Russian Opinion on START

The Moscow Times

A Cold War Treaty

"But at the end of the day, all of this grandstanding and political maneuvering is meaningless for two reasons: First, Russia is not able to maintain nuclear parity with the United States, and, second, there is no compelling security reason to be concerned about this fact. While the United States will be truly disarming its number of delivery vehicles in accordance with the New START limits — from 1,188 to 700 — Russia, which has only about 600 delivery vehicles today, falls below the lower treaty ceiling from the very beginning. What’s worse, by 2017, the year that New START mandates that all nuclear arms cuts must be completed, Russia’s number of strategic delivery vehicles will decrease even further to roughly 390. This is because many of Russia’s 600 strategic delivery vehicles were produced in the 1970s and 1980s and will expire in the next seven years. Even as the country will be forced to retire roughly 40 obsolete missiles a year, it will be able to produce only 10 new ones. Thus, as Washington will disarm to 700 strategic vehicles, Moscow will disarm from 600 to below 400."

http://www.themoscowtimes.com/opinion/article/a-cold-war-treaty/428502.html