Bridging to a START Christmas

With the expiration of the START treaty now less than a week away, efforts to lock up a final treaty are in full gear. Laura Rozen reports NSC Senior Directors Mike McFaul and George Look have taken up residence in Geneva until things are finalized but it appears Christmas won’t come early for the administration. AFP and GSN are reporting State Department spokesman Ian Kelly came out and said:

What we're saying now is that we're hoping to get this draft agreement by the end of December

Steve Pifer and Linton Brooks both agreed with that assessment at a Hudson Institute event today and thought ratification might happen in the U.S. in a few months. RIA Novosti ran a more optimistic piece that stated:

Russia and the United States will manage to draft a new arms reduction treaty before the expiry of the current pact on December 5, a Russian lawmaker said Monday.  "Intensive and substantive work of two delegations is continuing on an almost 24-hour basis," Konstantin Kosachyov, who heads the State Duma's international committee, said.  "There is a clear resolve to achieve a result within the timeframes set by the two presidents and linked to the current START treaty's expiration date," he added.

Assuming that the two sides are unable to finalize a treaty by Saturday, the discussion will focus on the possible negative ramifications that could transpire should the treaty lapse without having a successor fully in place. On the U.S. side, one tangential downside is that Obama will have to accept the Nobel Peace Prize without what had hoped to be a major arms control treaty locked up.

With regards to START itself, Jon Kyl (see NOH for a discussion of contradictory statements on verification) cut right to the chase and noted on record:

The question of what happens after the 1991 Agreement expires is important. The Russian Federation is already telling us they intend to deploy a new road mobile missile, one which, for the first time, will have multiple independent reentry vehicles . . . That we don’t have answers to these questions is alarming, more so because our negotiators must have known for months that a ‘‘bridge’’ would be necessary . . . According to press reports, only now have the negotiators begun looking at the question of verification. I was shocked that there had been virtually no talk—and I know this from my conversations with members of both the Russian and U.S. delegations in Geneva—of what happens after December 5 and prior to the possible entry into force of the follow-on agreement when and if it is signed by the two executives. Mr. President, I don’t say this lightly, but, this borders on malpractice.

The State Department was quick to refute the lack of bridging discussion assertion but there has been fairly little discussion about what the agreement what actually entail which is the first major hurdle to tackle.  Pavel Podvig had some good insights on the question and argues that a bridging agreement will likely be based on new treaty provisions rather than the original START, particularly from the Russian view. Senator Lugar’s bill may also play a part in the stop gap efforts but there are still some blanks left to be filled in.  Another important consideration is when a bridging agreement might surface. Vienna’s newest addition Mike McFaul, Senior Russia Director at the NSC, was surprisingly optimistic on this question in a 15 November press conference:

Q I have two. On START, the commitment is to have it in place by the end of December, but doesn’t it expire in mid-December?
MR. McFAUL: Yes, it does expire on December 5th. And in parallel, we have a bridging agreement that we also are working with the Russians. I fully suspect we'll be able to get that in place by December 5th.
Q You're definitely not going to make the December 5th deadline, though?
MR. McFAUL: Well, I don't know that for sure, but what I do know for sure is that we won't have a ratified treaty in place by December 5th. That has to go through our Senate, through their Duma. So that is for sure we do need a bridging agreement no matter what. [emphasis mine]

Things may have changed in the past two weeks but at least at that time there was a good chance both sides would be able to lock up a provisional bridging agreement before the RS-24 race begins which may help suggest things won't be as bad as some postulate when the treaty expires.

wikimedia/dbking