Foreign Policy In Focus

Vladimir Putin's pledge to improve the Russian child welfare system parallels his intention to fill the void left by not renewing Nunn-Lugar.

On Friday, Dec. 27, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a bill prohibiting future adoptions of Russian children by American citizens. At the New York Times, David Herszenhorn and Erik Eckholm explained that it

… was drafted in response to the Magnitsky Act, a law signed by President Obama this month that will bar Russian citizens accused of violating human rights from traveling to the United States and from owning real estate or other assets there. The Obama administration had opposed the Magnitsky legislation, fearing diplomatic retaliation, but members of Congress were eager to press Russia over human rights abuses and tied the bill to another measure granting Russia new status as a full trading partner.

Nor are Russian concerns devoid of legitimacy. In the Washington Post, Olga Khazan reports:

Several high-profile cases of abuse also haven’t helped. Russian policymakers named the bill after a high-profile Russian adoptee, Dima Yakovlev, a toddler who was adopted by a Virginia couple and died after being left in a hot car for nine hours. And after a 7-year-old Russian boy was returned alone to Moscow in 2010 by his Tennessean adoptive mother, the outrage was so great that a Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson temporarily announced a suspension of all U.S. adoptions.

Putin, in turn (the Times again) said that instead he would sign

… a resolution also adopted Wednesday that calls for improvements in Russia’s child welfare system. “I intend to sign the law,” Mr. Putin said Thursday, “as well as a presidential decree changing the procedure of helping orphaned children, children left without parental care, and especially children who are in a disadvantageous situation due to their health problems.”

Whether or not he'll follow up is another matter. Meanwhile, the Dima Yakovlev Bill could have been avoided if the United States hadn't passed the Magnitsky Act, which amounted to poking a stick at the Russian bear. Russia also kicked the United States Agency for International Development out of the country.

The Russian government had made no secret of its unhappiness with some programs financed by the Agency … like Golos, the country’s only independent election-monitoring group, which helped expose fraud in disputed parliamentary voting last December.

Meanwhile, Russia's termination of Nunn-Lugar may also be a result of U.S. insistence on deploying missile defense systems in Eastern Europe. It claims, however, that it has enough money of its own to continue to perform the services Nunn-Lugar had been funding. But, as with caring for underserved children, it remains to be seen if Russia will follow through.

Blame Russia, for, in both instances, cutting off its nose to spite its face. But, in fact, it had been seeking to save that face when confronted by the United States with the Magnitsky Act, perceived interference by the Agency for International Development, and missile defense.

Nuclear disarmament and nonproliferation require action on two fronts: the local and policy.

It's sometimes lost on the arms control community that halting the spread of nuclear weapons begins at home. The disarmament community, on the other hand, has long understood the importance of going local. These days, no one embodies that more than the Los Alamos Study Group. For instance, it was instrumental in letting the air out of the CMRR-NF balloon. The CMRR-NF (Chemistry and Metallurgy Research Replacement facility) is a building that the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico seeks to construct. It's intended to carry out design work on plutonium pits -- the living, breathing heart of nuclear weapons.

Among the LASG's efforts to halt the CMRR-NF have been sustained lobbying on Capitol Hill and two separate lawsuits that it filed against the Department of Energy on the grounds that the planned facility was environmentally and seismically un-safe. Thanks to the LASG and a sputtering economy, it's now unlikely that the CMRR-NF will ever see the light of day.

Greg Mello, LASG's executive director, also frequently points out of how little benefit the nuclear-weapons labs based in New Mexico (Los Alamos and Sandia) have been to the state. In his latest newsletter he writes:

Here in New Mexico we see what appear to be desperate attempts to promote nuclear weapons, in editorials in our largest newspaper and from Senate candidates. Oddly and wrongly, weapons projects are usually linked to the state’s economic health. The reality is otherwise.   

Leaving aside most of the errors on which the myth of our nuclear dependence rests, these writers and politicians fail to explain how nuclear weapons will be an engine of growth, an assumed good in their world.

… Our congressional delegation, without fail, serves the labs first.  Every hour so spent, every meeting, every committee assignment so oriented, is a loss to our state.  Cumulatively, in our competitive world, these losses have been very damaging to the state’s economic and social development, to our civic institutions, and to the protection of our environment. 

After all, Mello asks:

How in the world will static, Soviet-style, pure federal employment, comprising two or three percent of the state’s total workers, become an engine for economic growth? 

Meanwhile, at the federal level, U.S. nuclear policymakers have suffered a setback since Russia decided to opt out of the Cooperative Threat Initiative. Nunn-Lugar, as it was referred to out of deference to its creators, Senators Sam and Richard respectively, was a model federal program. Engineered in 1992, it enabled the security and dismantlement of an extraordinary number of nuclear weapons in the states of the former Soviet Union. Why then is Russia allowing it to lapse?

Russia claims that it can now afford to ride herd of its own loose nukes. Meanwhile, a New York Times editorial calls "Cutting off this successful program now is perverse and reckless — and all too typical of President Vladimir Putin's sour, xenophobic and self-isolating worldview." But, at Foreign Policy, Jeffrey Lewis provides more broad-based insights into Russian suspiciousness. Among them:

In recent years, American officials have been driven bonkers by Russia's refusal to accept their assurances that missile defense interceptors deployed in Europe won't threaten Russia's deterrent. The United States shows PowerPoint slide after PowerPoint slide to demonstrate the physical impossibility that these interceptors could hit a Russian ICBM. The Russians remain unmollified. Frustrated U.S. officials claim the Russians either don't understand or don't want to.

In fact, he writes, "We may be wrong about what frightens the Russians."

In September 2009, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates noted that the Russians had expressed concern that U.S. missile defense interceptors in Europe "could be fitted with nuclear weapons and become an offensive weapon." …  (The United States and Soviet Union prohibited such missiles under the 1987 INF Treaty.) … It is a funny sort of paranoid fantasy, the notion that the United States might place nuclear weapons on missile defense interceptors and use them to decapitate the Russian leadership in Moscow.

But, writes Lewis, there may be method to their madness. In fact, they may be living in "sheer terror at the persistent technological advantage held by the United States."

The simplest explanation for Russia's overwhelming concern with missile defense is that the General Staff fears that Russia is much, much more vulnerable to an attack against the country's command-and-control infrastructure -- what used to be called decapitation -- than we realize.  … And, as a result, they make strange, dangerous, and seemingly irrational decisions. 

In a follow-up post to the Foreign Policy piece at Arms Control Wonk, the leading arms-control blog that he administers, Lewis offers solutions.

How do we start talking about command and control with Russia, especially if the Russians won’t address the matter directly?  I would propose that the US and Russian agree to a joint statement prohibiting the placing of nuclear weapons on missile defense interceptors. … of a ten-year duration signed by both Presidents.

This should be a relatively easy proposal for the United States to accept. [But the] Russians might be less interested. As best I can tell, the Moscow ABM defense system still relies on nuclear warheads.

But

… An agreement to prohibit nuclear-armed ABM interceptors would provide at least two benefits. First, a prohibition on nuclear-armed missile defense interceptors would provide a mechanism to address the least difficult portion of Russia’s stockpile of tactical nuclear weapons. 

… Second, a prohibition on nuclear-armed missile defense interceptors would enhance strategic stability by reinforcing the prohibition on intermediate-range nuclear forces. … A ban on nuclear-armed ABM interceptors, combined with some confidence-building measures, might make the difference in preserving INF.

The LASG's work in New Mexico (and on its behalf in Washington) and Jeffrey Lewis's policy proscriptions are arguably the most cutting-edge approaches on, respectively, the local and the policy levels. Let's hope that, working in secret synergy, they create anti-nuclear fusion.