New START, on the merits

As for whether there is a longer-term link between missile defense and offensive systems, Fred Kaplan of Slate made the point most clearly in a critique of Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney’s ill-considered case against New START:

“This is arms control 101. If both sides drastically reduce their offensive weapons while one side greatly builds up its defensive weapons, then that side could (theoretically), launch a disarming first strike and, moments later, shoot down what’s left of the other side’s missiles as they’re fired in retaliation . . . Very small offensive forces, combined with very large defensive forces, erode deterrence and create a ‘destabilizing’ situation.”

It is this scenario, as unlikely as it may be, that motivated Russia to comment upon the relationship between offenses and defenses in the preamble to New START.

Furthermore, as Marc Ambinder notes in a recent piece on the web site of The Atlantic, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has testified that pursuit of a system that would thwart Russia’s deterrent is inadvisable in any case:

“Under the last administration, as well as under this one, it has been United States policy not to build a missile defense that would render useless Russia’s nuclear capabilities . . . That, in our view as well as theirs, would be enormously destabilizing, not to mention unbelievably expensive.”

To recap, there is no link between New START and missile defense. Future decisions on missile defense development and deployment will be made based upon strategic considerations at the time, not on this relatively modest but extremely important agreement.

New START will make us all safer, and it deserves to be ratified by the U.S. Senate. Attempts to link it to unrelated issues should not be allowed to change that fact.

William D. Hartung is the director of the Arms and Security Initiative at the New America Foundation.