Working in "marathon sessions" with officials from the U.S. State Department, College Russian professor Deborah Garretson participated in negotiations over a new arms reduction treaty between the United States and Russia from behind the scenes this month. In her work on the New Start pact signed by President Barack Obama and Russian President Dmitri Medvedev in Prague on April 8 Garretson helped to make the English and Russian versions of the treaty compatible.
During the negotiations, Garretson was responsible for "conforming text," or studying the Russian and English language of the treaty to make sure the text matched "perfectly," she said in an interview with The Dartmouth.
"When conforming text, you must look at every single word in the treaty," she said. "You also have to research how it has been done before and then sit down and talk to the Russian delegation about what concerns and changes you would want to make in the text."
To conform the text of the treaty, Garretson worked with a lawyer to go over changes made to the text, specialists who explained the language in certain provisions and a chairman of each Russian-American working group during each phase of negotiations for the treaty. All of her work took place in Geneva, she said. "What happens is when negotiating, each side puts forward proposals in brackets, and then negotiators come back and accept certain components and unbracket the specific text they can accept that they both agree to," she said.
Conforming the text was a demanding task, according to Garretson.
"I can't believe I am still upright," she said.
Garretson decided to become a contractor for the State Department in the early 1980s because of the way the Cold War dominated international politics, she said.
"Working on disarmament seemed like a rather useful thing to do," Garretson said.
Garretson, who previously worked as an interpreter on START I in 1991 and the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, said that there has been little recent progress in relations between the United States and Russia.
"As far as U.S. relations with Russia are concerned, not much was done in the Clinton years, very little was done in the Bush years, and that was a very large gap," Garretson said.
Part of the process of conforming the current treaty involved using her knowledge of the techniques used in prior treaties, Garretson said.
"I have interpreted and done a lot of translations, so I was familiar with treaty procedures and language and that kind of thing," she said.
Her job this month was much different than the interpreting she had done in the past, Garretson said.
"When interpreting, you go into meetings and listen to whatever is being discussed and also facilitate discussion," Garretson said. "You only see parts of the treaty when you're interpreting, because when you come in and work for one group on a particular section, another interpreter is helping negotiate a different section simultaneously. When you're a conformer you actually see the end result."
During the six years of negotiations for START I, which was signed in 1991, Garretson worked on the treaty periodically, traveling to Geneva during her off-terms, she said. She worked on the INF for a period of about three months, she said.
New Start requires that the United States and Russia reduce their nuclear weapon arsenals by 30 percent and have no more than 1,550 strategic warheads and 700 launchers deployed seven years from now. It also provides for continued inspections, which expired with the first treaty in December.
Garretson said she could not comment on specific provisions of the treaty because she is not a specialist in arms control, but that she believes the signing of the document is a positive step for U.S.-Russia relations.
"I think it's wonderful," she said. "The fact that the Americans and Russians are sitting together and negotiating these issues is terribly important. I know from the news that Obama wants to do more things with the Russians and continue these relations, and I think that's great."
Garretson was contacted by the State Department this fall to conform the text of the treaty, but she did not begin her work in Geneva until the end of January because she was teaching classes at the College, she said. Garretson missed the first two weeks of Spring term because she was working toward a mid-April deadline.
"It was a really rewarding experience," she said. "It doesn't matter what small or big piece you work on, because you know it hopefully will make the world safer."
Now that Obama has signed the treaty, it must still be ratified by the Senate.
The New York Times reported that Obama met with the leaders of 47 nations on Monday to discuss the threat of terrorism at the Nuclear Security Summit in Washington, D.C.
The summit was "the largest assembly hosted by a U.S. leader since the founding conference of the United Nations in 1945," according to the Associated Press.
