Meeting in The Hague as fears grow that west's deteriorating ties with Russia will harm nuclear co-operation
More than 50 world leaders will meet in The Hague to discuss the world's nuclear security on Monday amid fears that the west's rapidly worsening relations with Moscow over
Ukraine could hobble international efforts to contain the threat of a catastrophe as result of miscalculation, terrorism or accident.
Barack Obama will meet the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, at the two-day summit, but Vladimir Putin will stay away. Russia will be represented by foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, who will be meeting US secretary of state, John Kerry, and other western officials for the first time since Russia's annexation of Crimea.
So far, nuclear experts said, Washington and Moscow have been successful in insulating their cooperation over nuclear issues from the tensionover Ukraine. On the same day that
Obama announced sanctions on Vladimir Putin's allies and advisors, a team of Russian officials arrived in San Francisco on a surprise inspection of the US nuclear arsenal – a visit made possible by clauses aimed at increasing mutual transparency and trust in the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) the two countries signed in 2010, setting a ceiling of 1,550 for the number of strategic warheads each country can deploy.
However, advocates of nuclear disarmament say the new freeze in US-Russian relations was likely to torpedo any hopes that they had of persuading Washington and its Nato allies to withdraw the last US nuclear weapons on European soil, an estimated 150-200 B61 gravity bombs deployed in the Netherlands, Germany, Belgium, Italy and Turkey.
Campaigners have long argued that the B61 bombs are obsolete and their removal would represent a confidence-building gesture to Moscow at no strategic cost, putting pressure on Russia to make a reciprocal reduction in its arsenal of about 2,000 operational tactical warheads. But most now concede that the disarmament lobby's chance of winning that argument has gone from slim to nonexistent.
"The Ukraine crisis will only amplify voices of those against any move on the B61, from eastern Europe in particular. It will closed down that debate," said Ian Kearns, the director of the European Leadership Network, a group of former ministers pressing the case for disarmament.
"The debate over withdrawing nuclear weapons from European Nato air bases is over for the foreseeable future," George Perkovich, the director of the nuclear policy programme at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, agreed. "This will pose some dilemmas for the Dutch, Belgians, Germans and others who have parties that want them out."
Paul Ingram, the executive director of the British-American Security Information Council (BASIC) also predicted that if Nato-Russian relations continued to deteriorate, arguments by arms control advocates in the West against upgrading a new fleet of dual-capable aircraft (DCA), with the capacity to deliver B61 bombs, were also likely to fail. The modernisation of the fleet would give new life to the B61 as a weapon and represent a nuclear escalation in the heart of Europe.
"I have little doubt that for the moment at least the political opposition towards spending on updating the DCA aircraft will be weakened by this action. And that could be all it takes to tip the balance," Ingram said.
Earlier this month, the Russian deputy defence minister, Anatoly Antonov, reaffirmed Russia's intentions to stick to the agreements in the New START treated and a 2011 accord called the Vienna Document, which allow for mutual inspections of nuclear sites as a way of building confidence and transparency, lessening the chances of misunderstanding leading to catastrophic miscalculations.
However, Kearns warned that if President Putin wanted to raise the stakes in the stand-off with the west there are several ways he could bring the dispute into the nuclear sphere. He could suspend implementation of the New Start treaty, or even withdraw from it altogether, or he could move some of Moscow's stockpile of nuclear warheads into the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad, bordering Poland and Lithuania. In December, Russia said it had deployed short-range Iskander missiles, capable of delivering a nuclear warhead, into its western military districts, bordering Nato states.
Putin portrayed it as a reaction to the development of a Europe-based anti-ballistic missile system, which Washington says is intended as a shield against a potential Iranian threat. Moscow argues the missile defence system compromises Russian nuclear deterrent.
"One way or another, we will have to react to that," Putin said in December, saying his government had not yet made up its mind to move Iskander missiles to Kaliningrad.
The Nuclear Security Summit which begins in The Hague on Monday is the third in a series launched by President Obama in 2010, aimed at improving the security around the world's stockpiles of fissile material, to prevent theft by terrorism. The initiative relies heavily on cooperation between the US and Russia as the stewards of the world's two biggest arsenals.
There are estimated to be 2,000 metric tonnes of weapons-grade plutonium and highly-enriched uranium (HEU) stored at hundreds of sites in 25 countries, with widely varying security standards. In July 2012, protesters broke into a US site called Y-12, where 400 tonnes of military HEU are stored. The most serious breaches in nuclear security in recent years, in which smugglers have been arrested while trying to sell weapons-grade uranium or plutonium have taken places at volatile points along Russia's borders.
The Ukraine crisis has already disrupted global initiatives aimed at preventing the spread of weapons of mass destruction and fissile material under the auspices of the G8. The western boycott of the G8 meeting in Sochi means that cooperation on the partnership has been suspended.
