As US-Russian relations continue to deteriorate, the Trump administration is considering whether or not to extend the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START). New START limits the strategic nuclear forces of the United States and Russia to relatively low and equal levels, including their intercontinental missiles, submarine-launched missiles, and heavy bombers. The treaty will expire in 2021, but could be extended for an additional five years by executive agreement. Proponents of New START have emphasized the cooperative benefits of extension — improving transparency, reducing costs, and alleviating US-Russian tension — but extending the Treaty would also serve American competitive strategy. If Russia intensifies its aggression, the United States has the material and technological means to defeat Russia in a nuclear arms race over the long term. In the short term, however, New START is a crucial stopgap to prevent Russia from pulling ahead in the arms race. Given New START’s importance to American competitive strategy, the Trump administration should stop vacillating and extend the Treaty.

To understand New START’s competitive role, we need to compare American and Russian nuclear capabilities. Until the early 2040s, when the current wave of modernization is completed, the United States will have neither the fiscal resources nor the industrial capability to build up nuclear forces beyond the New START limits. At the moment, the American nuclear arsenal is rapidly decaying. America’s aging bombers liked “Ike”; its missiles danced disco; and its submarines came of age with the Apple II. Modernizing this force will cost an estimated $1.2 trillion over the next thirty years and test the limits of the American defense industry. What’s more, these new capabilities will not be ready for decades.

The same is not true of Russia, which has surged ahead with its own nuclear modernization program. Russian efforts to develop more exotic nuclear delivery systems have received wide attention, but the more serious threat to American security is Russia’s extant arsenal of modernized missiles, like the RS-24 Yars and the RS-28 Sarmat. Unlike notional doomsday devices, these Russian missiles are coming off of the production lines today. If the Russians opt to continue building these missiles beyond the New START limits, the United States would have very few options to match the new Russian deployments without disrupting its own already-delayed nuclear modernization program.

We’ve been here before. In the 1960s, the United States enjoyed a massive lead over the Soviet Union in nuclear-armed bombers and missiles, but the costs of the Vietnam War caused the United States to delay or cancel a number of new weapons. By the early 1970s, the Soviet Union had caught up to the United States’ arsenal and continued to build, threatening to leave the United States in the dust. In response, Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon began the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) with the Soviet Union in the late 1960s. SALT was justified publicly in terms of ending the arms race, but behind closed doors, American leaders hoped that arms control dialogue would slow the Soviet buildup and buy time for the United States to modernize its nuclear forces.

The SALT process begun by Johnson and Nixon continued under the Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter administrations throughout the 1970s. Ford and Carter combined negotiations aimed at capping the size of the Soviet nuclear arsenal with a push to develop more advanced American nuclear weapons, including more accurate ballistic missiles and air-launched cruise missiles for American bombers. While Ford and Carter’s SALT policies were controversial, in hindsight we see that SALT played a crucial role in shifting US-Soviet competition from a race for quantity of weapons to a race for quality of weapons, one where the United States’ huge technological advantage would have the greatest competitive effect. This competitive strategy paid off in the 1980s under President Ronald Reagan, when the United States leapt ahead of the Soviets once again with a new generation of advanced missiles, like Peacekeeper and Trident.

Arms control negotiations played an important role in the United States’ ultimate Cold War triumph, allowing American leaders to forestall further Soviet missile deployments and buy time to develop a competitive response. As tensions with Russia escalate, employing strategic arms control is just as important today. The Trump administration must extend New START to enhance its competitive strategy in an era of renewed great power competition, just as the United States did during the Cold War. By setting the pace of competition through arms control, the United States can ensure that it will retain its preeminent nuclear capabilities well into the 21st century.

The post America’s strategic interest in New START appeared first on American Enterprise Institute – AEI.