Russia suspends New Start treaty inspection of nuclear sites

Russia has suspended an arrangement that allowed the US and Russian inspectors to visit each other's nuclear weapons sites under the 2010 New Start treaty, in a new blow to arms control.

Mutual inspections had been suspended as a health precaution since the outbreak of the Covid, but a foreign ministry statement said on Monday that Russia is unwilling to restart them. It claimed that the US sanctions were imposed because of the invasion of Ukraine and stopped Russian inspectors traveling to the US.

The statement said that there were no similar obstacles to the arrival of American inspectors in Russia. The Russian foreign ministry raised the issue with the relevant countries but did not receive an answer. The US state department did not immediately respond to the claim that the sanctions created an imbalance when it came to nuclear weapons inspections. A spokesman said the United States is committed to the New Start Treaty, but we keep discussions between the parties regarding the implementation of the treaty. The treaty, which limits each country's deployed strategic warheads to 1,550, and imposes limits on delivery systems, was extended for five years in February 2021. It is the last remaining remaining Arms Control treaty between the US and Russia, and its inspection and verification clauses are widely seen as vital in building mutual confidence and preventing nuclear miscalculation.

Jon Wolfsthal, senior director for arms control and non-proliferation in the Obama administration's national security council said that at a time when US and Russian relations are tense, anything that undermines stability and nuclear predictability is a concern.

We continue to exchange large amounts of information with Russia about their nuclear weapons. This is just a political road bump and not a new obstacle to stability, and the hope is that this is just a political road bump. Russian nuclear forces have maintained a part of the New Start agreement, notifying the US on any changes in status of its nuclear arsenal, while inspections have stalled.

They have been stepping up notifications. Rose Gottemoeller, former Nato deputy secretary general and under secretary of state for arms control and international security, said it was remarkable.

Notifications come in to the National and Nuclear Risk Reduction Centre, which is a center in the department of state. They told me they received 18 notifications one day in May. Gottemoeller, now a professor at Stanford University, said they had never seen that number of notifications before. It seems that the Russians, at least the Russian nuclear forces, have been intent on continuing implementation for mutual predictability and confidence. Inspections are important in order to check whether a country s notifications of its nuclear weapons are accurate, but Pavel Podvig, a Geneva-based independent analyst on Russian nuclear forces, said they are not the only one.

Podvig, who is a senior researcher at the UN Institute for Disarmament Research, said that the volume of notifications is sufficiently large to be able to detect serious discrepancies. Of course, there are national technical means that can't see everything, but serious discrepancies will be detected, so I wouldn't say that all is lost for arms control, even though it is a rather unfortunate decision on Russia's part.