You thought last year's ratification of a treaty with Russia to cut nuclear weapons was difficult? Just try getting a follow-up through the Kremlin – and the Senate, or even the Pentagon. President Obama's nuke-free-world vision looks further out of focus.

The New START treaty sets a limit of 1,550 warheads and 800 launchers for the U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals. Except those caps are for the major bombs, the ones that can incinerate cities halfway around the world. The treaty wasn't designed to curb the smaller, artillery-shell-ready nukes that each side possesses for possible use in a land war. Russian officials sound like they're fine with keeping it that way.

The Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, said nyet Thursday to early U.S. signals for negotiating away so-called tactical nuclear weapons. Before any accord on cutting tactical nukes, Lavrov announced, the New START levels of strategic weapons has to be reached, which will take years.

That's just for starters, so to speak. According to The Wall Street Journal, Lavrov wants other nuclear powers drawn into follow-on negotiations – particularly China, whose military isn't particularly comfortable with its American counterpart. Cutting against Pentagon priorities, Lavrov said new talks also "must include weapons in space, strategic missiles equipped with conventional explosives, and other weapons."

That makes a Pentagon gambit to get New START through the Senate an obstacle for additional weapons cuts. Last year, to reassure hawkish senators that the treaty wouldn't hinder the military's ability to hit a target anywhere around the world, Defense Secretary Robert Gates boosted a program called Prompt Global Strike, which outfits intercontinental ballistic missiles with subnuclear conventional warheads. Just last week, he reiterated his intention to fund "conventional deep-strike capabilities" while he rejiggered the Pentagon budget.

That was risky enough strategically, because a conventionally armed ICBM looks the same on radar as a nuclear-armed one. But now it's a potential roadblock for Obama's nuke-free agenda. And one that anyone could have seen coming: Lavrov warned last April that "world states will hardly accept a situation in which nuclear weapons disappear, but weapons that are no less destabilizing emerge in the hands of certain members of the international community."

Now to learn whether Prompt Global Strike was a Pentagon gambling chip directed at Congress (which, in fairness, didn't fund the program during its Bush-era origins). Republican senators like Jim Risch expressed a desire to cut tactical nukes during last month's New START debate, but that might have just been their own gambit to obstruct the treaty.

No one's yet tested whether there's any desire in the Senate to trade away a long-range missile program for curbing the Russians' small nukes. And that overlooks the broader question of whether Obama can persuade the Senate on any additional nuke-treaty, after the difficulties in passing New START.

Lavrov may just be setting his opening stakes high, like any good negotiator. But it's no secret why the tactical weapons are dear to Russia: The Russians have fallen far behind in their conventional military capabilities, and so its 2,000-or-so deployed tactical nukes are a big part of its deterrent. U.S. intelligence believes Russia recently moved many of those weapons closer to NATO's borders.

Does the Obama administration have a strategy to get Russia to give those up? And can it coax all the other different stakeholders – China, the military, the Senate – that it's safe to go along?

Image: U.S. Army

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