THEWORLDTODAY.ORG DECEMBER 2007

ARMS CONTROL Jane Sharp Missile Madness

Russia says this is the month it will pull out of a 1990 treaty limiting conventional forces in Europe. The decision comes after heated disputes over the future of Kosovo and Washington’s plan for missile defences in Europe. The west is missing a trick: new arms agreements are needed, not new missiles.

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during the cold war years we learned that successful arms control agreements with the Soviet Union were those that established parity, or at least a mutually acceptable status quo. After the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Treaty Organisation in 1991, a much diminished Russia saw all its one-time military allies, and three former Soviet republics, join NATO, making parity harder to achieve. During the 1990s, under President Boris Yeltsin, Russia pushed for equality to the United States in arms control diplomacy and in negotiations over the future of the former Yugoslavia. US President Bill Clinton tried to meet Yeltsin’s concerns, but since then there has been little constructive cooperation on arms control between President George Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin. Indeed, since 2000, Bush has been hostile to any kind of multilateral diplomacy. He began his presidency with a new generation of ballistic missile defences and withdrew from the 1972 Anti Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, an agreement which had stabilised US-Soviet relations for two decades. In Russia, an increasingly belligerent Putin, flush with oil money, is now determined to achieve great power status in his dealings with the west. He is asserting himself in many areas: trying to block independence for Kosovo; countering US sanctions against Iran; and renegotiating

arms control agreements concluded when Russia was weak. Specifically, he wants to extend the life of the 1994 START-I agreement – due to expire in December 2009 – that limits US and Russian inter-continental ballistic missiles. He cannot afford to upgrade these offensive missiles, and would prefer new negotiations to reduce numbers. He is also determined to rewrite or pull out of agreements which he claims are unequal and discriminatory: in particular the bilateral 1987 Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty, banning US and Soviet intermediate ballistic and cruise missiles with ranges of 500 to 5,500 kilometers and the multilateral 1990 Treaty on Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE), which codified the balance between NATO and the then Warsaw pact in five categories of ground force equipment. The Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces treaty resulted in the destruction of 846 US and 1,846 Soviet intermediate range missiles, including those which caused so much anxiety in Europe, particularly in West Germany in the 1980s. In February last year, however, at the annual Wehrkunde meeting in Munich, Sergei Ivanov, then Russian defence minister, denounced the treaty as ‘a Cold War relic’, while Putin said that Russia could no longer comply with a bilateral treaty, which does not constrain non-signatory states which already have or might soon acquire intermediate range missiles. In October Putin threatened to withdraw unilaterally from the 1987 treaty unless it is made global.

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