Hillary Clinton will be pleased with her first big trip to Europe as secretary of state, not least because of the generally positive meeting with her Russian opposite number Sergei Lavrov. Moscow is clearly relieved to be dealing with a White House that is no longer bent on confrontation. It has, therefore, committed itself to negotiating a new and third Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (START) to replace the existing 1993 US-Russian deal that runs out this December.
Under START 2, both sides reduced the number of their nuclear warheads from 6,000 to 3,500. START 3 may see a further radical cut. This will not only please opponents of nuclear weaponry but also the Russian and US treasuries. They are obliged to spend significant sums maintaining their nuclear stockpiles. Nothing substantive came out of the Lavrov-Clinton talks but the Russian welcomed the Obama administration’s new openness and said that he believed it would help rebuild the mutual trust that the Bush years had so dissipated.
One major issue that remains to be resolved is the European missile shield, which the Russians believe is aimed at them rather than Iran. It seemed initially that Obama might cancel the project, based in Poland and Czech Republic, outright and the Kremlin suspended a plan to advance Russian missiles to the Kalingrad enclave between Lithuania and Poland. Now the US appears to be holding back on scrapping the shield program, either to use it as a bargaining chip during START 3 talks or because it is interested in taking up a Russian proposal that the part of the shield could actually be located on its territory.
Certainly the world has changed since the last nonproliferation treaty. Pakistan and India have become nuclear powers as has North Korea. Israel, the only nuclear power in the Middle East, remains obdurately outside any form of atomic weapons control and Iran is widely suspected of acquiring its own arsenal. Therefore, while Moscow and Washington talk about reducing their own stockpiles, the issue of proliferation and how to address it will also concentrate their minds.
The deterrence provided by these awesome weapons has kept Moscow and Washington from going to war with each other and gave Europe one of its longest-ever periods of peace. What, therefore, needs to be recognized by the long-established nuclear powers is that other countries want the advantage of that deterrence as well. The impetus for the spread of atomic weaponry is not going to go away unless some currently hard-to-envisage system of guarantees can be established. While they may cut their own destructive power of their own nuclear warheads, it now seems unlikely that the US and Russia can now abandon them completely. The awful truth remains that any country that used a nuclear device against another nuclear state would suffer an equal if not greater counterattack. The US attacked Iraq to destroy the nuclear weapons it did not have while engaging diplomatically with North Korea that has bombs. Perversely proliferation spreads deterrence. However, the room for disastrous error remains.
