While Russian President Vladimir Putin has declared that Russia is suspending participation in the New START arms reduction treaty, the US assessment of Russia’s nuclear program remains unchanged, two senior administration officials told CNN.
There remains some uncertainty among US officials as to what Russia plans to do now that it has halted participation in the agreement, the officials said.
But officials in President Joe Biden’s administration remain confident that the US will know if Russia begins to build out its nuclear program.
“We’re confident in our ability to monitor these very questions,” a senior administration official said when asked if the US would know if Russia began to build up its nuclear program beyond what it has now. “New START is an important tool, but it’s not the only tool we have at our at our disposal.”
The official would not detail the tools the US has in its arsenal. Historically, the US has relied on intelligence gathering to monitor Russia’s nuclear program in addition to the information that is gathered as a part of New START.
The Biden administration’s confidence in monitoring Russia’s nuclear program mirrors the comments from State Department spokesperson Ned Price earlier.
“We haven’t seen any reason to change our nuclear posture, our strategic posture just yet, but this is something we monitor every day,” Price said on “CNN This Morning.”
About the nuclear arms treaty: The treaty limits each the US and Russia to no more than 1,550 deployed nuclear warheads and 700 deployed missiles and bombers. It also requires on-site inspections as part of compliance checks. Russia has not been in compliance with the treaty for months, because it hasn’t allowed inspections that are part of it. The inspections have now not occurred since 2020, because they were halted due to Covid-19 and never resumed.
As Russia continues with its invasion of Ukraine, Putin is doubling down on his commitment to the war. US officials are wary to say that those efforts would handicap Russia’s ability to build its nuclear program, but some see it as unlikely that they would engage in those efforts while the war in ongoing.
“I wouldn’t want to offer an assessment as whether that has overstretched them to the point that they would be precluded from some way in some way from taking steps to develop their nuclear arsenal but … they’ve got a lot of problems on their hands,” an official said. “I think they’re going to be careful not to not to bite off more than they can chew.”
