The Foreign Service Journal, May 2020

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | MAY 2020 31 My bottom line regarding this difficult decision is that the United States had good reason to withdraw from the INF Treaty, and it had the support of U.S. allies. A treaty that is being hol- lowed out from the inside is no longer in the U.S. national secu- rity interest, which must be the litmus test for any nuclear arms control treaty. On Strategic Arms Reduction Finally, it is important to get some perspective on strategic arms reduction—the first Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START), the Moscow Treaty (the Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty, or SORT) and the New START Treaty. I worked on both START and New START, in 1990 and 1991 as a lowly State Department repre- sentative and in 2009 and 2010 as chief negotiator. The basic recipe for the success of both treaties has been that both sides have used them to reduce and eliminate strategic nuclear delivery vehicles and launchers, and to take warheads out of deployment. We have been certain of that because of the monitoring and verification provisions of both treaties—the on-site inspections, yes, but also the use of unhampered national technical means of verification (e.g., national satellites, radar), exchanges of data and telemetry information, notifications, and demonstrations and exhibitions, which help when compliance problems arise. This is Ronald Rea- gan’s “trust but verify” adage in action. START, which entered into force in 1994, brought the number of deployed warheads down from 12,000 to 6,000 on each side. SORT, which entered into force in 2003 and was implemented while START continued in force, brought the numbers of deployed warheads down to approximately 2,200. New START, which entered into force in 2015, brought the numbers down to 1,550 on each side. So there has been real strategic nuclear arms reduction through this series of treaties. Note, however, that these treaties focus on the elimination of delivery vehicles (e.g., missiles) and launchers (e.g., submarine tubes) because they can easily be seen by national technical means and counted as they are destroyed. Once the warheads are off the delivery vehicles they go into storage and so become “non-deployed,” no longer counted under treaty limits. The holy