MOSCOW — Saying relations with the United States have deteriorated in a “radically changed environment,” President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia
withdrew Monday from a landmark nuclear
security agreement, in a
troubling sign that the countries’ cooperation in a range of nuclear
areas could be threatened.
The treaty, on the disposal of plutonium, the material used in some nuclear weapons, was concluded in 2000 as one of the framework disarmament deals of the early post-Cold War period.
It
required Russia and the United States to destroy military stockpiles of
plutonium, a deal that represented another encouraging step away from
nuclear doomsday and an insurance policy against the materials falling
into the hands of terrorists or rogue states.
The
deal has no bearing on the numbers of nuclear weapons deployed by
Russia or the United States. Instead, it concerns 34 tons of plutonium
in storage in each country that might go into a future arsenal, none of
which has yet undergone verifiable disposal.
Still,
the abrogation signals that the nuclear agreements that accompanied the
breakup of the Soviet Union and were to lead the world back from the
hair-trigger brink of atomic conflict could be open to revision, as
Russia’s relations with the West sour on a range of disputes today,
including Syria and Ukraine and the Kremlin’s interference in the
domestic politics of Western democracies.
The Kremlin had signaled previously that it planned to cut back on mutual efforts with the United States to secure nuclear material on Russian territory.
Times
have changed, Mr. Putin wrote in the decree signed on Monday. “The
threat to strategic stability posed by the hostile actions of the U.S.
against Russia, and the inability of the U.S. to deliver on the
obligation to dispose of excessive weapons plutonium under international
treaties” forced Russia’s hand, he wrote.
Josh
Earnest, the White House press secretary, said the administration was
disappointed by the Russian decision since “both leaders in Russia and
the United States have made nonproliferation a priority.”
“We’ve
also been quite disappointed by a range of Russian decisions both in
Syria and inside of Ukraine,” Mr. Earnest said, adding that the decision
on the plutonium deal was part of a problematic pattern.
Russia
will withdraw from the original pact and subsequent amendments, the
decree says, meaning that the country will no longer be treaty-bound to
destroy its plutonium stockpiles. But the decree also offers an
assurance, backed by no bilateral agreement, that the plutonium will not
be used for military purposes.
“These
agreements were designed to limit and circumscribe the future chances
of getting back into a competition over nuclear arms,” James Collins, an
associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said in a telephone interview. “It was an important step in defusing the strategic nuclear arms race.”
Mr.
Collins, who was the United States’ ambassador to Russia when the
agreement was signed, called the abrogation a “strange move,” given the
extraordinary danger, not least to Russians, should plutonium fall into
terrorist hands. He added that it was “in my understanding the first
time they have withdrawn from a specific nuclear agreement,”
highlighting the slide in relations lately.
Russia
and the United States had reaffirmed the plutonium disposal agreement
in 2009, as President Obama pursued the “reset” policy with Dmitri A.
Medvedev, then the Russian president.
Russia
had viewed the agreement as rendering disarmament irreversible by
destroying the fissile materials accumulated during the Cold War. In
this light, the Russians had interpreted the treaty as requiring that
the plutonium be irreversibly transformed into nonexplosive materials by
using it in civilian nuclear power plants as a type of fuel, called
mixed oxide fuel, or mox. Russia is pressing ahead with that.
But
glitches and cost overruns in the mox plant at Savannah River, S.C.,
delayed the American program. This year, Mr. Obama proposed canceling
the program in the 2017 budget and instead sending the plutonium for
long-term storage at a nuclear waste site in Carlsbad, N.M.
The
State Department has said the move complies with the treaty, but the
Russians have said it does not, as Mr. Putin reaffirmed on Monday.
As
ties with the West have frayed under Mr. Putin, analysts in Moscow have
floated the prospect of a Russian pullback from an array of disarmament
agreements dating from a period of greater friendliness. Two years ago,
for example, the Obama administration accused Russia of violating another bedrock security agreement by testing a prohibited ground-launched cruise missile.
In
Mr. Putin’s second term in office, Russia pulled out of a treaty
governing conventional forces in Europe in retaliation for the Bush
administration’s abrogation of the antiballistic missile treaty that
prohibited missile defense systems.
Russia
and the United States last signed a nuclear disarmament accord in 2009,
when both sides agreed to a new limit on delivery vehicles such as
bombers or cruise missiles of 500 to 1,100, and a limit on deployed
warheads as low as 1,500.
In
the chaos surrounding the end of the Cold War, the United States
embarked on a sweeping program to secure the former Soviet Union’s
nuclear arsenal and fissile materials by returning them to Russia from
former Soviet states and upgrading security at storage areas.
The
Soviet nuclear program was so entwined with the economy and society
that slowing the Cold War military machine took years and cost United
States taxpayers billions of dollars.
In
several cities, specialized nuclear reactors, for example, continued to
pump out plutonium because they were also used to heat water for
residential use in showers and space heating in nearby towns.
A
1993 agreement allowed Russia to sell blended-down uranium bomb cores
to American utilities for use as fuel rods in civilian power plants, in a
swords-to-plowshares program called Megatons to Megawatts. This program
generated about 10 percent of all electricity
in the United States for 20 years, until 2013. The plutonium program,
while smaller, held the potential to also yield energy for civilian
electrical networks.
It
seems unlikely that the two countries will resume cooperation on
plutonium soon. The Kremlin first wants the removal of all economic
sanctions and compensation for the damage they have caused; the repeal
of the Magnitsky Act,
which allows Americans to freeze the assets of Russian officials
thought to have been involved with human rights violations; and
reductions in the American military presence in countries that joined
NATO after Sept. 1, 2000.
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