

It's been nearly a year since nuclear inspectors counted missiles in Russia as part of long-standing arms-control agreements. The Obama administration argues that they need to return ASAP, and so the Senate needs to ratify a new nuclear-arms treaty with Russia before the year ends. But the United States has ways to check out the Russian nuclear arsenal from space – that is, if you don't need to be exact.

"We have a wealth of advanced classified systems up there that can read license plates," says Stephen Schwartz, a nuclear-arms expert at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies. "But you can’t see inside buildings and they have trouble seeing through clouds."

Verification is the heart of arms control. Before the United States and Russia started signing arms-control deals in the 1970s, each launched spy planes and satellites up into the sky to get a sense of how many missiles the other guy had. And even with the advent of missile-counters, the United States continues to throw satellites into space to snoop below.

Tomorrow, Cape Canaveral will launch what the director of the National Reconnaissance Office – the intelligence agency that manages the spy satellites – calls the "largest satellite in the world" into geosynchronous orbit 22,300 miles above the earth, where it'll use "sensitive radio receivers and an antenna generally believed to span up to 100 meters (328 feet) to gather electronic intelligence for the National Security Agency," as sat-watcher Ted Molczan told Space.com.

The National Reconnaissance Office's satellites are classified. But of the 438 U.S. military, government and commercial satellites hovering overhead, "you could characterize about 90 of them as collecting some form of intelligence, whether it is imagery, signals or detecting nuclear detonations," says Brian Weeden, a former officer with the U.S. Air Force Space Command. (Globalsecurity.org has a good rundown of some of their capabilities.)

When it comes to arms control, the satellites are good for "a rough sense of scale," says Danger Room alum and arms-control wonk at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies Jeffrey Lewis. That is, "you can count brigades and you can see bunkers," and can watch heavy equipment moving in and out of nuclear-production sites.

But anything more specific requires on-the-ground inspectors. "If a treaty calls for them having 500 delivery vehicles, you'd probably know the number was 1,000 and not 10,000," Lewis continues, "but you would not be able to tell 500 from 1000." You also wouldn't know how many nuclear warheads are placed on a single missile. And you definitely can't use them to see inside a nuclear bunker or silo.

And you probably would have a time lag before you knew anything at all. Spy satellites are typically in low-earth orbit, between 300 and 2,000 kilometers above the earth, and they fly overhead an area and might not return for several days. "They can't be everywhere at once," Weeden says, "and there is competition for these assets, with the wars in Iraq, Af-Pak and everywhere else."

At the same time, while the verification provisions in the so-called New START treaty with Russia are more stringent than what's in place now, they still leave a lot to be desired when it comes to stopping illicit proliferation like the "loose nuke" problem.

Under New START, inspectors wouldn't be able to count every warhead in the U.S. or Russian arsenals, they would just be able to "see if there's a missile in the tubes or in the silo and then count the number of warheads on it," Lewis says. But that's still a progression in transparency from the predecessor treaty, which expired last December.

"If the goal is to someday count every Russian warhead," Lewis says, "New START is step in that direction."

But Baker Spring, a New START opponent from the Heritage Foundation, says it's "blame shifting of the highest order, bordering on the astounding" for the Obama administration to use the lack of inspections as a cudgel on the Senate to pass the treaty. In 2009, the Obama team didn't conclude a post-expiration bridging agreement with the Russians keeping inspectors on the ground until a new treaty could be ratified. If Obama was so concerned about verification, Baker says, he should have pushed for a verification add-on to the George W. Bush-era Moscow Treaty, which could have attracted Republican support, and then the administration "wouldn't face the problems it faces in the Senate today."

Instead, it's looking like now or never for New START. And while its inspectors won't be able to totally stop the loose-nuke fear, unless they're back on the ground under a negotiated accord, it's hard to see a path toward more-stringent verification. "You can’t blow [New START] up and then expect the Russians to negotiate an even more robust treaty," Lewis says. "The arms-control process will stop for some substantial period of time."

Update, November 19: For more, see Danger Room pal Eli Lake's new piece in the Washington Times.

Photo: Wikimedia

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