WASHINGTON, March 1 (UPI) -- A remarkable strategic debate has opened up in the Russian media about the merits and pitfalls of withdrawing from the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty.
As we reported in BMD Focus last week, Russia's most senior generals have already publicly served notice that the Kremlin is prepared to pull out of the more than 19-year-old INF, which has been a cornerstone of superpower détente since it was signed on Dec. 8, 1987.
"If a political decision is taken to quit the treaty, the Strategic Missile Forces are ready to carry out this task," SMF Commander Gen. Nikolai Solovtsov told a news conference in Moscow on Feb. 19, according to a report from the RIA Novosti news agency.
Solovtsov's statement followed hard on the heels of a warning the previous week from his boss, four-star Army Gen. Yury Baluyevsky, the Chief of the Russian General Staff, that Russia may unilaterally scrap the nearly-20-year-old INF. "It is possible for a party to abandon the treaty (unilaterally) if it provides convincing evidence that it is necessary to do so," Baluyevsky said Feb. 15. "We currently have such evidence."
RIA Novosti explicitly linked this threat to the Bush administration's determination to push ahead with plans to build a base for ground-abased anti-ballistic missile interceptors in Poland and a radar tacking facility to guide them in the neighboring Czech Republic.
However, an article published later in February by RIA Novosti correspondent Andrei Kislyakov and reprinted by UPI on Feb. 27 by permission of RIA Novosti, opened up a new area of the debate by questioning whether it was in Russia's own interest to leave the INF even if the United States and its allies pushed ahead with their ambitious BMD plans for Central Europe.
Kislyakov argued that taking the decision to reopen production lines to build a new generation of intermediate range ballistic missiles to replace the old SS-20s that were scrapped under the INF Treaty would be an ambitious, time-consuming and costly undertaking. And even if the healthy Russia treasury could find the money to pay for the program out of its windfall profits from record oil and gas export prices, Russia's overall defense budget was still only a fraction the size of the United States.'
"Where is the war chest to help pay for all these things?" Kislyakov asked. "If we recognize that no magic wand has been found yet, then we'll have to cut back on existing national projects, and no one will be able to choose which ones to axe."
Also, Kislyakov argued that Russia's military-industrial base for building ICBMs and other shorter range ballistic missiles was already fully extended. Therefore to launch an additional ambitious program would be to force Russian policymakers to slow down on the production of other urgently needed weapons.
"Which plant will manufacture the required number of missiles?" Kislyakov asked.
The existing facility east of the Urals chronically fails to cope even with the production of ICBMs ordered by the state. What must be the procedure for condemning land for positioning areas and where should they be located? How to provide the proper infrastructure and bring units up to the necessary strength? How to ensure uninterrupted command and control, including launching new communications and reconnaissance satellites into orbit?"
"Sergei Ivanov, Russia's former defense minister, may have been right to describe the INF Treaty as a relic. But all things old are not always worse than what's new," Kislyakov wrote.
"Modernizing the existing nuclear missile arsenal is indeed quite an understandable asymmetrical answer to the appearance of global anti-missile systems," Kislyakov continued. "But adding intermediate-range ballistic and cruise missiles to such an answer in the future is not a very happy choice."
Kislyakov's arguments look unlikely to be heeded, given the high-profile support Gen. Solovtsov has already given for reopening the production lines for intermediate-range ballistic missiles. And the healthy state of Russia's energy export earnings suggests that the money to do so could and probably will be found.
But Kislyakov's article is of prime importance for several other reasons. First, it confirms that a healthy, open debate on major national security issues still exists in Russia's print and electronic media. Second, it raises important issues of what Russia's spending priorities should be given its impressive and once again expanding, but still finite aerospace industrial resources.
Third, the debate Kislyakov has opened is of note because it is not about responding from weakness, but about different ways of responding to strategic developments from strength. Industrially and financially, militarily and strategically, Russia is once again on the global upswing after a quarter century of relative and absolute decline. Debates how to respond to challenges from a position of strength are very different from debates about to how to respond to problems from positions of weakness. The arguments now being heard in Moscow are much more likely to lead to effective answers.
