New START is dead — good riddance

Since 1972, the United States has always had some sort of ongoing bilateral nuclear treaty with the Soviet Union and its successor state, the Russian Federation. Or at least it did, until this week, when the last in this long line of treaties – New START – expired.

That treaty, signed during the Obama and Medvedev administrations, set limits on deployed nuclear missile launchers and warheads. But the Trump administration and other American conservatives, including myself, had expressed concerns in the past that the treaty failed to include China, a more significant threat to the United States than the modern Russian Federation. 

Many arms controllers are decrying the end of the treaty. Michael McFaul, President Barack Obama’s ambassador to Russia, wrote the treaty was “tragically” ending, a sentiment echoed by arms controllers across the Atlantic. Experts at organisations such as the Vienna Centre for Disarmament and Non-Proliferation urged Washington and Moscow to create a new bilateral treaty, which they said could later be expanded.

This would be a mistake, because the issue with New START – indeed, with the very nature of bilateral nuclear treaties – goes beyond them specifically leaving out China. It is that they are built for a fundamentally different era.

In the 1970s, bilateral nuclear treaties made sense. They were solving a critical issue: The world, at least the parts of it the United States was concerned with, was divided in two. The Nixon administration sought to ensure that a hot war did not start in divided Europe, and to that end it negotiated the SALT agreement (Strategic Arms Limitation Agreement, on offensive missiles) and Anti-Ballistic Missile treaties (which restricted defensive weaponry). The Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, agreed under the Reagan administration, was designed to decrease the chance for a conflict in Europe.

But the world is no longer divided, and Europe has now been subsumed by Brussels, from the Atlantic to the Baltic Sea. The only sense a bilateral treaty would have is to keep America and Russia from getting too many nuclear weapons. But this, while perhaps an admirable goal, should not be the main goal of foreign policymaking. After all, tens of nuclear explosions could eliminate a country as a viable actor; hundreds could scramble the entirety of human civilization for decades, if not destroy it entirely. And no serious proposal has ever been entertained which would limit the number of offensive nuclear weapons to the hundreds or the tens.

The goal, as it was in the 1970s and 1980s, is to avoid a war which could eventually spiral into one which elicits the use of nuclear weapons. When Europe was divided, the feared scenario goes something like this: A revolution occurs in a country loyal to Side A. Side B sends troops to help the revolution go forward; Side A fires on the troops with a missile. Side B counters by attacking the base from which the missile was fired with a missile of its own, perhaps a small tactical nuclear device. Side A counters with multiple tactical strikes. And the spiral continues until both capitals are in flames.

That scenario is not happening now in Europe. But a spiral could occur in Asia, where China is seeking to expand its sphere of influence. And there is absolutely nothing governing China’s nuclear capabilities. The People’s Republic has roughly 600 nuclear weapons. If that does not sound like a lot, it’s a significantly higher number than the 20 they had which could strike the United States at the turn of the century. While China will likely not have a similarly massive growth in nuclear weapons over the next 25 years, they certainly will continue to increase until they at least rival the number possessed by the United States.

That is something which genuinely threatens American interests. Leaving them out just to get yet another bilateral Russian treaty, a relic of the Cold War system, is foolhardy.

Where does this leave Europe? The bilateral system was incredibly helpful for the continent, as it limited the amount of nuclear weapons Russia, the unabashedly largest threat to the EU, was able to possess. But now, it’s gone.

The continent has a few options. It still has two nuclear powers, the United Kingdom (linked by NATO) and France, the only EU member with access to domestic nuclear weapons. France has not been subtle about its consideration of extending its nuclear umbrella. But doing so would mean accepting French hegemony, which is something that some of Europe may not be eager to do. 

They could hope that the United States sticks around, but as the Trump administration has made abundantly clear in public and private conversations, America is slowly but surely seeking to make Europe pick up the slack – and if the continent is not willing to defend itself financially, it is hard to imagine Washington risking nuclear Armageddon for it.

Europe could consider proliferation, but European arms control experts have been quick to push back against that view, with one saying, “The real importance is not to increase the number of nuclear weapons…but to have various ways of delivering on that mission.” In other words, to strengthen the triad system (of delivery by plane, submarine, and land-based missiles). But if the entire continent becomes reliant upon France’s handful of missiles, then the amount of delivery options becomes essentially irrelevant.

An EU-controlled bomb is out of the question; one can imagine the satire of the European Council having to meet before sending a request to use a nuke to the European parliament and then to national capitals for approval. Such a concept could only come about with true federalisation, sure to be opposed by many.

Regional blocs, however, could be the best option. Countries which share actual national interests, such as Poland and the Baltics, could consider securing for themselves, one way or another, nuclear capabilities. It may mean less continental loyalty, but the multipolar world may simply not be a place for pan-European movements as imagined by the liberal internationalists.