U.S., Russia Agree to Large Nuclear Arsenal Cuts

One problem in the international realm is that unproductive conflicts between nations are exciting and headline grabbing, while amicable positive-sum interests tend to be a bit boring. Thus Barack Obama heading to Russia, focusing his summit activities on an issue where agreement was likely, and coming away quickly with an agreement in principle to hammer out the details of big bilateral cuts in nuclear arsenals hasn’t attracted much attention. If Obama had done something much less intelligent and gotten in a big, but ultimately pointless, public argument with the Russians about NATO membership for Ukraine or something it probably would have gotten more play. But agreement is good and conflict is bad. Leaders who seek agreement should be rewarded. And it ought to be noted that what’s been agreed to is a pretty big deal:

Arms-control analysts who support Obama’s determination to conclude a new START agreement say that the stated reductions are significant because they are realistic enough to receive the legislative-branch ratification required in both countries, yet ambitious enough to act as a first step toward Obama’s vision of a world eventually free of nuclear arsenals.

“They’ve hit the sweet spot in finding numbers that will be a significant reduction and likely to get the necessary support in their respective parliaments,” says Joseph Cirincione, president of the Ploughshares Fund, a Washington foundation focused on nuclear-weapons reduction and nonproliferation.

The numbers announced Monday, Mr. Cirincione notes, amount to a 30 percent reduction in the nuclear arsenals of the two countries that possess 95 percent of the world’s nuclear weapons.”

In other words, that’s a roughly 28 percent reduction in the total number of nuclear weapons in the world. It’s also a powerful signal to the French, British, and especially Chinese that the United States and Russia are serious about reducing arsenals and that the Obama administration really wants to pursue a nuclear-free world. The fact that the US and Russia contain such a large proportion of global nukes is, after all, a bit of an anachronism as in pretty much all other respects China has clearly replaced Russia as the number two geopolitical player and in some domains the European Union has set itself up as a more-or-less independent great power. It would be very plausible for the Chinese (and much less plausible, though still possible, for the Europeans) to decide they need to react to this situation by “leveling up” and building their own arsenal of thousands of nuclear weapons.

Steps that give the Chinese confidence that they don’t need to do that, that the US and Russia are prepared to level down, will do an enormous amount to help build a more peaceful, more secure world. Not only in terms of the US-China relationship, but also in terms of India’s thinking about its nuclear needs and therefore Pakistan’s thinking and therefore the general problem of proliferation around the world. These reductions, if they come to pass, will be a huge deal.