On Nuclear Cuts, a Split Over Whether Senate Backing Is Needed

WASHINGTON â€" Secretary of State John Kerry called Senator Bob Corker on Tuesday to discuss President Obama’s renewed drive for arms control. On that much, at least, the two agree. Exactly what was said, however, has quickly become a point of contention.

Mr. Corker, a Tennessee Republican and the ranking minority member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, issued a statement Wednesday warning against “unilateral disarmament” just minutes after Mr. Obama’s speech in Berlin proposing new nuclear arms cuts by the United States and Russia.

Any future cuts in the nuclear arsenal, Mr. Corker added, should be made only in the form of a treaty thatwould require Senate approval for ratification. The senator added that Mr. Kerry had already called “and assured him that any further reductions would occur in bilateral treaty negotiations subject to the advice and consent of the Senate.”

Not so, according to Kerry.

“The secretary told Senator Corker that the SFRC,” the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, “would be consulted as we moved forward into discussions with the Russian Federation, but did not indicate that the administration had decided to codify any results in a treaty,” a State Department official said by e-mail.

The differing accounts of their conversation point to a potential rupture at home before any agreement with Russia has even been reached. Mr. Obama said in his speech that he would seek “negotiated cuts” with Moscow paring their mutual nuclear arsenals by one third, down to about 1,000 deployed strategic warheads each, but he did not say whether he would enshrine suc! h cuts in a treaty. Wary of Republican resistance to a new treaty, administration officials are holding out the possibility of each country committing to reciprocal cuts without a binding treaty.

The New Start treaty signed by Mr. Obama and Russia and approved by the Senate in 2010 set a ceiling of 1,550 deployed warheads for each country but administration officials now argue that nothing prevents the president from cutting further on his own authority as commander in chief. Assuming Russia goes along, these additional cuts could still be verified by the mutual inspection regime put in place by the New Start treaty, officials note.

There is precedent of sorts for such a move. In 1991, the first President George Bush announced he would unilaterally withdraw almost all U.S. tactcal nuclear weapons from Europe and Asia, halt development of two new strategic weapons and take off alert status Minuteman II ballistic missiles already scheduled to be dismantled. Mikhail Gorbachev, president of the dying Soviet Union, responded soon afterward with a comparable commitment to withdraw tactical weapons from Eastern Europe.

Still, in the nuclear age, most arms cuts have been made with the force of a treaty and the consent of the Senate, where a two-thirds vote is required for approval. President George W. Bush tried following his father’s example in 2001 by announcing that he would reduce the American strategic arsenal to between 1,700 and 2,200 deployed warheads. President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia responded with a similar pledge. But Mr. Putin later insisted on a treaty and Mr. Bush agreed, signing the Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty in 2002.

Republicans wasted little time Wednesday asserting the prerogatives of the Senate and pressing Mr. Obama to seek their permission before making any arms reductions. “Important decisions such as this should only be made after consultation with the Senate,” said Senator Orrin G. Hatch of Utah.

Some Republicans made clear they wanted a role because they oppose further cuts. A group of 10 “missile state” Republicans, representing Midwestern and Western states where intercontinental ballistic missiles are based, issued statements warning against cuts, as much out of home-state interests as national security concerns.

Another group of two dozen Republican senators, led by Marco Rubio of Florida and including many of the missile-state lawmakers, sent a letter to Mr. Kerry insisting on a treaty for them to consider.

“It is our view that any further reductions in the U.S. nuclear arsenal should only be conducted through a treaty subject to the advice and consent of the Senate,” they wrote. “This view is consistent with past practice and has broad! bipartis! an support, as you know from your service in the Senate.”

The Republicans cited some key allies for their view. Among them was Leon E. Panetta, Mr. Obama’s second defense secretary, who testified in 2012 that nuclear arms reductions “at least in this administration have only been made as part of the Start process and not outside of that process, and I would expect that that would be the same in the future.”

And they noted that in 2002 a Democratic senator named Joseph R. Biden Jr. co-authored a letter to the younger Mr. Bush’s secretary of state pointing out that with rare exception arms control agreements had been submitted t the Senate for consideration.

“We see no reason whatsoever to alter this practice,” the letter said.