The “Reset” after Five Years

January 3, 2014 | Edited by Benjamin Loehrke, Lauren Mladenka and Geoff Wilson

Looking back at the “reset” - Five years ago, the Obama administration set out to “reset” the U.S.-Russia relationship. After initial successes, like the New START treaty, the relationship has since soured as Putin’s Russia took a more nationalist turn and the two countries disagreed over policies in the Middle East. Will Englund of The Washington Post looks back at the reset, where it faltered and the road ahead.

--”The two countries do, in fact, continue to work together on Afghanistan, on space travel, on nuclear security and terrorism, to some extent on Iran and recently even on Syria. Yet there is no agenda on nuclear arms, or Europe’s future or Asia’s, or global energy policy or the Arctic.” Officials acknowledged that the relationship is difficult, “but argued that engaging with Moscow is better than the alternative,” writes Englund.

--”The United States and Russia, in any case, are heading in separate directions — or wish they could. The coming year brings a slew of challenges that will force the two nations to engage, even if at arm’s length and with a palpable lack of enthusiasm.” Full story here. http://wapo.st/1cNsCDB

Timeline - “High and low points in Obama’s effort to ‘reset’ U.S.-Russian relations”from The Washington Post. http://wapo.st/1gwrlRS

Destroying Syria’s chem weapons - “Long before forces loyal to Bashar al-Assad launched a massive chemical weapons strike that nearly dragged the U.S. into Syria's civil war, the American government was trying to figure out a way to neutralize Assad's stockpile of nerve gas and other illicit weapons,” writes Dan Lamothe for Foreign Policy. Amongst a long list of potential technical and logistical problems facing such an effort, was the fact that, “no country seemed inclined to allow the work to be done on its own soil.”

--”The world is about to see a possible solution: In the next few weeks, the United States expects to deploy the 648-foot, 22,000-ton MV Cape Ray with technology aboard that can break down the chemical agents used to make sarin and mustard gases. The steel-gray ship's personnel will pick up the chemicals in a port somewhere in the Mediterranean Sea… and then process them in international waters, where there are far fewer diplomatic and political issues than doing the work on land.” The chemical weapons will be neutralized by new field deployable hydrolysis systems aboard the Cape Ray by, “heating and mixing with water, sodium hydroxide and sodium hypochlorite to break down the chemical weapons into waste that is about as hazardous as many household cleaners.” Full story here. http://atfp.co/1g5Oudf

Syrian chemical weapons destruction - Arms control expert Daryl Kimball talks with MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow about the process of destroying Syria’s 700 tons of chemical weapons. Interview here. http://on.msnbc.com/1hlPbTx

Tweet - @MarkDStrauss: Recently declassified satellite photographs of South African nuclear test site, 1977: http://bit.ly/1dZRG8C

UPF in trouble - The NNSA may ultimately be forced to modify its plans for the Uranium Processing Facility in Tennessee due to rising costs, reports Global Security Newswire. The agency estimates, “the future site's maximum estimated cost at $6.5 billion, a nearly six-fold increase from the facility's anticipated price tag from 2004,” though project costs could reach as much as $19 billion. However, “NNSA officials would not revise their own expense projection until they ‘actually have some confidence in what the cost will be.’” Full story here. http://bit.ly/KmZUiT

Small war, global catastrophe - ”Even a ‘limited’ nuclear war would be a global disaster. A conflict confined to one region of the world, as might occur between India and Pakistan, involving just 100 Hiroshima sized bombs, less than 0.5 percent of the world’s nuclear arsenals, would cause worldwide climate disruption…Temperatures across the planet would fall, precipitation would decline and crops would fail… A catastrophe of this magnitude is unprecedented in human history,” writes Ira Helfand for The Republican.

--”It is profoundly unrealistic to assume that we can continue to maintain enormous arsenals of nuclear weapons and somehow they will never be used. And we now know that even a very limited use of these weapons will be a catastrophe for us all.” Read the full story here. http://bit.ly/19SgMqD

Gorby and the Iron Lady - “Britain shed light on Mikhail Gorbachev's audacious bid to save the ailing Soviet Union on Friday, publishing previously secret documents showing his attempt to forge better ties with the West during the depths of the Cold War,” writes Christine Murray for Reuters.

--Amid talks over the superpowers’ nuclear arsenals, “Gorbachev's 1984 visit [to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher] helped change the course of the Cold War by convincing the ‘Iron Lady’ and her ally, U.S. President Ronald Reagan, that the Soviet Union might soon be led by a man with whom the West could do business.” Read the full article here. http://reut.rs/1g5LAVK

Events:

--Joseph Cirincione, Ploughshares Fund, book discussion of Nuclear Nightmares: Securing the World Before It Is Too Late. January 4th @ 6:00 pm, at Politics and Prose in Washington DC. http://bit.ly/IPJMW5

--"The Trillion Dollar Nuclear Triad: US Strategic Nuclear Modernization over the Next Thirty Years." Discussion with Jeffrey Lewis and Jon Wolfsthal at the Monterey Institute’s Center for Nonproliferation Studies. Jan. 7th from 1:00-2:30. RSVP by email to CNSDC@MIIS.edu