Christ, fourteen sounds like a very low number for arms control purposes.A state department office tasked with negotiating and implementing nuclear disarmament treaties has lost more than 70% of its staff over the past two years, as the Trump administration moves towards a world without arms control for the first time in nearly half a century.
The Office of Strategic Stability and Deterrence Affairs, normally a repository of expertise and institutional knowledge that does the heavy lifting of arms control, has been whittled down from 14 staffers at the start of the Trump administration to four, according to the former staffers. The state department declined to comment.
What??The state department has instead focussed its arms control efforts on “creating the environment for disarmament” (CEND) shifting the onus for disarmament from the nuclear weapons powers to non-weapons states.
How absurd! That's like a gun-toting gang of thieves rounding up a group of neighbors and saying, "You guys figure out how you're going to make us want to stop robbing you." Oh, hey, wait. That's called a protection racket.An invitation to a 2 July state department conference on the subject invites non-nuclear states to come up with “measures to modify the security environment to reduce incentives for states to retain, acquire, or increase their holdings of nuclear weapons”.
The Trump doctrine.The shift in approach comes as the administration claims to be conducting a review on whether to extend the New Start agreement limiting US and Russian strategic nuclear warheads, or find an alternative to it that would include China and new weapons systems.
Vladimir Putin has said Russia is in favour of a New Start extension, but warned that time is running out.
“If we do not begin talks now, it would be over because there would be no time even for formalities,” Putin told the Financial Times.
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Frank Rose, under-secretary for arms control until 2017, said he had tried to rebuild the strategic stability bureau when he was in office, especially by recruiting a young generation of experts.
“We’ve got a real problem,” Rose said. “Regardless of your views on whether we should extend New Start or negotiate a new agreement, you need to have career expertise to actually do the negotiations.”
[...]
The White House said the leaders agreed to keep talking about a “21st-century model of arms control, which President Trump stated as needing to include China”.
China has ruled out participation in an arms control agreement with US and Russia whose nuclear arsenals are 20 times bigger than the Chinese, estimated at less than 300 warheads. Even if Beijing were willing, a trilateral agreement would require extensive and prolonged negotiation. But former officials and arms control experts in Congress say there have been no serious consideration of what to do when New Start expires in February 2021.
They don't want to.After an exodus of most of the office’s staffers at the end of last year, [Pranay Vaddi, a former member of the strategic stability office,] said: “The bottom line is that, for a myriad of reasons, the state department isn’t equipped [to pursue arms control negotiations]”
Impeach Trump. Ditch Mitch and send Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer home. The whole world depends on it.Few experts believe that the downgrading of the state department’s capacity to negotiate disarmament agreements is a case of negligence. It is more widely seen as a deliberate strategy directed by John Bolton, Trump’s national security adviser, and a lifelong opponent of arms control agreements which he sees as unnecessary constraints on US sovereignty.
Over little more than a year on Bolton’s watch, the US has pulled out of the 2015 nuclear agreement with Iran, and the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty, which will terminate on 2 August.
Bolton is also reportedly pushing for the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, signed by President Bill Clinton in 1996 but not ratified by a Republican Senate, to be withdrawn from Senate consideration and “unsigned”, as a possible prelude to a resumption of US nuclear testing.
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Bolton’s previous record suggests that he is much better at knocking non-proliferation accords down than building them up. His earlier scalps include the Agreed Framework with North Korea and the Anti Ballistic Missile treaty. In his memoir, Surrender is not an Option, Bolton boasts of the bureaucratic cunning involved in sinking these agreements, and derides the diplomats in the state department as appeasers.
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Arms control advocates argue Bolton has convinced Trump to insist on Chinese participation fully aware of Beijing’s adamant refusal, as a “poison pill” to kill off prospects of a new arms control treaty.
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The assistant secretary of state for arms control, verification and compliance, Yleem Poblete, resigned in May after clashing with her boss, Andrea Thompson.
Thompson, the under secretary for arms control and non proliferation who does not have a background in arms control, has herself been weakened by a scandal involving undisclosed connections with the boyfriend of [convicted Russian agent Maria Butina, Paul Erickson.] [ed: link added and emphasis mine]
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According to several sources, the NSC tried to stop a meeting between Andrea Thompson [...] and Russian deputy foreign minister, Sergei Ryabkov in Geneva in January, according to two sources familiar with the arrangements.
The meeting went ahead but was kept brief, in the face of Bolton’s resistance to setting up a permanent dialogue with the Russians. A second Thompson-Ryabkov meeting in Prague on 12 June wrapped up after two hours and a half-hour lunch, with no timetable for future meetings or a plan for negotiations.
