NATO Must Decide on Removing U.S. Tactical Nukes, Albright Says
May 21, 2010

The decision to withdraw U.S. tactical nuclear weapons from Europe or reduce the size of the arsenal should be made by the NATO alliance as a whole in consultation with Russia, former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright told lawmakers here yesterday (see GSN, May 17).

A draft version of the alliance's new mission statement released Monday recommends keeping an estimated 200 U.S. air-dropped gravity bombs in a half-dozen military bases throughout Europe, despite recent calls by Germany, Belgium and other states to have them removed.

The warheads were fielded during the Cold War as a hedge against Moscow's nuclear arsenal. Experts estimate that Russia maintains roughly 2,000 deployed tactical nuclear weapons within its territory.

"It's very clear that NATO continues to rely on conventional and nuclear weapons; that is part of the deterrent posture," Albright, who chaired the NATO Strategic Concept Expert Group that prepared the mission statement, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Therefore, the 13-member panel concluded that "as long as nuclear weapons remain a part of the system that the alliance has to have a nuclear component," she said.

The topic produced some of the team's "livelier" discussions, according to Albright.

The draft consensus report -- which will be crafted into a final document by NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen in time for the next alliance summit in Lisbon, Portugal, in November -- also recommends the 28- nation body possess a strong defense against potential ballistic missile attacks from Iran.

Albright said panel members were aware that some in the international community believe the United States should make a unilateral decision to remove its tactical nuclear weapons from Europe as the bombs no longer serve a military purpose and are antithetical to U.S President Barack Obama's vision of global nuclear disarmament.

"We came up with the idea that there be, in fact, talks and that [NATO's] Special Consultative Groups on Arms Control be re-established in order to be able to have this kind of a dialogue," she told lawmakers, referring to the group that has dealt with nuclear force issues in the past.

"I was very glad that we were able to get that kind of a consensus agreement," Albright added.

The tactical weapons issue also came up in an earlier committee meeting this week. Republican members of the panel pressed the Obama administration's national security team to explain why a new nuclear arms control deal with Russia did nothing to cut such weapons.

"Did we miss an opportunity to get them to do some things tactically that would have made their neighbors feel slightly more safe?" Senator Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) asked Tuesday during a hearing on the successor agreement to the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty.

The "New START" pact addresses only strategic nuclear weapons, requiring the former Cold War adversaries to lower their respective arsenals to 1,550 deployed warheads and 700 fielded delivery vehicles, with another 100 held in reserve.

The treaty must be ratified by lawmakers in Moscow and Washington before entering into force. That would require support from at least 67 senators.

The proposed treaty "isn't everything that everybody could have wanted," according to Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. "Certainly we're very aware of the tactical nuclear weapons that Russia has. That has been discussed with them in terms of the future."

Defense Secretary Robert Gates acknowledged that Eastern European states have concerns about Russia's tactical nuclear weapons, but said those arms were not addressed in negotiations on the new arms control pact.

The Kremlin is "not willing to negotiate on tactical nukes, and the history of these arms control agreements were always on strategic weapons," Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told the committee. "But we have said that we want to go back and begin to talk to them about tactical nukes. We would like to as soon as we can get this ratified, with all hope that the Senate will so advise and consent. We want to do that."

Clinton said she, Gates and Mullen had made it clear to alliance members that the decision to withdraw the tactical weapons must be made multilaterally and with Russian input.