"We write to urge the State Department to convene the next U.S.-Russia Strategic Dialogue as soon as possible. A U.S.-Russia Strategic Dialogue is more urgent following President Putin's public address on March 1st when he referred to several new nuclear weapons Russia is reportedly developing including a cruise missile and a nuclear underwater drone, which are not currently limited by the New START treaty, and would be destabilizing if deployed."
Specifically, they proposed that the new Russian weapons systems be brought into the SALT treaty, which they urged him to extend. This would ensure strategic stability.
I quote from their closing paragraph:
"There is no guarantee that we can make progress with Russia on these issues. However, even at the height of Cold War tensions, the United States and the Soviet Union were able to engage on matters of strategic stability. Leaders from both countries believed, as we should today, that the incredible destructive force of nuclear weapons is reason enough to make any and all efforts to lessen the chance that they can never be used again."
This letter by four U.S. Senators published on the Senate website of one was picked up by the agency RIA Novosti, RBK and Tass within hours of initial posting, from where it went into mainstream Russian news. However, mainstream U.S. and other Western media did not give a single line of coverage to it and it disappeared in days as if down a black hole.
However, all traces of nervousness in official Washington did not end there. Later in the month, following the victory of Vladimir Putin in the elections which took place on the 18th , The New York Times carried on page one a report of Donald Trump's remarks about his phone call to congratulate his Russian counterpart:
"We had a very good call," Mr. Trump told reporters. "We will probably be meeting in the not-to-distant future to discuss the arms race, which is getting out of control."
Yet, even the words of a president led to nothing, and the issue of Russia's possibly having achieved strategic parity with the United States and reinstated Mutually Assured Destruction was left without public discussion in Washington. The President called for and Congress reacted positively to raising the defense budget and in particular to funding a massively expensive modernization of the country's nuclear weapons potential.
A year later, in his February 2019 State of the Nation address Vladimir Putin returned to the question of Russia's new strategic arms and what they meant for bilateral relations with the United States. As he said explicitly now, the country's new hypersonic weapon systems would enable Russia to reach targeted American cities within the same 10-12 minutes that the Americans would enjoy by lobbing their slower missiles at Moscow from perches in Poland and Romania. Still the United States did not react. America was very busy with its domestic political wars.
In 2020, Russia, the United States and the world at large were wholly absorbed in dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic. However, in 2021 the Kremlin has repeatedly called attention to those of its most advanced weapons that are now integrated into its armed forces and are fully operational. As Vladimir Putin remarked in an address to one professional organization a week ago that was covered extensively on state television's evening news, the firings of its newest missiles have been followed closely by American intelligence. With more than a dollop of contempt for American pigheaded self-indulgence and denial of reality, Putin said that the Russians stood ready to share their telemetric recordings with the United States so that they could see better what they were now up against.
The caustic disdain for Russia's ill-wishers implicit in that statement is fully symptomatic of the latest hard line that we see in Russian foreign policy ever since Biden assumed the presidency. Putin is not coddling Joe the way he did Donald. The Kremlin has no illusions about the Cold War mentality of its American and of its European adversaries, and it is responding in kind. This pertains to diplomatic expulsions, to economic and personal sanctions, to whatever slings and arrows come its way.
In recent weeks, we have seen how every affront to Russian national pride and to international diplomatic norms has been met by a Russian response that went one step further against "unfriendly states," of which the United States is now listed officially.
In this highly charged atmosphere, we may assume that sober reports on Russian military capabilities have been fed to the President by senior Pentagon officials. While politicians have engaged in their blather, for many weeks these military men in the Joint Chiefs of Staff have been engaging their counterpart in the Russian military establishment, General Gerasimov, to keep the peace, avoid misunderstandings where U.S. and Russian forces act in close proximity and to maintain "stability." It is a safe bet that their concerns are what is driving the agenda for the summit, and it is a safe bet that the Biden-Putin meeting will end in some agreement on procedures for negotiating a broader and deeper arms control treaty. Whatever else happens at the summit in Geneva will be cherries on the cake.
References:
Click Here - lengthy analysis of the defense part of Vladimir Putin's speech to the bicameral Russian legislature and of the reasons for the collapse of U.S. intelligence reporting on Russia over several decades
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
