Prospects and Implications for New START Extension

What is the future of the arms control architecture that has provided some stability in the years of the Cold War and its aftermath? What are the prospects for new negotiations to account for, reduce and eliminate US and Russian nuclear weapons? What is the likelihood of other nuclear-weapon states to join the negotiations? What implications will this have on the upcoming Review Conference of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT)?

VCDNP Senior Fellow Angela Kane addressed these questions during a hearing of the United Kingdom's House of Lords All-Party Parliamentary Groups on Global Security and Non-Proliferation, as well as the group on the United Nations.

First, Ms. Kane advocated that the United States and the Russian Federation extend the New START Treaty before it is allowed to expire in February 2021. If New START expires, the confidence building measures that it provides will also disappear, including mutual verification, military-to-military contact, risk reduction measures and transparency measures. This is a safety net that would be dangerous to lose.

Ms. Kane observed that this is a symptom of a larger problem in the international system - the decline in multilateralism. She observed that structures that once guaranteed a multilateral approach to global problems no longer hold and, as a result, we face a return to high military expenditures on nuclear programs and the threat of a new arms race.

Talks between US and Russian government representatives that took place in Vienna starting from June offer hope for detente, according to Ms. Kane, but even these talks are subject to differing interpretations from the US and Russian sides. Until more progress in made in this regard, Ms. Kane offered a number of recommendations to maintain stability, including:

• Extending New START, if not by the legal provisions in the Treaty, then perhaps by a political declaration promising to adhere to the terms of the Treaty until a new agreement can be reached;
• Conducting discussions in the P5 context on strategic stability, transparency, nuclear doctrine and postures, such as the P5 Civil Society Conference held in February 2020 by King's College London and the European Leadership Network.
• Conducting a joint study between the P5, or even the P3, on the topic of transparency building in the absence of arms control agreements.
• Engaging in dialogue about the value of verification, not as a political issue, but as a technical one. The US-Russian experience in verification could be instructive in this regard.
• Further investigating what the role of France and the United Kingdom in future arms control endeavours.
• Revisiting some models from the past, such as the Nuclear Security Summits.

In closing, Ms. Kane posed a question to the participants: what is the vision for arms control?  How do states want to approach this issue in the future? Rather than always focusing on the precedent from the past, what might states want to build in the next 50 years?

Ms. Kane's full remarks are available below.