The ABM Treaty Demarcation Agreement
After nearly four years of often-deadlocked negotiations, the United States and Russia signed a package of agreements modifying the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty on September 26, 1997. (See the State Department website for the text of the agreements and related documents.) The negotiations, which the United States initiated so as to be allowed to proceed legally with its programs for new theater missile defenses, were intended to clarify the treaty's restrictions on theater missile defenses and to establish a clear "demarcation" between permitted theater defenses and prohibited strategic defenses.
While the two countries did agree to make far-reaching changes to the treaty, they did not reach a clear demarcation, and one of the key agreements is more accurately described as a stalemate. This lack of resolution indicates that missile defenses will continue to be a point of contention between the United States and Russia for well into the next decade.
Most US press coverage of the signing missed this point entirely, perhaps because the actual text of the agreements was not released until a week later. The media relied instead on the US State Department press release and fact sheets, which described the negotiations as successful.
For political reasons, both Presidents Yeltsin and Clinton have chosen to ignore the stalemate and will spin the demarcation agreement to their respective legislatures as the agreement each wanted. Clinton will portray it to the Senate as an agreement that permits all six current US theater missile defense (TMD) programs (designed to counter short-range missiles launched at US troops and allies abroad) and does not restrict other possible future TMD systems. Yeltsin will present it to the Duma as an agreement that preserves the ABM Treaty and constrains US missile defenses and thus gives Russia the stable strategic environment it seeks before cutting its strategic arsenal under START II and III.
The package of agreements signed includes the following:
- a memorandum of understanding on "multilateralization" specifying that Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan will jointly succeed the Soviet Union as parties to the treaty
- a first agreed statement, or "low-speed agreement," covering theater defenses whose interceptors have speeds of 3 km/sec or lower
- a second agreed statement, or "high-speed agreement," covering theater defenses with interceptors faster than 3 km/sec
- an agreement on confidence-building measures
The low- and high-speed agreements are the most significant. The ABM Treaty is intended to prevent deployment of defenses against US and Russian long-range strategic missiles on the grounds that such defenses could not be relied on to work and yet would be an incentive for the other country to build or retain relatively large numbers of nuclear weapons to overwhelm the defense in order to maintain a second-strike retaliatory capability. However, to prevent circumvention of its provisions, it also restricts both the capability and testing of other types of defenses (air defenses and theater missile defenses). Article VI of the treaty prohibits giving such defenses "capabilities to counter strategic missiles" and testing them "in an ABM mode," but the treaty does not specify how to determine whether a defense is strategic-capable or has been tested in an ABM mode.
Until recently, this lack of clarity was not a problem because the air and theater defenses developed and deployed by either country clearly did not rub up against these prohibitions. However, when the 1991 Gulf War against Iraq prompted the United States to invest more heavily in developing new and more capable theater missile defenses, it was clear that some of these systems (in particular, the Theater High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) and Navy Theater-Wide system) fell into a gray area.
To allow the first THAAD test to proceed legally, in 1993 the United States began discussions with Russia to clarify the Article VI prohibitions. Contrary to US expectations, however, this matter was not easily resolved (and absent an agreement with Russia, the United States declared THAAD testing to be compliant with the existing treaty). The United States wanted to simply drop the restriction on the capability of theater defenses and to permit any theater defense that was not tested against long-range (greater than 3,500 kilometer) target missiles. Russia, on the other hand, was concerned that a testing restriction alone would not preclude theater defenses with a capability against strategic missiles and wanted to prohibit high-speed defenses, thus permitting deployment of the US THAAD system but not Navy Theater-Wide system. This was unacceptable to the United States, whose primary goal was to preserve all its missile defense programs and to satisfy congressional hawks who wanted no restrictions on US missile defenses.
Indeed, the two separate agreed statements covering low- and high-speed defenses reflect the fact that the two countries have not moved far from their initial negotiating positions. The agreements are very different from each other. The low-speed agreement clearly specifies that any defense system will be considered treaty-compliant if its interceptors are not faster than 3 km/sec and if it is not tested against target missiles that are faster than 5 km/sec or have a range greater than 3,500 km.
The high-speed agreement does not specify what systems are permitted or prohibited, but only notes that any permitted high-speed system must adhere to the same testing restriction as low-speed systems and that the parties to the treaty will "hold consultations and discuss" any "questions and concerns" that any party has about such high-speed systems.
Beyond that, the high-speed agreement prohibits all space-based interceptors and spells out several principles that will govern the deployment of high-speed defenses:
- They may not be deployed for use against other treaty partners.
- Their scale of deployment -- in number and geographic scope -- must be consistent with the theater missile threat.
- They may be deployed only if they do not pose "a realistic threat to the strategic nuclear force" of a treaty partner.
The third principle listed here is especially significant since it is a redefinition of the Article VI prohibition on giving theater defenses a capability against strategic missiles. Previously, this restriction was interpreted to mean that a theater defense could not be given the capability to intercept a strategic missile. The new "force-on-force" criteria permits theater defenses that are capable of intercepting strategic missiles so long as they do not pose a "realistic" threat to the entire retaliatory offensive force of the other country.
However, this is not a clarification of the treaty terms. Indeed, this restriction is even more ambiguous than the original one because it is much more difficult to assess whether a defense system could be effective against a hypothetical second-strike retaliatory attack than whether it could shoot down one missile. At the very least, it is clear that the force-on-force capability of a defense depends strongly on the size of the offensive forces. A theater defense that did not pose a realistic threat to an arsenal of several thousand nuclear weapons could well do so to a much smaller arsenal of a few hundred weapons. This is the basis on which many advocates of deep reductions in nuclear forces have opposed these changes to the ABM Treaty.
Moreover, by permitting strategic-capable interceptors, the changed interpretation of the Article VI restrictions undermines the treaty's ability to uphold its other prohibitions. Key among these is to prevent a base for a strategic defense. Now each country could be permitted to deploy large numbers of strategic-capable mobile interceptors and sensors, which could be rapidly deployed to provide a defense against strategic missiles.
However, from a practical point of view, the new capability restriction on high-speed theater defenses may be irrelevant. The United States has declared that each country will have "the national responsibility" for determining the treaty compliance of its own high-speed defenses (see "Second Agreed Statement of September 26, 1997, Relating to the ABM Treaty," US State Department Fact Sheet, September 26, 1997). The United States had previously tried to get Russia to accept this premise but Russia, not surprisingly, refused. The US interpretation is not reflected in the actual text of the high-speed agreement.
Since the United States had previously made it clear that it would proceed with all its planned theater defense programs in any event by simply declaring them to be compliant with the existing treaty, Russia had little to lose by agreeing to these treaty modifications. Moreover, according to a Russian involved with the negotiations, Yeltsin felt he needed to come to some agreement in order to demonstrate to the US Congress that Russia was willing to negotiate on the treaty, thus forestalling Congressional calls for simply abandoning the treaty. Also, Yeltsin came under increasing pressure from Clinton to deliver a demarcation agreement in exchange for continued US assistance on other matters vital to Russia.
At the same time the two countries signed the ABM treaty modifications, they also signed an agreement extending the deadline for START II reductions in deployed strategic warheads by five years -- to the end of 2007. This step was designed to ease Russia's concerns about the financial burden of disabling its weapons and thus to gain ratification of START II by the Russian Duma. In fact, this extension may also ease Russia's concerns about the demarcation because it will now have a decade to wait and see what theater defenses the United States actually deploys and whether the Republican push for deployment of a national missile defense, as well as theater defenses, proves successful.
Nevertheless, Russia resisted the treaty modifications until the end, even insisting that lower-ranking diplomats sign the demarcation agreements instead of Primakov and Albright, who signed the ABM Treaty multilateralization agreement and START II extension.
What is likely to happen from here on?
Yeltsin need not seek ratification of the demarcation but it will be an important issue in the ratification of START II by the Duma. Those few Duma members knowledgeable about the ABM Treaty are apparently prepared to downplay the significance of the treaty modifications in order to get START II ratified, allowing Yeltsin to sell the modifications to the Duma as ones that will preserve rather than weaken the ABM Treaty.
If Russia ratifies START II, the Clinton administration will bring the ABM treaty modifications to the Senate for ratification next spring in a package with the START II extension. The outcome is unclear. Congressional hawks object to the prohibition on space-based interceptors, among other things. However, there will be considerable pressure for the Senate to ratify the package to keep the START reductions on track.
It is unlikely that the negotiations on high-speed theater defenses will continue at this point. One of the restrictions Russia was seeking to include in the high-speed agreement was a prohibition on space-based sensors, such as the Space and Missile Tracking System the United States plans to deploy sometime in the next decade. Such a constellation of satellites could allow missile defense interceptors to defend large ground areas and would make a defense of the United States against Russian strategic missiles more feasible. A restriction of such space-based sensors is unacceptable to the United States.
In the short term, the ABM Treaty agreements may help gain Russian ratification of START II. In the longer term, they may pose real barriers to reducing US and Russian arsenals much below START III levels of 2,000 warheads each. And if the past serves as any guide to the future, Russia will likely remain concerned about the US Navy Theater-Wide program and US space-based sensors.
The demarcation agreement did not lay down rules of the road but only succeeded in kicking the can down the road. Missile defense issues are likely to be a matter of concern for a long time to come.
Page originally posted in 1997.
