Good, but not great

After months of delay, the US and Russia have finally signed a new START treaty limiting both sides to 1,550 deployed nuclear weapons. In the mid-1980s, the two superpowers had roughly 60,000 warheads pointed at each other, so it would seem that this treaty is a real and tangible boost to the cause of nuclear disarmament. In reality, START changes little.
 

Not the likelihood or destructive power of a hypothetical war between Russia and America anyway, but things have changed for Dmitry Medvedev and Barack Obama. Both Presidents have benefited politically from this treaty in strikingly similar ways.
 

Assuming Medvedev can get ratification from the Duma, START will be the first major policy he has realised independently from Vladimir Putin, showing that he may not be as much of a puppet as had previously been suspected. The Russian security establishment, or Siloviki, will not necessarily be happy with this treaty. The exact wording has yet to be finalised, but it looks likely that no link between START and American missile bases in Eastern Europe will be explicitly mentioned. In recent months, every time Medvedev said anything positive about how negotiations were going, Putin made a point of publicly stating that the possibility of a missile shield based in Romania and Bulgaria would be a big obstacle, and more recently Boris Gryzlov, a close ally of Putin and speaker of the Duma said that ratification would be dependent on such a link being made.
 

Up against such opposition, Medvedev would be looking at a major victory if he can sign this treaty into law in Prague this April. If he is considering running against Putin for the Presidency in 2012, then this is the opening shot of that competition. The treaty presents almost identical benefits and problems to Obama.
The ‘reset’ of relations with Russia had, up until now, been a bit of a joke. Nothing really happened and like practically every other major platform of Obama’s presidency until this month, there was no actual substance behind the oratory and charisma. Obama isn’t stupid though, and he realised that without some policy victories to point to, the Democrats would be absolutely hammered in November’s elections. Now he can add this to the Healthcare Reform Bill on his list of changes.
 

Undoubtedly, relations between Russia and the US are far better now than the Bush era. The two nations still have fundamentally opposed interests, and Moscow isn’t going to stop its drive to thwart the US at almost every turn because of a piece of paper, but at least some common ground has been found. Obama can legitimately say his negotiations have paid off. Ratification in the Senate isn’t a certainty either, but he will have an easier time of it than Medvedev. Most people would rather argue with Palin than Putin.
 

The timing is great too; now the US can keep a somewhat straight face when it says Iran shouldn’t build nuclear weapons at the Nuclear Security Summit in Washington in a fortnight. Few people familiar with US or Russian foreign policy will say they have the moral high ground while dealing with anyone, but this does give Obama some tenuous moral authority to lecture Iran, in the eyes of some people at least.
There are also fringe benefits for both sides. Missile batteries aren’t cheap to run (more of an issue for the Kremlin than the White House), so more money can be diverted into practical military applications like counter-terrorism units, modernisation of conventional forces, etc.
 

In reality though, 1,550 deployed nuclear warheads is more than enough to create the nightmarish nuclear holocaust that haunted the world in the early 1980s. Even with their reduced arsenals, both sides retain the ability to absolutely and utterly destroy each other and every other state on Earth several times over. Such a scenario is extremely unlikely, but in all likelihood it will never go away completely. The value in this treaty is political and diplomatic, not military; it matters little whether a country gets hit by 1,000 or 40,000 nuclear warheads.