|
|
|
|
Map of Europe |
CIAO DATE: 08/06
International Affairs:
A Russian Journal
Ten Years of the START Treaty
Yu. Nazarkin *
The Treaty on the Reduction and Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms (START Treaty) entered into force 5 December 1994. All the reductions the parties had agreed on were carried out within the seven-year timeframe and now activities to verify compliance with the limitations provided for in this Treaty are under way.
Over the last ten years, the Treaty has served and continues to serve Russia's interests. It has been instrumental in substantial reduction of our strategic arms with an appropriate and verifiable reduction of the U.S. arms. It helped to strengthen the nuclear nonproliferation regime both through contributing to the implementation of Article VI of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and the renunciation by Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Belarus, on whose territory strategic nuclear arms were also deployed, of keeping them under their control. The Treaty played its important part as a detailed and precisely regulated basis (a system of verification, definitions, counting rules, etc.) for bringing about possible agreements on further strategic offensive arms reductions. Owing to this last circumstance, the continuing operation of the START Treaty makes it possible to use its potential for further real, rather than declarative, steps with regard to reducing the nuclear arms of the United States and Russia.
Now that the Treaty has been functioning for a considerable period, it would be interesting to look back at the heated battles among the Soviet leaders prior to its signing.
The START talks were the most difficult of all I have taken part in. Surely, the very subject of the talks related to the mainstay of the military might of each of the two superpowers called for special care and caution in fine-tuning the provisions of the Treaty. But that's not the whole story. There were many principled opponents of its signing both in Moscow and Washington. While I don’t dare to analyze the motives of the American opponents, I can't but go back to the heated struggle that was going on among our political leadership that I came to witness.
A cursory examination would give an impression that the main opposition came from the country's military leadership. In reality, this was not quite so. It is true that the Ministry of Defense and the General Staff took a tough stand and pressed for minimal cuts to our own arms. It would have been strange for them to take a different stand. It is they who have the main responsibility to protect the country's military security. But when the political leadership was assigning the task to reach understandings, solutions were found to a large extent thanks to the military people's ability to show the needed leniency.
The main opposition to the signing of the Treaty came from those quarters in the country's top political leadership which were against cutting back the production of strategic arms and setting the economy on the free-market track, and against democratization.
At the end of March 1990, I was summoned from Geneva, where START talks were in progress, to Moscow for a meeting of the Politburo Commission for Oversight of the Negotiations on Disarmament headed at that time by Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee Lev Zaikov (informally, the commission was called the "Big Five" for the number of agencies included into it, 1 or the "Zaikov Commission").
The meeting was to discuss draft directives for our delegation to the Washington meeting between the Soviet foreign minister and the U.S. secretary of state. It is worth noting that this was a difficult period where both parties were going to make hard political decisions to enable the signing of the treaty.
We began by discussing the memo on air-launched cruise missiles (ALCMs). As the most contentious and complex, the memo was set apart from the directives on other questions. The problem consisted in how to count these missiles attributed to heavy bombers with which they were equipped. Having a considerably greater number of heavy bombers, the United States could gain a considerable superiority in the number of nuclear warheads provided the counting rules the Americans insisted upon were adopted.
The discussion of the memo devoted to ALCMs as the only specific question developed into a much broader discussion. Did we need a START treaty at all? This was at the heart of the argument. Putting the question like this and the dissimilar views of it clearly revealed differences among the country's top leaders over the general trend of foreign policy and organizational development of defense and the entire political course for that matter.
What follows is my account of the points of the discussion based on the remaining notes I took during the meeting.
Speaking after Zaikov's general introductory words was Chief of the General Staff Mikhail Moiseev who set forth the objections to the rules of counting ALCMs proposed in the Foreign Ministry memo. 2 He argued that a decision like that would enable the United States to increase its advantage in the number of warheads. He also argued against some of the understandings reached earlier, including those reached during the 1986 summit in Reykjavik.
The next speaker was Marshal Sergei Akhromeev, military adviser to the president who shortly before that resigned as chief of the General Staff. He presented his view of the situation pointing to many errors in the calculations miscalculations cited in Moiseev’s address. He at the same time stressed that it was inadmissible to retreat from earlier agreements, still less from those approved at the summit level.
The address by CPSU Central Committee Secretary Oleg Baklanov, who was in charge of the defense industry, was very harsh and defying the president. Without touching on the subject matter of the memo under discussion, he stated his "own opinion" of the Treaty as a whole. He essentially maintained that as a result of signing the START Treaty the USSR-USA warhead ratio would be 1:1.93 in favor of the USA (instead of 1:1.4 in March 1990), and taking into account the nuclear arsenals of Britain and France, it would be 1:2.1. No political conclusion was formulated but it was very easy to fathom: the conclusion of the START Treaty and therefore the understandings on this score reached by Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan and subsequently George Bush were a fatal error.
Aleksandr Yakovlev, secretary of the CPSU Central Committee for ideology, limited himself to asking whether we might end up disarmed as a result of signing the Treaty and unable to inflict "unacceptable damage" on the United States, etc. Valentin Falin, head of the International Department of the CPSU Central Committee stated his opinion as evasively: On the one hand, the arms race is a burden to us, but on the other, to which extent the nuclear weapons that would remain with us under the Treaty could solve the problem of inflicting unacceptable damage on the potential adversary?
Vladimir Kryuchkov, KGB chairman, spoke quite definitely for concluding the Treaty. His logic was that the arms race would go on even without the Treaty, we would not be able to catch up with the Americans in this race anyway and we would only exhaust our economy even more; thus we had no other road to take except the road forward, toward signing the Treaty. Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze spoke from the same positions.
When Igor Belousov, deputy premier and chairman of the Military Industrial Commission (VPK) was called on to speak, I felt tense inside. Incidentally, the acronym VPK could also stand for "military-industrial complex."
Representatives of this organization advocated military programs by definition. Belousov, however, used very strong and definite terms to state that the START Treaty "is needed for the country as badly as the bread we eat and the air we breathe." The economy, he said, was strained to the limit and we were simply in no position to go back to the arms race. That, he went on to say, would mean going back to totalitarianism, collapse of perestroika and an economic impasse. As for our defense capability, he said, it was ensured by the deterring nature of nuclear weapons not only with the 1:2 ratio but also with a ratio more advantageous to the West. Belousov's statement cheered me up very much: now that the VPK head was for the Treaty, it meant that we needed it badly.
Zaikov tried to reconcile the irreconcilable postures of the participants in the meeting. "We need to be moving forward but with caution," was his final conclusion.
After four hours of inconclusive discussion, Shevardnadze left to meet with the French foreign minister, who was on a visit in Moscow, so the directives with regard to ALCMs were put aside.
The other questions, including sea-launched cruise missiles (SLCMs) were dealt with rather promptly, what had been prepared did not pave the way to any agreement. Making things even worse was impossible and improving on them was useless.
In order to make at least some decision with regard to ALCMs, a new meeting with the same participants was scheduled for the next day, which was a Saturday.
The Commission chairman, Zaikov, must have made the most out of this short break to find a compromise decision. As a result the Saturday meeting did not last longer than 30 minutes. The directives were approved in their tough variant that did not amount to any stepping stones toward agreement, but Zaikov announced that if the delegation discovered a possibility to agree during the talks in Washington, it would send a telegram from Washington with proposals and the entire package would then be sent to the president for approval. In other words, the issue was swept under the rug and the Foreign Ministry and the President were left with clearing up the mess.
Attempts to torpedo the signing of the Treaty continued further. They were masterminded by Baklanov as before. 3 A new dangerous situation arose several days after the above meeting.
The Washington Post of 3 April 1990 carried an article about the situation at the talks written by its military and political observer R. Jeffrey Smith. He was a usually well-informed and knowledgeable journalist conversant with the niceties of military-political questions. The article assessed the already agreed provisions of the Treaty with a clear slant in favor of the United States. It said that the Treaty would make it possible for the U.S. to continue deploying roughly the same number of warheads it had at the moment. It would get an opportunity to deploy nearly 15 percent weapons more than it had eight years prior to the opening of the strategic arms reduction talks. The Treaty did not provide for scrapping practically no single American strategic weapon made over the recent decade of intensive modernization. Nor did the treaty put a cap on the production of thousands of American nuclear cruise missiles, submarine-launched missiles and aircraft bombs in addition to those already in existence. These were the opening statements in the article. Each of them was worded subtly and even cunningly enough so as not to come into obvious conflict with reality. At the same time the overall picture was seriously distorted indicating a clear desire to show the advantages the United States would get from signing the treaty to the detriment of the Soviet Union.
Take, for example, the assertion that the treaty put no limit on the production of American nuclear cruise missiles, submarine-launched missiles and aircraft bombs. No, the treaty does not indeed provide for such limits because it does not touch at all on the sphere of strategic offensive weapons production. Hence, the production is not limited with respect to the other party either. Furthermore, it is only possible to weigh up the concessions to either party in the context of the entire treaty: one party was getting advantages with regard to one set of weapon types while the other gained with regard to other types.
R. Jeffrey Smith's article certainly played up to those quarters in the U.S. Administration that advocated the signing of the treaty. And it apparently played a positive role inside the United States. But its author had hardly bargained for the effect it produced in Moscow.
Soon after, I found myself in Washington for yet another meeting between the foreign minister of the USSR and the Secretary of State of the United States. After one of the press conferences I took part in, I was approached by Jeffrey Smith. He wanted to know what I thought about the Apr. 3 article. He was visibly anxious about its repercussions in Moscow.
I said frankly that I thought the article was dangerous because it provided the opponents of the agreement in Moscow with additional arguments against its signing while the reputation of its author who was well known for his objectivity and high professional skills aggravated the negative impact of the article.
"Do you think I've distorted some of the facts?" Smith asked with concern.
"Every fact per se seems to be correct although some of them are presented out of context and in an imprecise manner. Most importantly, the overall picture has come out greatly distorted: it shows in a biased manner the advantages the United States will be getting from signing the treaty and passes over in silence its concessions to the USSR."
At that time I wasn't aware of the real menace posed by the article. I discovered that on my return to Moscow.
It transpired that Smith's article was sent to Moscow in the form of information about American assessments of the Treaty and provided Baklanov with grounds to once again raise with the political leaders of the Soviet Union the question of inadmissibility of concluding the START Treaty which ostensibly undermined the roots ("and Americans admit as much themselves") of the Soviet state's overall defense capability.
As I heard, this question came under scrutiny from the Soviet leadership and the incisive discussion nevertheless confirmed the positions from which our delegation proceeded at the talks. Mikhail Gorbachev's waning prestige was at the time still high enough for his word to be decisive.
Getting ahead of myself, I will say that the struggle surrounding the Treaty continued even after its signing. It goes without saying that criticism was of various kinds. There were observations that could be answered in one way only: the treaty does limit us in some respects but in other respects, it is more advantageous to us than to the Americans and thus it amounts to a balance of concessions, a compromise. Many observations were based on ignorance and misunderstanding of the treaty. Had there been a reasonable and businesslike discussion it would have been possible, of course, to demonstrate the flimsiness of the criticisms or to explain why one or other concession was made and how it was offset by a reciprocal concession.
There were at the same time criticisms deliberately aimed to discredit the treaty and, of course, those who signed it. This was in the domain of plain political struggle.
A godsend for the political opposition was a certain colonel D. who for several years was a military expert on the delegation during our talks. I remember him as a good specialist who contributed much to solving a number of difficult military-technical problems. I also remember him turning more than once to me as head of the delegation with different ideas intended to help finding compromise solutions and thus speeding up the signing of the treaty.
He finally quit the General Staff, joined an opposition organization and became the most vehement critic of the treaty, our orthodox opponents' trump card in their campaign against the treaty. Yes, indeed, an expert with the delegation who knows the treaty inside out is telling the people: "The treaty is the greatest betrayal of state interests!"
I do not know the reason for so radical a change in his views although I can guess: the struggle against the Treaty must have been funded well. The following incident proves that this guess is correct.
When the ratification campaign in Moscow was in full swing, I got a telephone call from a retired general whom I knew and respected not only as a good specialist in the area of strategic arms but also as an honest and decent person. "Yuri Konstantinovich," the general said, "I've been commissioned to write an article about the Treaty…"Well, you know the Treaty very well, so we can hope for an objective assessment," I said. "This is why I'm calling you and to give notice: don't be surprised when you read the article." I wondered why. "It will not contain my assessment because I'm filling 'a social order'… I have to feed the family."
I could only express sympathy with the man whose conscience moved him to call me to apologize for what he thought was dishonorable. The article soon appeared in Pravda and it contained such crude distortions of the facts that I would not have believed that it could have been written by an expert who knew the treaty very well.
The behind-the-scenes struggle surrounding the treaty was also going on in Washington. This struggle at the talks showed in the fact that ad referendum agreements reached in Geneva were ever more frequently repudiated by the American side and the carefully composed "packages" 4 consequently went to pieces. Later, I read the following in the book written by Michael R. Beschloss and Strobe Talbott: "In Geneva, Richard Burt, the chief U.S. negotiator, was frustrated. He would send suggestions to the administration on how to resolve the sticking points. He would reach tentative deals with his Soviet counterpart, Yuri Nazarkin, only to have them slapped down by Washington, often on personal instructions from Scowcroft."5
As Washington continued to hinder the process, the head of the U.S. delegation, Richard Burt, grew increasingly pessimistic. He had long been offered a position with a major private consulting firm, but he kept postponing his transfer in the hope for a speedy conclusion of the talks. Finally, seeing apparently no real prospects of having the treaty concluded and fearing to miss a tempting offer, he decided to quit the administration, arranged a farewell party and departed in March of 1991. His deputy, Ambassador Linton Brooks, took over as head of the delegation.
Together with Brooks we were to rescue the treaty, which literally hung by a thread. The greater problems had been resolved but the signing of the Treaty was impeded by the absence of agreement on several questions that could not be solved without the participation of the chiefs of staffs of both parties.
One of the pending questions was the so-called "reducing the number of warheads." Both parties were interested in having the right to go to a lower number of the warheads attributed to and deployed on their ICBMs and SLBMs but they could not agree on the terms of this downloading. These terms were important from the viewpoint of the "breakout potential." In other words, in the event the treaty is broken neither party should have any advantage if it should wish to upload and thus increase its nuclear potential. But each party had its own plan for lowering the number of warheads taking into account its own practical needs, and a common denominator was to be found for them.
Yet another pending question was to formulate the definition of what constituted new types of ballistic missiles. The point was that it was permitted to reduce the number of warheads only with regard to existing types of missiles set forth in the treaty. This rule did not apply to new types. It was therefore important to establish clear criteria to distinguish new types from existing modified types. It was difficult to do that because either party had its own plans with regard to creating new types of ballistic missiles and, naturally, it would not like the definition of new types infringe upon its interests.
Furthermore, consistent with the already agreed provision, the parties had no right to attribute to ICBMs/SLBMs of a new type a number of warheads greater than the smallest number of warheads attributed to any ICBM/SLBM to which that party had attributed a reduced number of warheads.
Beschloss and Talbott who were cited above wrote later: "For his part, Moiseev saw lenient downloading rules as an economic and practical necessity. The Americans had already figured out that he must be especially concerned about two missile systems that were still in top-secret development in the Soviet Union but whose existence had been deducted by U.S. intelligence." 6 Compromise was possible through weighing up on a precision scale the practical needs and security interests of both parties. The role of such a scale was to be played by talks between those persons of both parties who were familiar not only with all the subtle distinctions of their armed forces but also had the right to make decisions with regard to these forces. Such persons were the chiefs of the general staffs. 7
There remained some unresolved problems with regard to heavy bombers and air-launched cruise missiles, access to telemetric information coming from missiles during test firings, among some other problems.
The Soviet Union proposed a meeting between the Soviet foreign minister and the U.S. Secretary of State attended by the chiefs of staff to agree on all those pending questions. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell pleaded too busy and sent his deputy instead to attend the meeting. Owing to that, Moiseev, then Soviet chief of the General Staff, sent his deputy, Omelichev, to attend it. The meeting ended inconclusively: apart from a few small matters, no problem was solved - the powers of both deputies proved insufficient.
The situation was taking a critical turn. The growing feeling in Moscow and Washington was in favor of discontinuing the talks. The opponents of the treaty in both capitals took advantage of the deadlocked talks to try and torpedo the treaty. The delegation was supposed to report back to Moscow as soon as possible its view on whether to break off the talks or… Or what, indeed?
The Americans held an Independence Day reception on 4 July 1991. It was afternoon. In the shady garden of the residence of the U.S. ambassador to the European UN office, a marine band was playing as majorettes spinned their batons, plenty of coke for the guests to chase down the hot dogs, popcorn and other American fast foods.
Catching sight of Brooks, I took him aside saying I had an important thing to discuss: This is roughly what I told him: "In order to finalize the treaty we should reach agreement on several purely military questions that can be decided only by our chiefs of staffs. Unless this is done as soon as possible, the delegations should pull up stakes because there remains nothing they can do in Geneva. I know that Powell is a busy man, but questions cannot be solved without his direct contact with Moiseev. The latest meeting of the foreign ministers attended by the deputies of the general staffs made it plain. I'm ready to sent to Moscow a proposal for a new meeting of the foreign ministers if Powell is guaranteed to take part in this meeting this time around."
Brooks listened to me attentively saying he would try to give his answer the next day. The next day he let me know that Powell would take part in the meeting if Moiseev could make it to Washington because Powell had to keep his hand always on the control desk at his headquarters (he was to deal with the mess in the wake of Desert Storm). I reported my discussion with Brooks to Moscow explaining why a new meeting of the foreign ministers and chiefs of general staffs was advisable.
The meeting between Aleksandr Bessmertnykh and James Baker with the participation of Colin Powell and Mikhail Moiseev took place in Washington 11-15 July.
Receiving no instructions to leave for Washington to attend the ministerial meeting I stayed in Geneva awaiting the results. Brook returned from Washington with happy tidings: the meeting was a success, agreements in principle were reached on all outstanding questions, the summit for signing the treaty would be in Moscow on July 31, and the delegations were to quickly reflect these agreements in corresponding texts of the treaty. Moscow, however, kept silent. I subsequently learned that in the meantime Moiseev was trying to persuade our defense industry chiefs that the understandings reached in Washington were not going to threaten the country's security. The United States faced similar problems but Powell managed to break down Scowcroft's resistance as early as during the Washington meeting. 8
The Foreign Ministry finally confirmed what I heard from Brooks and promised to convey the texts of the agreements. As time went by no texts from Moscow were forthcoming. Thinking that the treaty texts to be finalized with the Americans would have to be reported to Moscow anyway, I decided not to waste time waiting and gave Brooks my consent to a meeting of all our groups and subgroups to finalize the treaty and the texts having to do with it. Work swung into high gear. We literally worked around the clock. New texts were sent to Moscow for approval every day. At the same time, texts that were finalized earlier were being scrutinized to see that the Russian and English texts were authentic and to go over them with a fine-toothed comb for all sorts of possible minor faults. In the meantime there arrived from Moscow two men who took part in the Washington meeting - F.I. Ladygin, chief of the Soviet General Staff's Legal and Treaties Directorate and Zaikov's representative V. L. Kitaev. They brought along texts agreed in Washington.
The procedure to initial the treaty opened at the Soviet mission in Geneva at 11 a.m. 29 July 1991. Brooks and I, naturally, made solemn statements befitting the occasion and exchanged congratulations on the historic achievement. Then began the initialing process, that is to say, Brooks and I were putting our initials on every page of the text of the treaty. Since the text was enormous and there were four copies to initial - two in English and two in Russian 9 - the whole process took several hours.
The next day, 30 July, the entire delegation left for Moscow on charter flight. Everyone was elated: the assigned mission was accomplished, we won.
Shortly before the signing ceremony in the morning 31 July 1991, I called at the office of Deputy Foreign Minister V.P. Karpov who was in charge of disarmament matters. We had to agree on certain formalities of the upcoming ceremony. Usually reserved, he effusively greeted me and said: "I didn't think until the last moment that the treaty would pan out. There were much too many pitfalls. You may not know about all of them. My congratulations."
Frankly speaking, it was especially nice to hear praises from Karpov, a top-notch professional who knew and understood all the finer points and nuances involved in the drafting of the Treaty. Having gone through all the stages of the strategic arms limitation talks since 1969, he was the first head of the delegation in 1985 that I took charge of in 1989 and that now crossed the finishing line.
A couple of hours later, USSR President Mikhail Gorbachev and U.S. President George Bush signed in the St. Vladimir Hall of the Kremlin Grand Palace the Treaty on the Reduction and Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms. This ceremony closed the talks that opened 12 March 1985.
The ceremony was attended by Richard Burt, who took a plane from Washington specially for this occasion. He, I think, was very upset by not having seen the talks through and resigning a few months before the signing of the treaty.
Despite the great fatigue caused by intense work and not getting enough sleep during the last weeks of rush work, I was in a state of euphoria the first few days after the signing. Adding to the great inward satisfaction were the numerous congratulations from all the people I knew and did not know. I was receiving congratulations from many people in the offices, halls and elevators in and outside the Foreign Ministry high-rise building on Smolenskaia Ploshchad.
The feeling of euphoria was even stronger in anticipation of a vacation (I had not taken it in three years). I was only to do two things before that - to make sure that all documents pertaining to the treaty were put together correctly and sent to the Supreme Council deputies and their experts for study (the whole set of documents ran into more than 900 pages) and ask the Foreign Ministry chiefs to officially thank those employees who had to do the hardest and most important part of the work.
The delegation was working through the final stage under some impelling force. Many of those who participated in its work spent difficult years negotiating. Seeing the light at the end of the tunnel they spurted to the finishing line and worked 17-18 hours a day. All "tightening up the discipline" was out of the question. I only had to remind those too immersed in their work too much that it wouldn't be a bad idea to take a breather to stay the course.
Now that the goal was achieved at least a couple of kind words were in order to those who had spared no effort and health to fulfill the mission. That could have been done by asking all members of the delegation and all those who in Moscow had helped drafting the treaty for a party, say, at the Foreign Ministry Mansion on Aleksei Tolstoi street. All my attempts to arrange such a party were futile. The minister was away on vacation and his deputies pleaded lack of powers and asked me to wait for his return. He returned, as we know, as late as 18 August responding to urgent summons from the GKChP or State Committee for the State of Emergency.
Equally to no avail were all my overtures - official and private - to the ministry chiefs suggesting that those who had put in much effort to preparing the treaty be commended.
The developments ensuing soon thereafter cancelled these attempts and my vacation.
Waking up in the morning on Monday, 19 August in the resort hotel near Moscow I heard this dialogue outside the window:
"Did you hear, Gorbachev's been removed."
"You don't say! What'll they do next? Pension him off?"
Turning on the radio I heard about the GKChP.
Then ceased to exist one of the states on behalf of which Gorbachev signed the treaty. Taking over the Soviet Union's international obligations, Russia was going through hard times. The Foreign Ministry, too, fell on hard times.
Early in January of 1992, the new "Kozyrev-democratic" bosses of the Foreign Ministry distributed to all the employees of the former USSR Foreign Ministry forms that, when filled out, amounted to requests for dismissal and applications for jobs with the Foreign Ministry of Russia. It is incomprehensible, why ask for dismissal from an institution which no longer existed: neither the Soviet Union nor its Foreign Ministry existed at that time. Nonetheless, the requests-applications were submitted and there came a period of anxious expectation of the results of their examination. This "state of suspension" continued for several months for many people.
A commission was set up to check up on everyone's loyalty to the new regime. There appeared an institution of "commissars" who were trying, to the extent of their competence (or incompetence), to keep tabs on activities of the ministry's units.
It never even crossed anyone's mind in the USSR Foreign Ministry to sabotage the new government - hide away codes and throw keys from the safes into the Moskva River. The crumbling of the Soviet Union and the concurrent events pained civil servants (not only those at the Foreign Ministry by far) who had served their state - the Soviet Union - for a better part of their life. But in the final analysis, Russia's national interests had to objectively remain the same as those of the Soviet Union.
Despite the oppressive atmosphere, the dismissed specialists continued to prepare materials for the ratification of the START Treaty and conduct talks with Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan about the future of strategic offensive arms on their territory.
The START Treaty was ratified on 4 November 1992. There were 165 votes for the resolution to ratify the treaty, eight abstentions and no votes against. The resolution included a stipulation that instruments of ratification be exchanged after Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine acceded to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and signed accords with Russia on the START Treaty implementation procedure.
It took more than two years to comply with these provisions. The main problem was that the nationalist forcers in Ukraine were insisting that Ukraine should keep the nuclear arms and, accordingly, objecting to its accession to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty as a nuclear-weapon-free state. By the end of 1994, the political balance tilted in favor of a nuclear-weapon-free status for Ukraine. It signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty on 5 December 1994 and the START Treaty entered into force the same day.
In conclusion I can't resist citing a few lines from my own address during the final meeting between the Soviet and American delegations at the START talks on 29 July 1991. 10 These words were included in the address to answer the critics of the treaty: "I'm deeply convinced that the treaty can be correctly and objectively assessed if only it is to be regarded as a whole, as a balance of interests of the parties, a balance painstakingly achieved with the use of a precision political scale. This treaty corresponds in equal measure with the interests of both parties. I am confident that history will assess it fairly."
Today, it brings me deep satisfaction that history has assesses the START I Treaty fairly. The proof is ten years of its operation.
Endnotes
Note *: Yuri Nazarkin, Head of the Soviet delegation to the START talks in 1989-1991. Back
Note 1: The CPSU Central Committee, MoD, KGB, and Military Industrial Commission (VPK) of the USSR Council of Ministers. Back
Note 2: The Foreign Ministry memo was based on calculations made by the former chief of the General Staff, S.F. Akhromeev. Back
Note 3: I should give credit to O.D. Baklanov for his consistency and straightforwardness in upholding his position. But what underlay that position? It was, perhaps, what I.S. Belousov was talking about at that meeting - the desire to urge the country forward to fresh militarization of its economy at the cost of going back to totalitarianism. I wonder whom he saw in the role of a new dictator? Not Yanaev, no…. Back
Note 4: The "package" in the negotiating lingo stood for a set of unresolved and often essentially unrelated questions used by the parties for trading concessions: one party makes concession with regard to one question while the other with regard to another. Back
Note 5: Michael R. Beschloss and Strobe Talbott. At the Highest Levels: The Inside Story of the End of the Cold War. London, 1993, p. 373. Back
Note 6: Ibid., p. 404. Back
Note 7: As a result of a compromise that was finally reached, both Soviet missile programs mentioned by Beschloss and Talbott were continued. Back
Note 8: Michael R. Beschloss and Strobe Talbott, p.405. Back
Note 9: Either party was to have the initialed texts in Russian and English. Back
Note 10: It would have been better to quote the president. But what can we do if he didn't say these words? Back