Russian Nuclear Weapons: Past, Present, and Future

than the existing PNIs, which lack a legal basis and
do not entail obligatory data exchanges or other verification
procedures. 63 The governments of many developing
countries also favor eliminating Russian and
NATO TNWs, a position they again advocated during
the May 2010 NPT Review Conference.
The George W. Bush administration concluded
that it would prove too difficult to address TNWs
within the context of the Russian-American strategic
nuclear arms control talks. The May 2002 Strategic
Offensive Reductions Treaty (SORT), like previous
Soviet-American and Russian-American arms control
agreements, does not address nonstrategic nuclear
forces. In subsequently explaining this TNW exclusion
before the U.S. Senate, then-Secretary of Defense
Donald Rumsfeld explained that the parties decided
it would prove too difficult to resolve the many arms
control complexities associated with these nonstrategic
weapons:
We might have argued that Russia’s proximity to
rogue nations allows them to deter these regimes with
tactical systems; because they are many thousands of
miles away from us; the United States distance from
them requires more intercontinental systems possibly
than theater systems. This could have resulted in a
mind-numbing debate over how many non-strategic
systems . . . should equal an intercontinental system,
or open the door to a discussion of whether an agreement
should include all nuclear warheads regardless
of whether they’re strategic or tactical. 64
In early June 2005, Assistant Secretary of State for
Arms Control Stephen Rademaker said Russian officials
continued to evince “very little interest in talking
to us” on further Russian-American non-strategic
arms control. 65
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