Russian Duma Debates New START

Today's top nuclear policy stories, with excerpts in bullet form.

Stories we're following today: Friday January 14, 2011.

Russian Parliament Debates Arms Pact With US - The Associated Press 

• Legislators in the lower house of Russia's parliament on Friday debated ratification of a pivotal nuclear arms pact with the United States and considered their response to an accompanying U.S. Senate resolution.
• The State Duma is to hold the ratification vote for the New START in the third and last reading on Jan. 25, after which it will go to the upper house for final approval. Prospects for the pact's passage aren't in doubt, but Russian lawmakers want to respond to the Senate resolution with a similar motion.  That resolution said the treaty shouldn't restrict U.S. plans to develop a missile defense system. In response, the Duma draft ratification bill says the treaty can only be fulfilled if emerging missile defenses don't erode the Russian nuclear deterrent.
• The Russian draft bill also emulated the Senate resolution that mentioned increased funding for the U.S. nuclear arsenal by emphasizing the need to modernize Russia's nuclear forces.
• "The treaty is fully balanced and fully conforms with Russia's national interests," Konstantin Kosachyov, the head of Duma's foreign affairs committee, told the lawmakers. "I have not the slightest doubt that the Russian Federation will treat the agreement with the highest degree of responsibility."

Iran's Nuclear Slowdown - Editorial in The Washington Post [link]

• Confirmation that the international campaign against Iran's nuclear program has made headway recently came from a seemingly unlikely source: Israel's intelligence chief. Last week, Meir Dagan, outgoing head of the Mossad intelligence agency, said that Iran could not now acquire a nuclear weapon before 2015, because of unspecified technical problems.  That was a big change from previous Israeli estimates: In 2009, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu said Iran could have a bomb by this year.
• There appear to be solid reasons to conclude that U.N. and other Western sanctions and covert operations have hindered the Iranian program.
• An ingenious computer virus called Stuxnet may have put hundreds or even thousands of centrifuges used in uranium enrichment out of action...Two Iranian nuclear scientists were killed and another wounded in the last year in assassination operations Iran has blamed on Israel...sanctions may have impeded Iran from acquiring the specialized materials, such as maraging steel and carbon fiber, that it needs to replace broken centrifuges or build the more advanced models it has claimed to develop.
• Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton emphasized this week, the changed timeline does not mean that the threat of Iran's program is over or that the urgency of confronting it is lessened..."We have time. But not a lot of time."
• The challenge for the Obama administration, Israel and other allies will be to make use of that window to force a definitive end to the Iranian bomb program. The administration still hopes negotiations, set to resume Jan. 20, will achieve that end, but most likely it will require a fundamental change in Iran's hard-line regime.

A Post-Nuclear Euro-Atlantic Security Order - Sam Nunn, Igor Ivanov and Wolfgang Ischinger in The Moscow Times [link]

• As we enter 2011, the Euro-Atlantic region is a study in strategic contrasts. Over the past 20 years, no geopolitical space has undergone as dramatic a transformation as that between the Atlantic and the Urals...Despite these positive developments, the two largest powers in the region — the United States and Russia — each still possesses thousands of nuclear weapons, accounting for more than 90 percent of the world’s nuclear inventory. Many of these weapons remain deployed or designed for use within the Euro-Atlantic region.
• Reduction and elimination of this Cold War-era nuclear infrastructure is the largest piece of unfinished business from that bygone time. The continuing existence of large strategic nuclear forces deployed on high alert, and of tactical nuclear weapons deployed in certain NATO states and Russia, creates a risk of accidental, unauthorized or mistaken use. In addition, the risk of terrorist groups acquiring these weapons is high. Therefore, security vigilance is essential.
• Perhaps the most crucial step toward realizing this vision is to redouble our efforts to resolve regional confrontations and conflicts that give rise to new nuclear powers. The great swath of states stretching from North America across Europe through Russia has a vital role to play in stabilizing an increasingly fragmented and stressed international order.
• Similarly, the Euro-Atlantic states can mobilize behind efforts to strengthen the International Atomic Energy Agency’s safeguards system, which ensures the nondiversion of peaceful nuclear programs, in order to foster cooperation on countering the threat of nuclear terrorism and to develop new mechanisms to protect jointly critical infrastructure from cyber attacks.
• This is only a partial list of what must be done if governments are serious about building a stronger, inclusive European security order, one where the roles and risks of nuclear weapons are reduced and ultimately eliminated.

China Failing to Enforce Nuclear Sanctions Against Iran, Expert Says - Indira A.R. Lakshmanan for Bloomberg [link]

• China remains “a major gap” in enforcing global sanctions on Iran, with lax oversight enabling front companies to purchase sensitive materials that can advance Iran’s pursuit of a nuclear weapons capability, a leading expert on Iran’s nuclear program said.
• “China does not implement and enforce its trade controls or its sanctions laws adequately,” David Albright, a nuclear physicist who inspected Iran’s nuclear facilities for the United Nations’ atomic energy agency in the 1990s, said yesterday at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, a Washington research institute.
• “Over and over, Iran goes there to buy things,” including high-strength maraging steel, specialty vacuum pumps, Kevlar and carbon fiber used for machinery that produces enriched uranium, said Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security in Washington.
• The comments come just ahead of Chinese President Hu Jintao’s state visit to Washington next week. U.S.-Chinese cooperation in enforcing sanctions and slowing Iran’s progress in developing a nuclear weapons capability will be an important topic in the leaders’ talks, White House officials said.

Iran's Nuclear Sites Tour Proposal Flounders - Michael Martina and Steve Gutterman for Reuters [link]

• Iran's proposal for a tour of its nuclear sites floundered on Thursday after China effectively rejected the invitation and Russia cautioned such a trip could never replace U.N. inspections or talks between Tehran and world powers.
• China, ahead of President Hu Jintao's state visit to the United States next week, said it would be "difficult" for its ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna to go on the proposed Jan 15-16 tour.  Just hours later, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told reporters in Moscow that such a visit could never replace regular inspections from the IAEA or talks with major powers on Iran's disputed nuclear program, echoing the EU position.
• The European Union has turned down Iran's offer to allow selected ambassadors accredited to the U.N. nuclear watchdog to visit two nuclear installations while snubbing those from the United States, Britain, France and Germany.
• Ali Asghar Soltanieh, Iran's envoy to the IAEA, said the nuclear tour would go ahead as planned and that he had seen no official response from either China or Russia. Soltanieh said other ambassadors -- envoys from countries such as Egypt, Cuba, Venezuela and Syria -- would leave Vienna on Friday. "Yes, we will definitely go tomorrow, they have all confirmed," he told Reuters.
• Some diplomats say the Iranian tour proposal appears to be a negotiating ploy designed to drive a wedge between the major powers, while buying time to keep stockpiling enriched uranium.  But analysts said that if that was the aim, it had failed.  "If that is what they were hoping to do, and probably they were, yes, it has failed," said David Hartwell, IHS Jane's Middle East and North Africa.