A NUCLEAR WARHEAD CONTROL AND ELIMINATION REGIME: PROBLEMS AND PROSPECTS

Today, no arms control agreement requires nuclear warheads to be eliminated. Existing agreements provide for the reduction of deployed warheads and the elimination of their delivery vehicles, but largely because of verification difficulties and the absence of a strategic rationale, the elimination of non-deployed nuclear weapons has not been a strategic objective. However, this is changing. Last September, addressing the UN General Assembly after signing the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, President Clinton listed warhead elimination among the United States’ priority goals. “When Russia ratifies START II, President Yeltsin and I are all ready to discuss the possibilities of further cuts, as well as limiting and monitoring nuclear warheads and materials. This will help make deep reductions irreversible.” Last March at the Helsinki Summit, Presidents Clinton and Yeltsin agreed that START III would include “measures relating to the transparency of strategic nuclear warhead inventories and the destruction of strategic nuclear warheads and any other jointly agreed technical and organizational measures, to promote the irreversibility of deep reductions including prevention of a rapid increase in the number of warheads.” In the language of Summitry, this means verifiably eliminating nuclear warheads in an irreversible way. This paper addresses both the “why” of establishing a nuclear warhead control regime, and the “how.” It also describes existing U.S.-Russian transparency initiatives related to nuclear warhead elimination. It concludes by analyzing the problems of--and prospects for--nuclear warhead control and monitoring in the future.