What Does the Future of Arms Control Hold?

Lindsay: New START expired on February 5th, ending decades of U.S.-Russia cooperation to reduce each country’s nuclear weapons and make the world safer. To unpack what this means, I’m joined by Mike Albertson. Mike spent more than 15 years in the federal government, in roles in the Office of the Secretary of Defense and the Department of State’s Office of Strategic Stability and Deterrence Affairs, and he was involved in the negotiations that led to New START.

Mike, thanks for being with us on Talking Policy.

Mike: Wonderful to be here. Thanks for the opportunity, Lindsay.

Lindsay: So first off, what is New START?

Mike: New START is a legally binding agreement on reductions. That’s the ‘R’ in ‘New START’, is “reductions”: Strategic Arms Reductions Treaty. It is sort of the last in a series of agreements. So there were reductions agreements that started to be negotiated in the 80s, in the early 90s, into the 2000s, where we essentially went from 30,000 weapons to 6,000 weapons under START I, to 1,550 weapons under New START.

New START took the START I agreement, which was negotiated in 1991, and essentially pared it down and updated it. There was a lot of stuff that people thought we needed in the 1980s, that we did in the 1990s, that in 2010 they said, that’s too costly, that’s expensive. We don’t need to do that anymore.

But we need to manage how we get down to what we’ve agreed are now the new numbers that we both can live with. And those numbers were 700 deployed strategic launchers. So that’s intercontinental ballistic missiles, submarine launch ballistic missiles, and heavy bombers. Eight-hundred deployed and non-deployed launchers was the second limit, so filled silos and then sort of empty silos, so you have some margin for doing maintenance, overhauls, things like that in the operational force. And then 1,550 deployed warheads, so warheads that were located on front sections of ICBMs, on SLBMs, things like that.

So you have these limits, and then you have a verification regime to make sure that each side is abiding by those limits by the intended date, and then after the intended date that the limit’s supposed to go into effect. To do that, you’ve got data exchanges, you’ve got notifications that you send back and forth between nuclear risk reduction centers. You’ve got 18 onsite inspections you do in each other’s countries, and then you have a consultative body that meets and basically says, twice a year we’re going to meet [and] talk about how implementation of the treaty is going, and if either side has concerns, it’s able to raise that in that body and then we can sort of amend it to treaty, in very small ways to sort of make up for any legal issues that might arise over the course of implementation.

So that was the New START treaty. It went into effect in 2011. It had a 10-year initial lifecycle, which took it through 2021, and then it had a five-year extension. So both sides said, yes, we want to extend this treaty for five years. The five-year extension went into effect, but there was really no way to extend the treaty beyond that because it was supposed to, of course, [have] been replaced by another agreement that you would’ve negotiated in those 15 years to sort of take the process one step further.

So New START in a nutshell is sort of part of a longer continuity of strategic arms limitations and then reduction treaties, codifying sort of the path downward that both we and the Russians thought we were on.

Lindsay: So now that New START, this last remaining treaty between the U.S. and Russia, has expired, does that mean that arms control is over?

Mike: It’s a great question. I would say people should think about arms control in terms of sort of historical periods. New START had a 15-year history, so the 10 years the treaty was in force, a five-year extension where it was additionally in force. But it was sort of the one sole bright spot in the arms control landscape over the last, say, 25 years.

And the last 25 years saw a lot of erosion of a number of other treaties: the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, the Inter[mediate]-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, the Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty; all of these treaties that had sort of dated from the golden age of arms control, which is the 1980s-1990s, where we and the Russians were signing all of these agreements, stabilizing all of these different parts of the strategic relationship.

And then the last 25 years has been a sort of gradual erosion over time as more and more of these treaties have faded away into obsolescence, have not been replaced, have not been revised. And now we’re kind of in a wide open space, I’d say messy space. And so the closest analogy might be going back to say the early 1980s, where people were asking, “Is arms control over?” And of course, five or six years later after these debates, you had all these breakthroughs with the Soviets, you had a lot of arms control agreements done.

So I think it’s hard to say, like, is arms control over? Is it not over? It’s sort of been trending down for a long time, but as we’ve seen in the past, things could change, and all of a sudden you’re back in business doing arms control.

Lindsay: Yeah. You described this, like, 25 years of erosion from the golden era of arms control. What was going on that caused this steady erosion, given that arms control—reducing the number of nuclear weapons in the world—was an incredible accomplishment?

Mike: An analogy I try to make with audiences that aren’t sort of arms control people is sort of relationships. You think of arms control as a relationship between two countries. You have to cooperate to get something done, which means sort of each side has to want the same thing at the same moment. So you think of a romantic comedy or something where each side wants different things at different points in time and they never end up getting together. And that’s kind of the last 25 years of arms control, is, you know, Russia wanted to do arms control in the early 2000s, [but] the U.S. was distracted by the global war and terror. The U.S. had priorities other than Russia.

There was this sort of narrow window when interest aligned, in the Obama reset, where we managed to get New START done. But since that point in time, each side has wanted things from the other that the other side really doesn’t want to give. And so you have these sort of dueling narratives of, “I have a big, long list of preconditions of what I want from you.” “No, I have a big, long list of preconditions, you’re the one acting unfaithfully,” and it goes back and forth.

And so this ability to sort of sit down at the table and say, we both share a common interest in doing the following thing, we both need to work together. And then having the sort of geopolitical stability in the bilateral relationships such that you can sit down at the table for multiple meetings without something on either side disrupting that, whether that’s an invasion of a neighboring country, or whether that’s sanctions or whether that’s an arrest of a citizen in another country. Something always comes up and then this process gets derailed. So there hasn’t been a chance to build anything, because building things takes a sort of sustained effort over time.

Lindsay: Yeah, that’s an interesting way to frame it as a romantic comedy. I’m trying to think of what the trailer would be for that…

Alright, so we’re now officially living in a world without a legally binding treaty limiting U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals for the first time in 50 years. So practically speaking, what do we lose without this treaty?

Mike: So again, I think when people think about arms control, they typically have these pictures in their mind. They have either a picture of a U.S. leader and a Russian leader standing on a platform, shaking hands, signing an agreement, or they might have a picture of sort of boots on the ground inspections taking place with inspectors standing around a missile that’s getting cut up.

I want people to think about sort of the less sexy details of a treaty, which gets down to the two big things that a treaty provides, which is, one, data, and the second is dialogue. Those are the two big things you’re losing when a treaty goes away.

One, you have, through a treaty, sort of all of these accounting mechanisms by which you share data about what you are doing, and you get all this information in return of what the other side’s doing. When a treaty goes away, there aren’t the legal processes in place to share that data most of the time because it’s classified and you can’t share classified data without a legally binding agreement. So all of a sudden you lose this data. The biannual data declarations of everything we have in a big spreadsheet, the notifications of what’s taking place on a daily basis, that all goes away.

Second, you lose dialogue. And what do I mean by dialogue? When I jumped into this process, I was in a negotiation with people who had dealt with their Soviet and Russian counterparts probably for 20 years. They had sat across the table from them. They’d been in various dialogues, they’d been in various implementation meetings. You have a dialogue that is very difficult to interrupt despite other things going on in the bilateral relationship. You have to meet, it’s required in the treaty. And so you’re losing the data you’re losing this sort of dialogue. And then where does that lead you?

You think about where we are with Russia now in terms of strategic forces. We know exactly what they have and we can double check what they have. You contrast what we know about Russian strategic forces to the estimates that we have about Chinese nuclear forces and all of the different theories about what China has, where it’s going, what it’s doing when you don’t have data and you don’t have dialogue. You also look back at the Cold War, when we didn’t have data and we didn’t have dialogue, both sides often had these theories of what they thought the other side was doing, and then needing to spend time, energy, and money addressing some sort of perceived problem. These are the kind of things that happen when you sort of don’t have data and don’t have dialogue. Those are the risks I see.

Lindsay: Yeah. So one of the things we worry about, and you’re kind of alluding to this, with nuclear weapons is the potential for countries to miscalculate. To have accidents, to escalate rapidly. And these are the kinds of things that are driven by misunderstandings, when countries are afraid, when they’re guessing about one another’s intentions. And treaties, as you said, are one of the ways that you can eliminate that guesswork and create space for dialogue.

What role do you see for confidence-building measures that might be able to take place even in the absence of treaties, that can help diffuse tension and provide a little bit more transparency? Is this something that you think is possible? Or is trust between the U.S. and Russia, or the U.S. and China, so eroded that even confidence-building measures, like, you know, a hotline or something where leaders can call each other, are these kinds of things unlikely in the near future?

Mike: It’s a great question. I focused a lot over the last few years in my writings about this concept of sort of form versus function in arms control. People spend a lot of time in the arms control community thinking about the type of the agreement we want to have: should it be a legally binding agreement, a politically binding agreement, some sort of looser form of confidence building measures. And they focus, I feel, a lot less on what is the function of the agreement, what are we trying to do?

And you’re in a really hard place right now where, if you are Russia and China, you are not really interested in these concepts that the United States is interested in. And I’m talking about strategic stability, at least stability as the U.S. defines it, which is “We sort of like the world as it is, where we feel we’re in pretty good shape. We’d like to sort of codify things at this particular level of stability.” Russia and China are not interested in making the U.S.’s lives easier in terms of stability. Same thing with things like transparency, with providing confidence. Russian and Chinese strategies are based around sort of being not transparent in a lot of cases, about manipulating risks to their advantage, about reducing U.S. confidence in its ability to do things. And so we’re in this place right now where if you are an arms control person, you need to think about what kind of agreement is useful for the United States in giving us confidence, in meeting our defense requirements, but also how do you square that circle with sort of the Russian and Chinese theories of the case and what are their incentives for being involved?

So, you know, are there things we think that should be done that are sort of short of a legally binding agreement? Yes. And I think people have been starting to put together these lists of what they think is sort of the bare minimum we need between the U.S., Russia, and China to manage competition in the near term and maybe over the next decade. So if we can actually sit down at the table with Russia and China, is there sort of a minimal list of confidence building measures we can agree with? Maybe.

Lindsay: You’ve written about the importance of aligning arms control with the new security environment that we are living in, and when we talk about that, we’re usually talking about China, and its rapidly expanding force. So it’s not just the U.S. and Russia anymore.

The U.S. has really insisted on including China in future arms reduction frameworks, and Beijing is resistant. Is a trilateral approach realistic? It sounds like, from what you’re saying, that it’s probably not. I spoke with your colleague, Brad Roberts, about a year ago on this podcast, and he didn’t seem very optimistic about it either.

Will the U.S. have to work with China and Russia on separate tracks, and is there space to work with them at all right now?

Mike: Yeah, it can be a really gloomy picture or it can be a really interesting picture, right, if you’re thinking about international relations, political science, bureaucratic politics. Because you have to come up with a plan to get what you want. You can’t simply just say, “I want the following things. I’m willing to give Russia and China essentially nothing to get what I want,” and then assume that sort of everything’s going to fall into place if you just put enough pressure on those two countries to do it.

You look at the history of our nuclear engagements with China over the last 20+ years, and they just are not interested in having a conversation about their nuclear forces. They see arms control as sort of a trick, or a trap, as they’ve called it. So if you sit there and say China must be involved in the next round of arms control, or we’re not going to do anything at all, then your plan probably is going to lead to not a whole lot being done.

If you have a long-term plan featuring multiple sticks, multiple carrots, multiple avenues of pressure to eventually get to the Chinese table, like that’s a good plan to have in place. To me, getting China to the table is part of a broader arms control strategy that features multiple fronts, multiple players, multiple plans.

I think that you can do something with Russia that essentially doesn’t limit the U.S.’s ability to respond to what China is doing in a way that perhaps incentivizes China to eventually come to the table. We can do things with Russia, with China not at the table, to potentially get China at the table in the future, but I think that is a more realistic plan if you want to get something done during this administration.

Lindsay: I want to pause and ask a question to give listeners a sense of your background. How did you get into this really interesting space? You’ve had a career focused on nukes, especially Russia. Tell us about the kinds of roles and work that you’ve done in the time that you spent in Washington.

Mike: Yeah, we did a really interesting podcast with a former negotiating colleague of mine and a former state department colleague of mine on the Strategic Simplicity Podcast, where we looked at how do you become a back bencher? How do you become an arms controller? And I think what we all talked about was you don’t just sort of set out to be an arms controller. Usually you come to arms control or you’re invited to participate in arms control because you are good at something else.

In my case, I was an analyst looking at Russian nuclear forces at the time. So I knew something about what the other side of the table was interested in; what they were doing. So I was brought in the arms control process that way. But other people are brought in because they’re lawyers, because they’re technical experts on verification equipment or fissile material, because they’re diplomats and they just happen to be working sort of an arms control, Russia or China portfolio at the time. But you come at it sort of through other vectors and when you actually do a real negotiation, you are part of a team of a hundred people, who come from different agencies, who come from different backgrounds, but all bring some useful skill to a negotiating team that’s leveraged to do arms control.

I was fortunate that I came in at sort of an interesting time. I had had some experience doing START I, sort of the predecessor to New START. When New START came around, there was all of a sudden a need for a bunch of new people to come into the field. So you had a cadre of very senior arms control people who had worked on this for 30 years, who sort of New START was their last hurrah in their career. They’d worked their way from the back bench to the table. And then immediately after New START, a lot of them started to retire, because that was sort of the seminal moment of their career, was getting a big agreement done.

And then, you know, I was asked basically to come to [the] State [Department] because there was a generational turnover at State. There were no mid-career people at State. There were early career people and there were people about to retire and they said we need mid-career people doing arms control. So I went from doing sort of the ratification, negotiation, implementation stuff at the Defense Department to doing treaty implementation, but also the verification and compliance piece. And so I’m dealing with New START, but I’m also dealing with, you know, Russia’s violation of the Intermediate Range of Nuclear Forces Treaty.

So again, you’re having a very technical conversation there about what does the treaty say, what’s the legal interpretation of the treaty? How do we communicate to the Russians about wanting to maintain the New START treaty and keep that running, but also you’re violating this other treaty. How do we resolve this?

You’re dealing with allies, because you’re attempting to get allies on board with this idea that Russia’s violated this treaty [so] something needs to be done. And in many cases, you’re explaining to people for the first time, on a treaty like the INF Treaty, people haven’t thought about that since 1987 or 1981, and you’re explaining this is what this treaty is, this is why it was negotiated, this is what a violation entails, and this is what we’re going to do about it.

So to me, it was a really, really fascinating field to be a part of because it was so multidisciplinary, so multi-agency, but also had legal aspects, intelligence aspects, diplomatic aspects, just a really interesting field to be a part of.

Lindsay: And the progress is incredible, actually, when you hear about how far the numbers came down. But it’s also interesting that the acceptable limits of nuclear weapons are still world-destroying numbers, like, many times over. Was elimination ever on the table?

Mike: No, elimination wasn’t on the table. I mean, you remember in 2009 you had President Obama’s Prague speech, and he essentially was saying what many U.S. presidents have said and continue to say, which is, ‘I am seeking a world without nuclear weapons, but that world may not happen in my lifetime.’ And so it’s sort of an aspirational path of how to get there.

But again, in 2010, the idea was we will do the New START treaty, which will take us down to around 1,500. We will then start talking to the Russians about a follow-on agreement, which might take us down to a thousand. And, actually, President Obama offered up a proposal in 2013 to say, let’s go down to a thousand with the Russians, and talk about how we get tactical weapons in agreement, things like that. But then of course, after New START, none of that materialized because it all ran into other geopolitical problems.

Lindsay: Yeah. And now, am I right in saying that we’re ramping up, we’re not ramping down anymore?

Mike: I mean, this is the big worry that everybody has, is you’ve lost this cap that people saw as sort of dampening the arms race. Although now, the narrative is, well, it dampened this part of the arms race, but all of these other parts were sort of racing apace, at the time. But you sort of lost this cap, and therefore, now that you’ve sort of unscrewed the top from the bottle, the genie’s going to get out. We’re going to go back to arms racing, and nobody knows where that’s going to go.

But yes, I mean, the inflection point has gone from sort of, we’re now not going down. We might be going up, and the fact that it’s now sort of a multipolar competition that depends a bit on Russia and China and the U.S. just makes it more complicated in trying to figure out, okay, where are we actually going to be in a decade, without strategic arms control?

Lindsay: So where are we going to be in a decade, Mike?

Mike: I think people put these sort of big, worst case scenario projections out there of unshackled arms race. Where is it all heading? You know, I look at the next decade and I think more about, okay, yes, the magical constraints of arms control have been taken away, and so you could do all of these things, but you still have defense industrial capacity issues, you still have budget issues, you still have the idea of balancing conventional defense expenditures against nuclear defense expenditures, you have problems of domestic spending versus military spending. I think there are limits to sort of what the U.S. wants to do to respond to Russian and Chinese force buildup.

You know, China is building, where they’re going is kind of a question mark. When they will feel comfortable is also kind of a question mark. But, you know, the estimates now are, in 10 years they’re going to be about 1,500, so about where we are now in terms of deployed warheads. So, you know, if people are thinking about where we are in a decade, it’s a different world than exists now. But it’s not, you know, we’re immediately all going to go back to deploying 30,000 warheads, like it’s 1965 or something like that.

Lindsay: Tell me a story from your days in the trenches working on these negotiations. Is there anything that sticks out that you always think back to as a moment of particular surprise, or something that really encapsulates for you what this kind of work is about?

Because at the heart of it, what we’re talking about when we talk about arms control is making the world safer. I mean, the catastrophe of using these weapons is so awful, like, it’s best not to think about it. But the work is critical, and it’s done by human beings, and you were there! What was it like?

Mike: I have many interesting stories. I have a lot of good stories about being in arms control inspections in Russia, which is just a fascinating experience to actually go and visit one of the most sensitive sites in another country, and yet it be totally choreographed and totally routine. And you are standing, you know, next to a SS-18 front section where there are very large nuclear warheads just sitting ten feet away from you, and yet everyone approaches it. It’s just like, “Hey, we’re just here to count the number of warheads on the front section,” and you write down your little book and we’ll get back in the van and go to the hotel and, you know, it’s all just part of a day’s work. It’s very, very odd.

So, I went into negotiations not necessarily being a policy person, not having read a lot of history about arms control negotiations, not having, of course, participated in a lot of negotiations myself. And it is just a fundamentally weird thing because it is such an important issue. And yet there is all of this sort of diplomatic choreography that goes into negotiations. Like, you’re in a room with 40 people a side, and yet one person talks, and that’s typically the head of the meeting.

It is not really a back-and-forth conversation. It’s sort of a very choreographed conversation between two people through a translator. And you do strange things, like, every day you do a handshake line, you do receptions once a week, you do all of this stuff, and you say, as a junior person, “This is all silly. Why can’t we just have a back-and-forth conversation, get things sorted out?” But you realize all this choreography is important for sort of teeing things up. And then also, the master negotiators know when to switch from the formal choreography to, okay, we need to take a break. I’m going to have an informal conversation with my colleague and we’re going to sort this out.

And at least the most poignant reminder for me of this was, we were in a working group with the Russians where you’re doing this very choreographed back and forth. And it went on for an hour, hour and a half. And tensions are rising because, you know, the Russians are in violent disagreement with something the United States has said. And we are getting defensive because this was supposed to be an easy meeting, and this is taking a lot longer and things are getting heated. And then, you know, some member of the table just sort of raises a finger and says, “I think we should take a break, have some coffee, get a cookie.” And there’s always coffee and cookies in these meetings. And the Russians all go out and smoke.

The team lead sort of looks down, it’s like, I’m right in the middle of things, but yes, I guess we can take a break. So they take a break, the chair of the meeting walks over and is like, why have you interrupted me? I was in the middle of explaining to the Russians why they’re a problem. And the person says, “I think the issue was that roughly 40 minutes ago, their interpreter used the wrong word, like, misinterpreted something that you had said.” And so actually the last 40 minutes have all been based around this misinterpretation of one single word that nobody else caught. And then, you know, the team chief says, “Oh, good,” goes out, stands with the Russian team lead on the balcony for five minutes. And they come back in and the whole complexion of the meeting changes after that. But it’s basically because one person on the delegation with some attention to detail did not get caught up in everything that was going on in the back and forth, did not get as emotional as everyone else, and it’s very hard in a room where you can just sense that everyone’s getting really mad and this meeting’s going really badly. It is very hard to do this well. It is very hard to negotiate with another side across languages on a very technical subject dealing with nuclear weapons. And that’s just sort of one, one little note from negotiations past.

Lindsay: Yeah, that’s a great story.

Okay, so last question. We’ve talked over the last hour or so about the ways the world has changed over the last 30 years. And in a lot of ways, it feels like things aren’t… they’re not getting better, it feels like they’re getting scarier. What gives you optimism? What keeps you optimistic, what makes you hopeful about the future? And what are the things that you’re most concerned about?

Mike: What worries me is this strange notion of sort of a lost generation of arms control expertise. So we theoretically want to do arms control again. And sort of apropos of the earlier story I told, it requires sort of a village to do these things well, and often it’s the technical experts at the table who are the ones carrying a negotiation. It’s the lead negotiators doing a lot of work and a lot of talking, but it requires sort of a technical team of people to catch the issues that come up or write the treaty text or come up with creative solutions to problems that arise that then are articulated by the head of delegation.

And if we’re now in a space where you have lost a whole generation of expertise because of retirement—the people who came up through sort of the 1970s, 80s, 90s—who is going to negotiate this next agreement? Like who is going to be the one sitting at the table? There is going to be no shortage of lead negotiators and agency heads, because they will want to sort of lead the process, but who is going to staff them and staff them well? And that’s going to be the challenge, is not like a leadership problem, it’s a staffing problem.

Why am I somewhat optimistic? So, I mean, you look at this sort of steady erosion, all these treaties going away as the end of arms control. Is arms control dead, or on life support, or in a vegetative state?

But I’d say arms control is meant to be sort of evolutionary, right? It requires constant updating and revising, because again, arms control is supposed to be linked to the problems of the world as they exist in a particular moment, and those problems change over time.

When you have a treaty in place, all of the oxygen is sucked up by sort of, how do we keep this treaty from going away, and how do we revise this treaty? Everything is anchored cognitively on the agreement, and then the agreement finally goes away, and now you’ve got the whole sort of intellectual space opened up where a lot of people can do some very interesting work. They don’t need to write a paper saying, “We should extend New START.” Like, New START’s gone, it’s not going to be extended. Now they can write a paper on what should come next, and that paper is, let’s take some historical lessons from the 50s and 60s or the 80s that a historian could write. It’s how do you do multipolar bargaining, or, you know, how do the Russians negotiate, which is a great IR paper to write. There’s a lot of different disciplines now which can contribute to this field in a way that, in the past, when you just have an agreement, becomes a very sort of insular arms control community thing. Because it’s all like, well, I’m the only one who knows about New START and how it works, so I’m the only one who knows how to do it better.

Now it’s like, okay, you’ve got this weird funky, trilateral negotiating problem, how do you go about solving it? And that, at least to me, is sort of interesting and liberating and freeing in a way. And it gets some new blood and some new people interested in the field. So I’m optimistic about that.

Lindsay: Yeah, maybe an opening, not just all doom and gloom.

Mike: Yes, there’s sort of an opening for some new thought and some new people coming into this field. I’m optimistic about that.

Lindsay: Mike Albertson, thank you for being with us on Talking Policy. Always good to talk with you.

Mike: Thanks, Lindsay. I appreciate the opportunity and look forward to doing it again sometime.