Okay, who is NOT building a new nuclear weapon?

Russian President Vladimir Putin answered questions today from the Kremlin for over three hours in a live television, radio and internet broadcast of “The Hot Line with the President of Russia.”

AFP reports that:

“Putin told servicemen at the Plesetsk nuclear missile base that Russia would build another nuclear submarine next year and was also planning a "completely new" atomic weapon, about which he did not elaborate.”

Additionally, the AP reports that President Putin said:

"Our plans are not simply considerable, but huge. At the same time they are absolutely realistic…I have no doubts that we will accomplish them."

Putin’s remarks come on the heels of his discussions with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran in the first visit of a Russian leader to Iran since the 1940s, and of the Russian test launch of a Topol intercontinental ballistic missile.

In the context of previous Russian tit-for-tat behavior, such as withdrawal from START II immediately following the effective date of the U.S. abrogation of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2002 and the recent announcement that Russian participation in the Conventional Armed Forces in Europe Treaty would end on December 12 of this year following U.S. missile defense facility siting decisions in Eastern Europe, this move may create an opportunity to ask the Russians if they would consider terminating the development of this new nuclear weapon of the United States forgoes the planned Reliable Replacement Warhead.

We'll always have Votkinsk

Reuters reports that on Tuesday Russia’s First Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov was quoted by Interfax in remarks in Votkinsk, Russia that his country has begun mass producing Topol-M inter-continental ballistic missiles (ICBMs): "we are now entering a new and crucial stage of reequipping all of the strategic nuclear forces and operational and tactical systems."

Verification fans will recall Votkinsk fondly as the site of the first on-site inspections for verification of negotiated limits on nuclear arms agreed to by the former Soviet Union under the 1987 Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty – a Treaty Russia threatened to leave in February. Although U.S. and Russian on-site inspection rights under the Treaty ended in 2001, continued observance of the Treaty’s limitation reflects both the shared interest in avoiding a resumed arms race and a hopeful model for global limitations on intermediate range missiles.

Both purposes appear to have lost their charm for President Vladimir Putin. When asked by Doug Saunders of The Globe and Mail earlier this month how Russia might respond to the proposed American deployment of a missile defense system in Europe, President Putin specifically denied that Russian missile acquisition and potential abandonment of the INF Treaty are linked to the proposal, but replied that “As far as the INF treaty is concerned, this is a broader issue and it does not relate directly to missile defence systems of the United States. The thing is that only the United States and the Russian Federation bear the burden of not developing intermediate-range missiles, and the other countries are involved in this – Israel, Pakistan, Iran, Korea, South Korea even, as far as I'm concerned. . . . If everyone complied with it, then it would be clear, but when other countries in the world are fighting to pursue such efforts, then I do not understand why the U.S. and Russia should place such restrictions on themselves. We are considering what we should do in order to ensure our security . . . a lot of countries are involved in these efforts, including our neighbours. I repeat that this does not have anything to do with the U.S. plans to deploy missile defences in Europe. We are going to find responses to both threats, though.”

While one may think President Putin protests the linkage to European missile defense a bit too much, and find his suggestion that a global treaty would be better to be cynical, the U.S. effort to multilateralize the INF Treaty following the fall of the former Soviet Union suggests the sort of expansion of verification provisions developed during the Cold War that could contribute to greater global confidence in a strengthened nonproliferation regime.

Unlikely as it seems today, and even as Votkinsk becomes the birthplace of a new generation of Russian ICBMs, we should keep in mind that if we succeed in realizing President Reagan’s vision of a world free of nuclear weapons – given new life in January in the Wall Street Journal by George Schultz, William Perry, Henry Kissinger, and Sam Nunn – Votkinsk (along with Magna, Utah) will be where on-site inspection for nuclear disarmament was first achieved and this counterintuitive achievement should remind us that positive change is possible through careful and innovative diplomacy.

Missing the point on new Euromissiles

President Bush’s peculiar assertion yesterday that “Russia is not an enemy” resurfaces yet again a fundamental inconsistency of neoconservative foreign policy: common values cannot be spread by force.

The remark comes at an ironic moment, before a scheduled meeting between Russian President Vladimir Putin and President Bush on the margins of the G-8 summit in which the two leaders hope to resolve differences sparked by the planned U.S. deployment of an anti-missile shield in Europe.

When President Putin responded to the proposed deployment by threatening to target Russian nuclear missiles at Europe, Deputy State Department Spokesman Tom Casey diplomatically referred to President Putin’s concern as “silly.”

National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley responded to Putin on The Newshour with Jim Lehrer, saying of the proposed missile shield, “It's not aimed at Russia. The systems we would deploy do not have capability of any significant character against Russian ICBMs destined for -- you know, that are aimed at the United States. It just doesn't have any capability. It's a very limited capability about other states like Iran, who are developing ballistic missiles, and potentially the weapons of mass destruction that those missiles could deliver, so it's all about Iran.”

This answer makes neither linguistic nor technical sense. If Iran launched a nuclear missile at Europe (which experts conclude is technically unfeasible for years to come), the response would be certain and devastating. Iran would never stand toe-to-toe with the rest of the world and pick a fight – if it did it would lose badly – and this is what the use of a nuclear missile would unambiguously mean (although aiding terrorists with nuclear weapons, materials, or know-how could be another matter, against which a missile shield would offer cold comfort). In addition, Mr. Hadley’s response does not address President Putin’s explicit concern that the planned system will be able to strike airborne targets deep inside Russian territory.

As this verbal Cold War brewed, hundreds of protestors were arrested at the G-8 Summit convened to promote common values among the world’s leading industrialized states. As Professor John Kirton recalls the 1975 communiqué from Heads of State articulating the original mission of the G-7 process “We came together because of shared beliefs and shared responsibilities. We are each responsible for the government of an open, democratic society, dedicated to individual liberty and social advancement. Our success will strengthen, indeed is essential to democratic societies everywhere.”

While the protestors may not have a clear idea of the critical path to the global change they seek – or even a shared vision of what the world would look like if they got what they asked for – their presence underscores how delicate the legitimacy of efforts to promote democracy, freedom, peace and development can be. It is a good thing that the world’s most powerful leaders get together to talk about the good things they have in common and how they can work together, but including only the powerful in important discussions of the future breeds resentment in those who are excluded – themselves increasingly powerful in an age of global networks.

As Richard J. Harknett, James J. Wirtz, and T.V. Paul paraphrase the late RAND strategist Bernard Brodie, “any international arrangement must ultimately rely on and therefore reflect the systemic distribution of power.” The current asymmetric conflict pitting a lone hyperpower, the United States, and a loose “coalition of the willing,” against a franchised collection of terrorist networks suggests that Brodie’s observation may be as much a source of change as stability. The important question is, will this change work for us?

This is where the neocons get it wrong – they don’t know who the “us” is. If “us” is the American experiment in democracy, a continent-spanning melting pot of cultures and beliefs joined together under the rule of law to protect individual rights and service common values – a nation of ideas that twice rose to defend the world – we have a great chance of “winning.” If “us” turns out to be the privileged few who live behind a wall of power, we are in big trouble. The neocons have tried to split the difference by spreading democracy through force, and the inconsistency is killing us.

This latest adventure in poking the Russian bear is as surreal as it is pointless. President Bush’s exercise in building a defense that doesn’t work against an Iranian capability that doesn’t exist is more than an enormous waste of money, it has led the President of Russia to level a threat of increased military readiness that he is immediately capable of executing against a peaceful Europe with which he has no other reason to spark an arms race. But that’s what arms racing is – weapons acquisitions by one state driving responses in kind by the other until their arsenals are so ponderous that war seems a foregone conclusion. Realists understand this, because they base their analysis on capabilities, not intentions.

In asserting that Russia is not an enemy, President Bush has confused his own neoconservative idealism – that believes all bad intentions can be answered with hardware – with Russia’s realism which is hardwired to answer hardware with hardware, no matter what one leader sees in another’s soul.

More importantly, President Bush confuses the fact of the Cold War’s end with its meaning: even the largest nuclear arsenal in the world did not allow the Soviet leadership to resist the will to freedom. We would do well to remember the lessons of this last great global conflict as we work to respond to the danger of the next.