PIR Center

With the New START treaty extension, Moscow and Washington are on course for new arms control negotiations. The unprecedented breadth of the strategic bilateral agenda issues means that any future talks would entail extensive linkages and trade-off s in various spheres. The article explores two of the domains that would inevitably have to be addressed in future negotiations – missile defense and strategic conventional weapons. Missile defense was an integral part of U.S.–Russian arms control from early on, most prominently reflected in the ABM treaty of 1972. However, a deep look into the current state and trajectory of U.S. missile defense developments suggests that instead of focusing on the “strategic” interceptors in the continental U.S., the aim should be on regulating new mobile systems, which pose a more significant threat to the strategic stability and might be more amenable to limitations. Strategic conventional weapons are less clearly defined, and there is less arms control experience with dealing with them. On occasions where they were subject to arms control regulations, they were either banned or included in the strategic nuclear forceslimits. With many types of strategic conventional weapons, it does not seem that a one-size-fits-all approach is feasible. Some of the newer systems might remain too niche to have an impact on strategic stability. With the most ubiquitous strategic conventional weapons – long-range cruise missiles – a framework of asymmetric limits might be considered.

The article analyses the problem of cyber attacks on critical infrastructure, including facilities of the nuclear industry. At present there is almost no international legal regulation of the possible usage of information technologies in order to information systems used by object of the critically important infrastructure. Still, there has been an unprecedented growth in the information threats in recent years. As it was revealed in 2010, several Middle East States, first of all Iran in 2008, were the target for a series of systematic and sophisticated computer attacks, whose initiators remain unknown, which were aimed at the collection of information about the objects of critical information infrastructure of these states and its program intrusion. The author supports the thesis of the need for early development of international legal instruments to prevent and prohibit such cyber attacks. At the same time the leadership in the formulation and solution of this problem on the international scene can assume the Russian Federation, whose initiatives have since 1998 shaped the global agenda in terms of regulating the behavior of states in cyberspace. Despite the significant differences of different countries in this area, their positions on ensuring protection against cyber attacks peaceful nuclear infrastructure are the closest to a consensus, creating a window of opportunity for practical progress on this issue in 2013-2014.