U.S. Says Russia Tested Missile, Despite Treaty
By MICHAEL R. GORDON
American officials believe Russia tested a new ground-launched cruise
missile, raising concerns about Moscow’s compliance with an arms deal
that has been viewed as a bedrock accord in ending the Cold War.
Europe
WASHINGTON
— The United States informed its NATO allies this month that Russia had
tested a new ground-launched cruise missile, raising concerns about
Moscow’s compliance with a landmark arms control accord.
American
officials believe Russia began conducting flight tests of the missile
as early as 2008. Such tests are prohibited by the treaty banning
medium-range missiles that was signed in 1987 by President Ronald Reagan
and Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the Soviet leader at the time, and that has
long been viewed as one of the bedrock accords that brought an end to
the Cold War.
Beginning in May, Rose Gottemoeller,
the State Department’s senior arms control official, has repeatedly
raised the missile tests with Russian officials, who have responded that
they investigated the matter and consider the case to be closed. But
Obama administration officials are not yet ready to formally declare the
tests of the missile, which has not been deployed, to be a violation of
the 1987 treaty.
With
President Obama pledging to seek deeper cuts in nuclear arms, the State
Department has been trying to find a way to resolve the compliance
issue, preserve the treaty and keep the door open to future arms control
accords.
“The
United States never hesitates to raise treaty compliance concerns with
Russia, and this issue is no exception,” Jen Psaki, the State Department
spokeswoman, said. “There’s an ongoing review process, and we wouldn’t
want to speculate or prejudge the outcome.”
Other
officials, who asked not to be identified because they were discussing
internal deliberations, said there was no question the missile tests ran
counter to the treaty and the administration had already shown
considerable patience with the Russians. And some members of Congress,
who have been briefed on the tests on a classified basis for well over a
year, have been pressing the White House for a firmer response.
A
public dispute over the tests could prove to be a major new irritant in
the already difficult relationship between the United States and
Russia. In recent months, that relationship has been strained by
differences over how to end the fighting in Syria; the temporary asylum
granted to Edward J. Snowden, the former National Security Agency
contractor; and, most recently, the turmoil in Ukraine.
The
treaty banning the testing, production and possession of medium-range
missiles has long been regarded as a major step toward curbing the
American and Russian arms race. “The importance of this treaty
transcends numbers,” Mr. Reagan said during the treaty signing, adding that it underscored the value of “greater openness in military programs and forces.”
But
after President Vladimir V. Putin rose to power and the Russian
military began to re-evaluate its strategy, the Kremlin developed second
thoughts about the accord. During the administration of President
George W. Bush, Sergei B. Ivanov, the Russian defense minister, proposed
that the two sides drop the treaty.
Though
the Cold War was over, he argued that Russia still faced threats from
nations on its periphery, including China and potentially Pakistan. But
the Bush administration was reluctant to terminate a treaty that NATO
nations regarded as a cornerstone of arms control and whose abrogation
would have enabled the Russians to increase missile forces directed at
the United States’ allies in Asia.
Since
Mr. Obama has been in office, the Russians have insisted they want to
keep the agreement. But in the view of American analysts, Russia has
also mounted a determined effort to strengthen its nuclear abilities to
compensate for the weakness of its conventional, nonnuclear forces.
At
the same time, in his State of the Union address last year, Mr. Obama
vowed to “seek further reductions in our nuclear arsenals,” a goal
American officials at one point hoped might form part of Mr. Obama’s
legacy
But
administration officials and experts outside government say Congress is
highly unlikely to approve an agreement mandating more cuts unless the
question of Russian compliance with the medium-range treaty is resolved.
“If the Russian government has made a considered decision to field a prohibited system,” Franklin C. Miller,
a former defense official at the White House and the Pentagon, said,
“then it is the strongest indication to date that they are not
interested in pursuing any arms control, at least through the remainder
of President Obama’s term.”
It
took years for American intelligence to gather information on Russia’s
new missile system, but by the end of 2011, officials say it was clear
that there was a compliance concern.
There
have been repeated rumors over the last year that Russia may have
violated some of the provisions of the 1987 treaty. But the nature of
that violation has not previously been disclosed, and some news reports
have focused on the wrong system: a new two-stage missile called the
RS-26. The Russians have flight-tested it at medium range, according to
intelligence assessments, and the prevailing view among Western
officials is that it is intended to help fill the gap in Russia’s
medium-range missile capabilities that resulted from the 1987 treaty.
The treaty defines medium-range missiles as ground-launched ballistic or
cruise missiles capable of flying 300 to 3,400 miles.
But
because Russia has conducted a small number of tests of the RS-26 at
intercontinental range, it technically qualifies as a long-range system
and will be counted under the treaty known as New Start, which was
negotiated by the Obama administration. So it is generally considered by
Western officials to be a circumvention, but not a violation, of the
1987 treaty
One
member of Congress who was said to have raised concerns that the
suspected arms control violation might endanger future arms control
efforts was John Kerry. As a senator and chairman of the Foreign
Relations Committee, he received a classified briefing on the matter in
November 2012 that dealt with compliance concerns, according to a
report in The Daily Beast.
As
secretary of state, Mr. Kerry has not raised concerns over the cruise
missile tests with his Russian counterpart, Sergey V. Lavrov, but he has
emphasized the importance of complying with arms accords, a State
Department official said.
Republican lawmakers, however, have urged the administration to be more aggressive.
“Briefings
provided by your administration have agreed with our assessment that
Russian actions are serious and troubling, but have failed to offer any
assurance of any concrete action to address these Russian actions,”
Representative Howard McKeon, Republican of California and chairman of
the Armed Services Committee, and Representative Mike Rogers, the
Michigan Republican who leads the Intelligence Committee, said in an
April letter to Mr. Obama.
And
Senator Jim Risch, Republican of Idaho, and 16 other Republican
senators recently proposed legislation that would require the White
House to report to Congress on what intelligence the United States has
shared with NATO allies on suspected violations of the 1987 treaty.
Republican
members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee have also cited the
issue in holding up Ms. Gottemoeller’s confirmation as under secretary
of state for arms control and international security.
It
was against this backdrop that the so-called deputies committee, an
interagency panel led by Antony Blinken, Mr. Obama’s deputy national
security adviser, decided that Ms. Gottemoeller should inform NATO’s 28
members about the compliance issue.
On Jan. 17, Ms. Gottemoeller discussed the missile tests in a closed-door meeting of NATO’s Arms Control, Disarmament and Non-Proliferation Committee that she led in Brussels.
The
Obama administration, she said, had not given up on diplomacy. There
are precedents for working out disputes over arms control complaints,
and Ms. Gottemoeller said American officials would continue to engage
the Russians to try to resolve the controversy.
But
even with the best of intentions, establishing what the Russians are
doing may not be easy. The elaborate network of verification provisions
created under the medium-range missile treaty is no longer in effect,
since all the missiles that were believed to be covered by the agreement
were long thought to have been destroyed by May 1991.
COPY http://www.nytimes.com/
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