New START Enters Into Force Posted by Kelsey Hartigan

New START formally entered into force this past weekend when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov exchanged instruments of ratification on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference.  U.S. and Russian inspectors will soon exchange data on missiles, launchers, heavy bombers and warheads and in less than 60 days, inspections will resume.  According to my math, this means that by April 6, 2011, inspectors will once again be able to conduct on-site inspections.  My fellow arms control wonks will appreciate the timing:  President Obama gave his historic Prague speech on April 5, 2009 and signed the New START agreement with Russian President Medvedev a year later on April 8, 2010.  When inspections resume this April, the New START process will have come full circle.       

U.S.-Russian inspections ended in December 2009 when the original START agreement expired.  Since that point, the U.S. has only been able to use National Technical Means to monitor Russia’s nuclear arsenal.  National Technical Means, or NTM, is of course, just the polite way of referring to spy satellites.  As Mary Beth Sheridan explained in a piece last summer, however, reconnaissance satellites only go so far.  “For example, a satellite cannot peer into a Russian underground silo and see whether the missile inside is carrying one nuclear bomb or 10, officials say.”

“One of our dirty little secrets is, when the [Berlin] Wall went down, the United States reoriented a lot of intelligence capacity away from the Soviet Union and Russia. To some fair degree . . . the IC [intelligence community] was relying on U.S. inspectors to be on the ground," [Frank] Miller said.

The "boots on the ground" include people such as Phil Smith, a former Air Force crew chief for nuclear-tipped missiles. He has made about 20 inspection visits to Russian nuclear facilities.

"We have 15 years of experience under START, understanding where everything is. We've been through these sites multiple times," he said in an interview.

The U.S. teams typically arrive at Russian bases with only about a day's notice. Many of the inspectors' methods are surprisingly low-tech: They stretch tape measures along missiles and poke flashlights into trailers. The inspections allow each side to count nuclear weapons on a sampling of missiles, bombers or submarine launch tubes and look around one another's maintenance facilities and test ranges.

"If something is atypical . . . I will not be bashful about saying, 'Okay, we need to take a closer look at this one.' That's the kind of dynamic you have on the ground that you wouldn't have with a satellite," Smith said.

For more on New START’s inspection regime, it’s worth revisiting Ken Myers’ testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last June (pdf).  Myers is the head of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, which is responsible for implementing New START’s inspection and escort provisions.

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