Just before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee approved, 14-4, the resolution of advice and consent for the New START treaty in September, Idaho Senator Jim Risch attempted to stop the vote, arguing that he had “shocking information that if true would fundamentally impact the treaty and should prevent the committee from proceeding in any way.”

At the time, in a post titled A Curious Sort of Leak, I noted how odd it was that the information didn’t end up splashed across the front page of the Washington Times.  To me, that suggested “the details will prove somewhat of a letdown” and that “Like other things in life, perhaps this intelligence is sexier when something is left to the imagination.”

Boy, was I was right.

Adam Entous and Jonathan Weisman at the Wall Street Journal have now revealed Risch’s “shocking” information.

The precise claim — or, at least, its first phrasing — is that “The U.S. believes Russia has moved short-range tactical nuclear warheads to facilities near North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies as recently as this spring, U.S. officials say.”

That is still vague, not least because Entous and Weisman use the following phrases are used interchangeably: “short-range tactical nuclear warheads” “ground-based tactical weapons” “tactical nuclear weapons” and “tactical nuclear deployments.” Those are four different things: warheads, missiles, missiles armed with warheads, and units associated with missiles and warheads.  Good grief!

But as best I can tell, this is what has happened: Russia has begun the long-expected deployment of conventionally-armed Iskander missiles in Western Russia, starting with a unit near St. Petersburg.  A small group in the US intelligence community has long argued that Russia is secretly developing, using hydronuclear tests, a low-yield nuclear warhead for the Iskander (as well as a new ALCM).

The Iskander deployment, as well as the debate about New START, allows that group to reprise their argument that Russia is secretly developing new tactical nuclear weapons.

The Iskander Deploys in 2010

Russian officials have been talking about deploying a new conventionally armed missile for many years.  In this case, the system is the Iskander — which can come armed with both ballistic missiles (the SS-26 Stone) and ground-launched cruise missiles. (Later variants may incorporate artillery and multiple rocket launchers.)  The Russians seem taken with conventionally armed missiles, using the 2008 Georgia war to crush some cars in Georgia (an SS-21)  — we covered this at the time: Did Russia Fire SS-26s at Georgia?, More SS-sumthin’ Pics, SS-21 Debris in Georgia, Revisited — and kill a Dutch journalist (possibly an SS-26).  Charming, really.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev — peeved at the impending deployment US missile defense assets in Poland — also openly threatened to deploy the Iskander in Kaliningrad, the little pocket of Russia cut off from the motherland by Poland and Lithuania.

Medvedev later changed his mind about this bit of saber-rattling after the US altered the missile defense architecture in Europe. A Russian military official in July told a radio station, Moscow Echo, that Iskander deployments had begun to occur along Russia’s western border, starting in the Leningrad Military District.

The coincidence of timing and location is too much to ignore, especially given the persistent belief among some that the Iskander will be nuclear-armed.

What Happened in Kaliningrad in 2001?

Entous and Wiseman appear to conflate the Iskander deployment with a similar incident in 2001, when some in the IC argued that Russia was deploying tactical nuclear weapons in Kaliningrad. Deployments in the Leningrad Military Region are in an area “bordering NATO allies.”  It is also true that Entous and Weisman are careful to never assert that the deployments are in Kaliningrad.  But they’ve written the article in such as way as to give the casual reader the impression that the missiles are in Kaliningrad.

According to the U.S. assessment, Russia has expanded tactical nuclear deployments near NATO allies several times in recent years. An example is Kaliningrad, a Russian enclave between Poland and Lithuania. A State Department cable from April 2009 said Russia had warned it would take countermeasures, including putting ‘missiles’ in Kaliningrad, in response to expanded U.S. missile defenses in Europe.

There are a lot of problems with this paragraph.  It is, obviously, misleading to mention the threat to deploy missiles in Kaliningrad without noting that the Russians withdrew the threat and that the current deployment suggests they kept their word.  (That would be awkward, of course, since this is an article about Russian cheating.)

Nor am I persuaded by the claim by Entous and Weisman that Russia has “expanded tactical nuclear deployments near NATO allies several times in recent years.”  I know of one instance, nine years ago, that remains murky.  In that case, the United States had satellite images of a shipping containers aboard a Russian military train at a seaport near St. Petersburg, followed three days later by images of the containers arriving in Kaliningrad.

Although some people argued that these might be tactical nuclear weapons for Russian missiles, the United States had no idea what kind of missiles they were. One U.S. official told Reuters at the time, “over the last six months there has been some movement of tactical nuclear weapons into Kaliningrad – we don’t know how many, we don’t know what type and we don’t know why.”

Walter Pincus, writing in the Washington Post, reported that the weapons were being stored at a naval base, which raised the possibility that Russia was using a depot in Kaliningrad to store naval tactical nuclear weapons  (Under the 1991/1992 PNIs, Russia agreed only to eliminate 1/3 of its sea-based tactical nuclear weapons.  The rest were to be placed in storage. Kaliningrad is as good as place as any, I suppose.)

A Long-Standing Debate

I had an inkling of who might be behind all this Risch’s “shocking” information, when I chose my “not entirely hypothetical” example of a typical leak: An August 1997 story by Bill Gertz in the Washington Times, entitled “Russia Suspected of Nuclear Testing.”

This was the earliest salvo in a long-running publicity campaign by a small faction in the United States intelligence community that believes Russia is using hydronuclear tests to develop a low-yield nuclear warheads.

This group was responsible for the allegation that Russia had conducted a clandestine nuclear test in 1997 (which turned out to be an earthquake in all probability), allegations that Russia was developing new nuclear warheads just before the Senate considered the CTBT in 1999, and the kerfuffle over Kaliningrad in 2001.

Some of the intelligence reports generated by this crowd during the CTBT debate have been partially declassified. This group has long argued that Russia will place this new low-yield nuclear weapon on the Iskander weapons system, which comprises both a ballistic missile (the SS-26 Stone) and a ground-launched cruise missile.

It was presumably the first deployment of the Iskander this spring that fired them up again.

The intelligence community does not have a consensus view on whether Russia is using hydronuclear tests to develop new warheads.  In 2001, Bill Broad wrote a wonderful story, Dispute Over Nuclear Testing Divides U.S. Experts, that detailed the contours of this debate:

But some federal intelligence analysts charge that Russia is engaging in a type of outlawed test known as hydronuclear. In those tests, metallic bomb parts are thrown together explosively, liquefying (thus the hydro) while releasing small amounts of nuclear energy. The tests stop short of a large blast, releasing perhaps a millionth of the energy of the Hiroshima bomb.

Experts agree that hydronuclear tests can have some use in the design of new nuclear arms, although the extent is debated.

The intelligence team that says Russia is lying includes Lawrence Turnbull, a Central Intelligence Agency analyst, and Charles Craft, a Sandia National Laboratory analyst, officials said.

Mr. Craft leads a panel of the Joint Atomic Energy Intelligence Committee, a group that represents the nuclear views of many federal agencies.

The two, officials added, form the core of a group within the intelligence community that believes that it has evidence that Moscow is going over the hydronuclear line in an effort to develop new kinds of nuclear arms.

Part of the team’s evidence, a federal official said, centers on highly sensitive intelligence sources that are seen as giving Washington a clearer view into Moscow’s activities on Novaya Zemlya. Neither Mr. Turnbull nor Mr. Craft responded to requests for comment.

Officials said the State Department is skeptical of the accusation and has written formal rebuttals.

The differing sides in the dispute are trying to influence the formal process by which the federal government periodically makes judgments about secret foreign activities. This National Intelligence Estimate seeks to describe the likely state of development in the Russian nuclear program.

And although Larry Turnbull has since retired, I believe he has remained as a consultant to assist with the preparation of the new NIE on foreign nuclear testing that was intended to pave the way for ratification of the CTBT.  The debate continues.

The one thing Broad didn’t mention, that is important to understanding this debate, is that Russia declared 85 hydronuclear experiments at Semipalatinsk prior to the testing moratorium in 1989. (The US, by contrast, did only a handful during the 1958-1961 testing moratorium.)  Eighty-five is a surprising number that suggests Russia valued (or values) such tests in a way we did not.  The Russians say these were not tests to development nuclear weapons or industrial explosives, but experiments to better understand the complex physics of nuclear explosions.  Turnbull and others, however, don’t find that a compelling reason to do 85 of the damned things.

The inability to satisfactorily explain the curious Russian enthusiasm for hydronuclear tests has allowed this debate to rage, from the ill-fated decision to demarche the Russians in 1997, through the Senate’s failure in 1999 to ratify the CTBT, and now to questions about whether Russia has abandoned the commitments it made in the 1991 and 1992 Presidential Nuclear Initiatives.

1991/1992 Presidential Nuclear Initiatives

In 1991 and 1992, Washington and Moscow (first, the Soviet Union, then Russia) made a set of parallel, unilateral reductions in the number so-called “tactical” nuclear weapons.  Among the actions Moscow announced, one was that “all nuclear artillery munitions and nuclear warheads for tactical missiles are being eliminated.”

The Russians took much longer to withdraw such weapons to central storage than did the Unites States.  Both sides took their sweet time to complete dismantling warheads: The United States completed its eliminations in 2003, while as late as of 2004, the Russians were saying that they had “practically” completed the pledge.  “Practically” means some ground-based weapons remained to be dismantled because of “technical” and “financial” factors.  US officials, obviously, viewed such delays with skepticism.  As Russia moved to deploy a new, conventional missile system — the Iskander — it has become fodder in the debate about whether Russia was waiting for new tactical nuclear weapons before dismantling the old ones.

This debate flared up in public a few times during the Bush Administration.  In 2004, Steve Rademaker told an Interfax roundtable that “considerable concern exists that the Russian commitments have not been entirely fulfilled.” The comment drew a sharp rebuke from the Russian Foreign Ministry, which asserted they had “practically carried out in full all of the TNW reduction initiatives that had been put forward.” The statement also, however, described the measures as a “goodwill gesture.” The State Department followed up with a much more watered-down statement that “We believe that Russia, for the most part, has been implementing its PNI pledges, but the U.S. will continue to keep this issue under review.”

The controversy did not go away.  Rademaker repeated the statement in 2006.  And the assertion Russia is developing a low-yield tactical nuclear warhead for the Iskander also probably helped to hold up the release of the State Department’s “annual” Compliance Report (which has been issued only twice in recent years, in 2005 and 2009).  I am told that Turnbull was a major reason for the delay in the interagency process between 2005 and 2009.  And then there is this curious fact: The 2009 Compliance Report, like other governments reports, has a glossary of abbreviations (in case you don’t know your ass from your ASW).  The glossary 2009 Compliance Report includes an entry for “PNI” — the 1991 Presidential Nuclear Initiatives on tactical nuclear weapons.  The term doesn’t, however, appear in the text (or in previous compliance reports).  It seems pretty clear that a draft contained a section on the PNIs that was later removed, but someone forgot to delete the entry from the glossary.

It isn’t hard to believe, then, that the initial deployment of Iskander missile systems provided another opportunity to revisit this debate.  The Russians, for their part, don’t make it easy to trust them: In recent years, they merely note that they’ve reduced their non-strategic arms by 3/4.  They don’t mention the commitments made in 1991 and 1992.

(As a side note, this isn’t the same as openly violating the PNIs. You may read that Russia is openly violating the PNI by deploying nuclear-armed cruise missiles. Russia does openly maintain nuclear-armed sea-launched cruise missiles aboard attack submarines and some officials have talked of replacing the warheads with low-yield versions. [See the comments posted by Nikolai Sokov and Pavel Podvig in the comment section below.] As you might expect with unilateral statements, the US and Russians didn’t count the same systems: we considered nuclear-armed Tomahawk missiles “tactical” and removed them under Bush’s PNI; the Russians, however, do not think that way about the SS-N-21 and did not retire the system.  They wanted the weapons counted under START, but had to settle for a side agreement that capped the deployment of SLCMs at 880.)

Implications

If Russia were to deploy new nuclear weapons with Iskander, would that be inconsistent with the 1991/1992 PNIs?  I wouldn’t like it, but one can easily imagine the Russian Steve Rademaker arguing, in that lawyerly way, that having completed elimination of existing stocks, Russia is under no obligation not to replace them.

In fact, Russia isn’t under many obligations any more.  And that is really the problem here: Russia’s legal obligations when it comes to nuclear weapons are pretty few and far between these days.  Between various Russian statements about the PNIs and 1987 INF Treaty, US withdrawal from the ABM Treaty and the expiration of START, Moscow is down to two: an obligation not to defeat the purpose of the CTBT and an obligation to make reductions outlined in the New START treaty (which supercedes the Moscow Treaty).

With the CTBT facing little change of ratification by the US Senate, I am not sure I would count on Russia remaining under that constraint indefinitely.  Which leaves us with New START.

The Entous and Weisman story was leaked with the purpose of discouraging Senators from voting for New START. Already, Senator Jim DeMint has threatened to filibuster the New START treaty, in part based on the claim that Russia is deploying tactical nuclear weapons near NATO.

To my mind, that is backwards: A look at the deep divisions within the US intelligence community that causes us to see new Russian nuclear weapons in every woodpile suggests the problem is that we have too little arms control: too few obligations, not enough verification.

It seems clear that, if we don’t have New START, we will need something like it.

Which brings us to the key question: Would rejecting New START make it more likely that we would get a better agreement on verification?  Or a new agreement on tactical nuclear weapons? Or transparency measures relating to Russian testing activities at Novaya Zemlya?

No, no, and no.

If you don’t like Russian tactical nuclear weapons, you have to take it up with the Russians.  And rejecting new START makes that harder, not easier.