An arms control treaty for Donald: Is Putin preparing an October surprise?

Earlier this year, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists set its Doomsday clock to 100 seconds to midnight. It is the latest the morbid timer has ever shown – closer to “midnight” than the most famous “near miss” of September 1983, when Soviet strategic rocket officer Stanislav Petrov ignored multiple faulty missile launch warnings, and averted likely Armageddon.

The Bulletin’s January 2020 assessment was hyperbolic, but the security picture underpinning it was anything but auspicious. With the continuing climate emergency, North Korea, and tensions between the US, China, Russia and Iran, the world was hurtling somewhere ugly – and fast.  

Worse still, these new threats were emerging at a time the Trump administration was dismantling the world’s existing security architecture. In 2018, it withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal. A year later it withdrew from the US-Russia intermediate range nuclear forces treaty. Earlier this year, it signalled intent to leave the Open Skies arms control treaty.  

New Start, the last strategic arms control treaty standing, also looked dead in the water. Most assumed the Obama-era document would be allowed to lapse in early 2021 – with unclear consequences for nuclear arms proliferation. 

An election campaign and poor polling figures seem to have changed the calculus.

According to US media, Donald Trump is now pushing to have a “big treaty” in time for the 3 November vote. Hitherto sleepy negotiations on New Start have been superseded by frenzied diplomacy.  On 2 October, US national security advisor Robert O’Brien met with his Russian counterpart Nikolai Patrushev in Geneva. That meeting was followed three days later by an ad-hoc negotiation summit in Helsinki.  

On Tuesday, the US lead negotiator Marshall Billingslea said a new extension agreement had been agreed “in principle”.  

The breakthrough would appear to have been made possible by the US walking back their most hardline positions. As late as the summer, the US team presented unworkable suggestions – such as expanding the treaty to include countries like China and to cover sub-strategic nuclear warheads.  

Mr Billingslea seemed to suggest the new agreement would cover such warheads. Speaking on Tuesday, deputy foreign minister Sergei Ryabkov said that amounted to “delusion”.  

“If the Americans need to report to their superiors something they allegedly agreed with Russia before their elections, then they will not get it,” he said.

Moscow’s long-held position is that it is ready to sign an “unconditional” extension to the original treaty. The Kremlin views the treaty as a pillar of stability and status, and understands it can hardly afford a major new arms race.  

Given the newfound US enthusiasm for an extension, and its short timeframes, Mr Putin is in a position to dictate exact terms of such a change.

“Moscow is very happy to give Trump the beautiful signing ceremony he needs, but it can also read the polls,” says Andrey Baklitskiy, a senior research fellow at the Russian Foreign Ministry’s MGIMO University. “It sees Biden is comfortably ahead, and Biden wants to extend the treaty. If Trump isn’t ready to agree without preconditions, Russia has an obvious fallback.”  

The Kremlin’s ideal scenario, says Baklitskiy, would be to get a deal done this side of the election to avoid a “messy period” in the two weeks between inauguration in January and the treaty lapsing in February.  

The New Start agreement is a third iteration of a strategic arms control treaty first signed by Mikhail Gorbachev and George Bush in the final months of the Soviet Union. Agreed in 2010 by presidents Barack Obama and Dmitry Medvedev, New Start envisaged a 30 per cent cut in strategic missiles. Following implementation, both sides reduced their arsenals to 1,550 strategic warheads and 700 “delivery vehicles”.  

The treaty has provisions for short-notice inspections by both sides – and an extension of up to five years by mutual agreement.  

The Independent understands one focus of final negotiations is the length of such an extension. US negotiators remain keen to replace the treaty, and had been pushing for a short extension of a year. Those with experience of arms control negotiations insist that a much longer extension is needed.  

Pavel Palazhchenko, the man who was by Mikhail Gorbachev’s side as his chief translator through era-defining arms control negotiations, told The Independent that an extension of at least two years was “essential”.  

“The full five years would be preferable because there have been no substantive negotiations over Trump’s period in office,” he said.  

Lamenting a “wasted four years”, Mr Palazhchenko said he was now confident an agreement would be reached. Both sides understood a treaty was in their interests, with negotiations driven by the men at the top. One president needed to sell a “foreign policy victory”. Another needed it for confirmation of Russia’s “nuclear superpower status”.

A happy ending wasn’t always on the cards, he adds. Elements of the Trump administration longed to see the treaty lapse – and when that happened they would have “insisted” it freed the US of “commitments” to wider strategic security.  

“Trump is so erratic that he could have said yes, that’s my position too,” the translator said.  

“And that's when you get into dangerous territory …  the prospect the world’s whole [security] structure could collapse.”