The US secretly agreed to give the Russians sensitive information on Britain’s nuclear deterrent to persuade them to sign a key treaty, The Daily Telegraph can disclose.
Information about every Trident missile the US supplies to Britain will be given to Russia as part of an arms control deal signed by President Barack Obama next week.
Defence analysts claim the agreement risks undermining Britain’s policy of refusing to confirm the exact size of its nuclear arsenal.
The fact that the Americans used British nuclear secrets as a bargaining chip also sheds new light on the so-called “special relationship”, which is shown often to be a one-sided affair by US diplomatic communications obtained by the WikiLeaks website.
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According to diplomatic cables obtained by Britain's Daily Telegraph, mined from the thousands of classified documents released by WikiLeaks, the U.S. government agreed to provide Russia with information on the British nuclear deterrent as part of the deal behind the ratification and signing of the New START treaty.
Specifically, the Telegraph reports, the U.S. provided Moscow with the serial numbers of each Trident missile in the British ballistic missile submarine inventory. The Russians presumably already know how many Tridents the British have but can't be sure. British policy has been to refuse to confirm the exact size of its relatively tiny arsenal.
Last year, British Foreign Secretary William Hague disclosed that Britain had "up to 160" warheads operational at any one time, but he did not disclose the total number of missiles and warheads in its nuclear inventory. Duncan Lennox, editor of Jane's Strategic Weapons Systems, says: "They want to find out whether Britain has more missiles than we say we have, and having the unique identifiers might help them."
The State Department denies this, and spokesman P.J. Crowley said via Twitter that the U.S. simply "carried forward requirement to notify Russia about U.S.-UK nuclear cooperation from the 1991 treaty." So why did we, according to the Telegraph, have to ask Britain in 2009 for permission with detailed and classified information on the British Tridents, permission that was reportedly denied?
Indeed, according to one leaked memo, "the Russian Federation will receive unique identifiers for each of the missiles transferred to the UK, which was more information than was disclosed under START." So the State Department seems to have gone above and beyond the call of duty.
The British have quietly gone along with the State Department explanation, but then why wouldn't they? It wouldn't serve the new government of Prime Minister David Cameron well to acknowledge, after a series of snubs and insults from this side of the pond, that the U.S. had just thrown it under the strategic bus.
That we would betray Britain's nuclear secrets would not be surprising, since we are quite willing to betray our own. Before a recent U.N. conference on nuclear nonproliferation, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced: "Beginning today, the United States will make public the number of nuclear weapons in our stockpile and the number of weapons we have dismantled since 1991."
START, both old and new, has disclosure and verification requirements. Yet some secrets are and should be maintained, especially in regard to a historical ally that was not a party to the treaty and wishes to maintain a certain degree of confidentiality.
Our special relationship with Britain seems to have deteriorated into a special animus. Perhaps to this administration it was an inconvenient reminder of the days of Reagan and Thatcher, when the U.S. led the world instead of apologizing to it. It was a day when we and our presidents believed in American exceptionalism, not that at a meeting such as the G-20 we were just one of the gang.
It was President Obama who returned a bust of Winston Churchill loaned to President George W. Bush from the British Government's art collection after the Sept. 11 attacks. During a visit by the president of France, it was President Obama who proclaimed to British chagrin: "We don't have a stronger friend and stronger ally than Nicolas Sarkozy and the French people."
Well, we did. Certainly the British people must be wondering, with friends like these ...
More sedition at 1600 Pennslyvania Avenue.
You have to believe that Putin scratched his head after Obama bowed down to him and went on to abandon our Eastern European allies by giving up missile defense in Eastern Europe, and routed any American advantage by signing START.... Putin must have said, "This is too easy, it must be a trick!"
No, Putin, it's just an enemy in the White House. Obama sold out America for START and, according to new Wiki docs, he sold out the UK, too.
Here is a real president's take on START: John Bolton: New Start Is Unilateral Disarmament -- WSJ.com
The centerpiece of "New Start," the arms-control treaty that President Barack Obama signed with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev in April, is its reduction in nuclear warheads. Less well-understood—but profoundly misguided—is the treaty's return to outmoded Cold War limits on weapons launchers, which will require the United States, but not Russia, to dismantle existing delivery systems. This could cripple America's long-range conventional warhead delivery capabilities, while also severely constraining our nuclear flexibility. We will pay for this mistake in future conflicts entirely unrelated to Russia.
In pursuing New Start, the Obama administration has essentially jettisoned the 2002 Treaty of Moscow, which only dealt with the limitation of nuclear warheads that were operationally deployed. That freed large numbers of U.S. launchers (land-based and submarine-based ballistic missiles, along with heavy bombers such as the B-2) to carry conventional payloads world-wide—a concept known as "conventional prompt global strike."
Such delivery flexibility is far more important to America than to Russia, given our global interests and alliances. Its wisdom was evident after 9/11, as we fought in Iraq, Afghanistan and beyond. New Start encumbers us with unnecessary constraints that will distort strategic priorities and weapons-development for decades. (read the rest)
According to a report on Fox, Obama asked England if he could give the Russians information on Britain’s nuclear forces as a bargaining chip. England said no.
Obama did it anyway.
As I laid out meticulously researched and proved in my book, The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration's War on America, Obama is abandoning our allies and relinquishing American hegemony. Our "special relationship" with Britain and Israel is all but in ashes.
Now this .......
The US secretly agreed to give the Russians sensitive information on Britain's nuclear deterrent to persuade them to sign a key treaty, The Daily Telegraph can disclose.The US, under a nuclear deal, has agreed to give the Kremlin the serial numbers of the missiles it gives BritainBy Matthew Moore, Gordon Rayner and Christopher Hope 9:25PM GMT 04 Feb 2011Information about every Trident missile the US supplies to Britain will be given to Russia as part of an arms control deal signed by President Barack Obama next week.
Defence analysts claim the agreement risks undermining Britain’s policy of refusing to confirm the exact size of its nuclear arsenal.
The fact that the Americans used British nuclear secrets as a bargaining chip also sheds new light on the so-called “special relationship”, which is shown often to be a one-sided affair by US diplomatic communications obtained by the WikiLeaks website.
Details of the behind-the-scenes talks are contained in more than 1,400 US embassy cables published to date by the Telegraph, including almost 800 sent from the London Embassy, which are published online today. The documents also show that:
• America spied on Foreign Office ministers by gathering gossip on their private lives and professional relationships.
• Intelligence-sharing arrangements with the US became strained after the controversy over Binyam Mohamed, the former Guantánamo Bay detainee who sued the Government over his alleged torture.
• David Miliband disowned the Duchess of York by saying she could not “be controlled” after she made an undercover TV documentary.
• Tens of millions of pounds of overseas aid was stolen and spent on plasma televisions and luxury goods by corrupt regimes.
A series of classified messages sent to Washington by US negotiators show how information on Britain’s nuclear capability was crucial to securing Russia’s support for the “New START” deal.
Although the treaty was not supposed to have any impact on Britain, the leaked cables show that Russia used the talks to demand more information about the UK’s Trident missiles, which are manufactured and maintained in the US.
Washington lobbied London in 2009 for permission to supply Moscow with detailed data about the performance of UK missiles. The UK refused, but the US agreed to hand over the serial numbers of Trident missiles it transfers to Britain.
Professor Malcolm Chalmers said: “This appears to be significant because while the UK has announced how many missiles it possesses, there has been no way for the Russians to verify this. Over time, the unique identifiers will provide them with another data point to gauge the size of the British arsenal.”
Duncan Lennox, editor of Jane’s Strategic Weapons Systems, said: “They want to find out whether Britain has more missiles than we say we have, and having the unique identifiers might help them.”
While the US and Russia have long permitted inspections of each other’s nuclear weapons, Britain has sought to maintain some secrecy to compensate for the relatively small size of its arsenal.
William Hague, the Foreign Secretary, last year disclosed that “up to 160” warheads are operational at any one time, but did not confirm the number of missiles.
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