US accuses Russia of breaching New START nuclear disarmament treaty

Russian soldiers on Red Square in Moscow before a ceremony on the annexation of Ukrainian territories to Russia in September 2022ALEXANDER NEMENOV (AFP)

The United States has accused Russia on Tuesday of breaching the New START treaty, signed after the cold war and the last one still in force between the two great nuclear powers for the control of their atomic weapons.

Moscow does not allow planned inspection within its territory, the State Department alleges in a communication to Congress.

It is the latest gesture in a deterioration that is as drastic as it is accelerated in relations between the two governments since the Kremlin gave the go-ahead for the invasion of Ukraine almost a year ago.

The agreement entered into force in 2011, during the US presidency of Barack Obama who wanted to make the fight against nuclear weapons one of the pillars of his foreign policy, with questionable success.

That pact between Washington and Moscow, which between them accumulates 90% of nuclear weapons worldwide, was extended in 2021 for five more years.

The New Start limits to 1,500 the number of strategic nuclear warheads that the United States and Russia can have deployed, as well as the launchers -submarines or land vehicles- and missiles to fire them.

The agreement has as its main axis a system of mutual inspections of the respective arsenals.

But the Kremlin has already indicated that it will let it expire in 2026 because the United States "seeks the strategic defeat of Russia in Ukraine" and has hinted that the gap left by that treaty in nuclear arms control might not be filled: "that is a scenario quite possible”, acknowledged Russian Defense Minister Sergei Riabkov.

"Russia's refusal to facilitate inspection activities prevents the United States from exercising important rights under the treaty, and threatens the viability of US-Russia nuclear arms control," the State Department said in a statement.

Since August, Moscow had stopped authorizing US inspections under the treaty, arguing that Washington's sanctions prevented it from carrying out its own examinations of the rival country's stockpiles.

Nor was the periodic meeting of the bilateral monitoring committee of the pact held in November, as had been planned.

Russia decided to postpone the meeting in Egypt and neither side has set a new date.

New START does not cover smaller, harder-to-detect tactical nuclear weapons designed for use against specific targets on the battlefield and have never been regulated.

The Federation of American Scientists estimates that Russia has about 2,000 heads of this type, while the United States dismantled most of its arsenal after the fall of the Berlin Wall and today maintains around two hundred.

Moscow went so far as to threaten its use in the war in Ukraine, although in recent months it seems to have abandoned that rhetoric.

The Donald Trump Administration announced in August 2019 the US withdrawal from another disarmament agreement, the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces pact, which had been in force since the 1980s.

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