heavy and mobile ICBM as either by simply depriving Russia of this capability or by
reducing the number of warheads these missiles carry. Given the fact that the United
States has a clear-cut advantage over Russian sea-and air-based forces, the downsizing of
the Russian land-based arsenal means that if START II is implemented, the United States
will be in a position to strike first against Russian in a crisis situation.

Considering these anomalies in START II, the US proposal for starting talks on another
START agreement does not make any sense. Now that Russia is much more stable than
before, it would have been better for the American leaders to first try to remove Russian
grievances about START II and only then make an offer for another treaty for drastically
reducing the two nations' strategic ajrim.

Clinton-Yeltsin's last sum48

Emporium Current Essays

himself proposed the negotiations on Strategic Stability and Nuclear Security which,
besides Russia and the United States, should also involve the three other declared nuclear
powers - China, Great Britain and France. That was quite a sound idea since, in the
postCold War period, the question of nuclear arms control is not limited to Russia and the
US only; rather, the participation in the process of arms reduction by the other three
nuclear states is also necessary. One development that has taken place in this period is
that, at least in global politics, nuclear weapons do not retain as much value a they did in
the Cold War days.
There is another area which is very much linked to the process of arms reduction by the
declared nuclear states. That is the issue of nuclear proliferation, which has become quite
risky after the break up of the Soviet Union. Nuclear powers cannot address nuclear arms
while ignoring nuclear proliferation. They have to take the threshold nuclear states, India,
Israel and Pakistan, along with them in order to make the arms control process credible.
This is the only way the world can be freed from the grayest danger it is facing from the
nuclear arms possessed publicly or privately by some members of the international
community.

Nuclear disarmament is still a dream. What, however, is possible today is the gradual
reduction in nuclear arsenal of countries which posses them. And, in this reduction
process, what matters the most is the security concern of every negotiating state. Through
START I and II, the American ensured their security at the expense of the Russians.
While the Russians are asserting themselves now, they realise the mistakes they made in
negotiating the two treaties from a position of weakness.

Thus, when Mr. Clinton meets the Russian President, it will be better on his part no to
insist unreasonably on a new treaty. The best option is to tackle Russian concerns about
the START II treaty and, at the same time, remove their misgivings arising from the
American initiative on NATO expansion. If that is not done, not only will the ratification
of START II by the Duma become a dream as nuclear disarmament has been for the last
half century, the nationalist feelings in Russia will gain much more momentum. And, one
day, the wor!d may find even Gorbachev becoming Brezhnev. Finally, in their suwuit, the
two world leaders must also take into account the fact that the issue of nuclear
proliferation, especially in South Asia, cannot be settled by propagating about dangers but
by involving the threshold states in the arms cont rol process.mit meeting took place in
Washington in December 1995, and, during it, Mr. Yeltsin had