Russia’s decision for the 2016 Nuclear Security Summit (NSS) is an alarming sign that U.S.-Russia tensions over Ukraine and other issues may disrupt their nuclear security partnership. At best, the Russian decision may simply reflect an attempt to signal irritation at the U.S. by disrupting one of Washington’s highest priorities, that of countering nuclear terrorism. At worst, it may represent a decision to boycott the entire NSS process simply because the United States is hosting it.
In either case, the Russian decision is extremely counterproductive. In the short term, it risks sabotaging the tacit decision of both sides to continue cooperating, despite the current tensions, on critical nonproliferation issues, ranging from completing the removal and destruction of Syria’s chemical weapons stocks to finalizing an Iranian nuclear deal and removing dangerous stocks of Cold War-era nuclear material. Indeed, bilateral cooperation in this latter realm contributed to removing the remaining fissile material from Ukraine in 2012, thereby depriving that country of an easy near-term option for developing nuclear weapons and limiting the risks and stakes of the current crisis there.
The conflict between Russia and the West over Ukraine did not seem to harm the in The Hague, nor has it caused Moscow to break with the West in nuclear negotiations with Iran. It did not prevent recent successes in U.S.-Russian nonproliferation projects with such countries as Kazakhstan and Poland. Similar scenarios requiring urgent cooperation on nuclear nonproliferation might occur in the future due to regime changes or national emergencies elsewhere, such as the demise of North Korea’s dysfunctional Communist regime or a threatened terrorist seizure of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons.
Given Russia and the United States’ historically pre-eminent roles in supplying global nuclear materials and technologies, their large stockpiles of nuclear materials and weapons, and their leadership in many WMD-related areas, their nonproliferation collaboration is especially important for countering nuclear threats from terrorists and other nonstate actors.
Yet the Ukraine crisis has damaged the possibility of U.S.-Russia cooperation in this realm and reduced the likelihood of overcoming longstanding differences in Russian and U.S. nonproliferation priorities. For example, there is now little hope of intensifying bilateral threat reduction cooperation in other countries in Russia has expired.
Russian policymakers agree with their American counterparts that recent developments have made it more likely that countries might try to seek nuclear weapons to bolster their security from foreign attack. Yet Russia’s decision to boycott the NSS preparatory meeting compounds the problem by encouraging hopes among aspiring nuclear weapons states that the great powers will prove unable to unite, within the Security Council and elsewhere, to stop them.
Furthermore, next year’s Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) Review Conference looks to be more contentious than the 2010 session due to Ukraine as well as other issues, such as the stalemated U.S.-Russia nuclear arms control talks, the failure to convene a planned conference on making the Middle East a WMD-free region and the halting progress of the Iran nuclear negotiations.
Of course, the main threats to the nuclear nonproliferation regime still come from Iran and North Korea. The tensions between Russia and the West over Ukraine may make Tehran and Pyongyang more comfortable resisting U.S.-led pressure to eschew nuclear weapons options.
A Russian decision to cease supporting the NSS also augments the danger of nuclear terrorism. Russia is one of the most important international nuclear security players. Along with the United States, Russia possesses more nuclear material than any other country. Its stocks appear to be the source of many of the world’s reported nuclear trafficking incidents. Russia has also already experienced nuclear terrorism firsthand: On Nov. 23, 1995, Chechen separatists —a dynamite bomb designed to spew cesium-137 upon detonation—in Moscow’s Ismailovsky Park. The threat of radiological or nuclear terrorism against Russia persists; such fears arose during this winter’s Sochi Olympics. U.S.-Russia collaboration is required to counter it.
Whatever its other flaws, the NSS process has raised the level of global nuclear security. The inaugural NSS in 2010 focused on enhancing the security of fissile material—highly enriched uranium and plutonium—that could be used directly to manufacture a nuclear bomb. The second and third summits devoted greater attention to securing more-widely available sources for a so-called dirty bomb, such as cobalt-60, strontium-90 and cesium-137.
In addition to addressing a growing range of subjects, the summits have seen more countries participating and more associated events, such as industry and expert meetings at the time of the summits. Moreover, each NSS has produced a consensus communique and a work plan, with increasing numbers of individual states and groups of countries offering supplementary voluntary contributions to enhancing nuclear security.
In the long term, a Russian decision to boycott the few planning sessions for the 2016 nuclear security summit—let alone the conference itself, the last one currently scheduled—risks exacerbating the current challenge of determining how to ensure nuclear materials security if the summit process ends as scheduled in 2016. The post-Ukraine decision to suspend the G-8 summit format has deprived that group’s WMD nonproliferation mechanism, officially known as the Global Partnership Against the Spread of Weapons and Materials of Mass Destruction, of critical management, compounding the complications created by last year’s weakening of the U.S.-Russia Cooperative Threat Reduction program. Some Russian support will be needed to create an effective follow-on architecture in order to ensure that the International Atomic Energy Agency and other institutions are capable of carrying on important nuclear security work even in the absence of regular heads-of-state summits.
Russia has more effective ways of expressing its displeasure at U.S. policies than endangering a major institution in an area of obviously shared interest, namely averting nuclear terrorism. So far, all sides have managed to prevent their differences over the Ukraine crisis from interfering with cooperation in other critical areas. That Russia has chosen to make nuclear security partnership a victim of that crisis is a most alarming development.
__The author would like to thank the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation for supporting his nonproliferation research__