Consensus for American Security Members Endorse New START

Today's top nuclear policy stories, with excerpts in bullet form.

Stories we're following today, Monday, July 19, 2010:

Bipartisan Coaltion of Military and National Security Leaders Calls on Senate to Pass the New START Treaty - The Consensus for American Security [link]

• The Consensus for American Security stands for 21st century solutions to assure American and global nuclear security, starting with passage of the New START Treaty as a critical first-step.
• The Consensus for American Security is a new initiative of the American Security Project that brings together a broad, bipartisan consensus of former military and national security leaders who know that American security depends on sound and smart nuclear security policies.
• The July 19th conference call will be the first in a series of efforts to raise awareness about these issues and to rebuild an enduring bipartisan consensus in the United States about our nation’s security.
• Members include former Secretary of State George Shultz, Chief Negotiator of the first START agreement Ambassador Richard Burt, Lieutenant General John Castellaw USMC (Ret), Lieutenant General Robert Gard USA (Ret), Vice Admiral Lee Gunn USN (Ret), Lieutenant General Donald Kerrick USA (Ret), Rear Admiral Rose Levitre USN (Ret), and several dozen other prominent Americans.

Why The Nuclear Neo-Cons Oppose START – It’s Arms Control - Max Bergmann in The Wonk Room [link]

• New START is really just about stability, it is about continuing down the status-quo arms-control path that has been practiced by the US for the last half century.
• To opponents of the treaty like James Carafano of the Heritage Foundation, this is a treaty that keeps the US at relative nuclear parity with Russia.
• This is an extremely radical and destabilizing view. To them the Soviet/Russian adversary is still out there.
• While Obama is often described as pushing a radical vision in advocating the abolition of nuclear weapons, it is really anything but. And this is not just because Reagan, Kennedy, Eisenhower and now Kissinger, Schultz, Nunn and Perry advocated the same vision.
• The vision to get to a world without nuclear weapons does not really involve changing course, but merely continuing down the road that President like Reagan already put us on. The real radicals are the ones trying to get us to turn off Reagan’s road by rejecting START.

Trinity's Anniversary and Legacy: The Atomic Bomb Turns 65 - TakePart [link]

• At 5:29:45 a.m. local time on July 16, 1945, the Atomic Age entered the history books with a blast in the New Mexico desert.
• The courses of science and technology were forever changed, and mankind was introduced to the very weapon that could ensure its wholesale destruction.
• Manhattan Project leader J. Robert Oppenheimer’s memory may best express the scene at the world’s first nuclear explosion: “We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent."
• From tactical "suitcase" nukes to hydrogen bombs, we live in a world crowded by nuclear weapons. All it takes is one to set the clock back on civilization, be it through a nuclear accident, an act of terrorism, or an intractable dispute between nuclear powers.
• See this video titled Oppenheimer: The Man Behind the Bomb -- A "Countdown to Zero" Exclusive:

It's Time to Start Worrying Again - The New York Times [link]

• A new film — titled “Countdown to Zero” and opening Friday — is designed to demolish viewer apathy. The rise of global terrorism, the expanding nuclear club, the increased availability of fissile material on the black market: all point to a higher likelihood of nuclear attack than ever before.
• The point of “Countdown to Zero” — made repeatedly and with unnerving force, through nightmare possibilities evoked by talking-head experts, graphics and archival footage — is that it is time to start worrying again.
• Director Lucy Walker conducted nearly a hundred interviews on camera (and many more off), with physicists, writers, nuclear weapons experts (including the former C.I.A. officers Valerie Plame Wilson and Rolf Mowatt-Larssen) and a hefty roster of world leaders (including Tony Blair, Mikhail Gorbachev and Pervez Musharraf).
• One of the crucial arguments of “Countdown to Zero” is that while nuclear arsenals might have worked as a cold war-era deterrent, they have no place in a world as volatile as ours.

Queen Noor of Jordan's "Countdown to Zero" - Good Morning America [link]

• Queen Noor talks to George Stephanopoulos on Good Morning America about nuclear weapons and the new film Countdown to Zero.
• She says, "There is an international consensus that nuclear terrorism is now the greatest threat." And she goes on to say, "No one is exempt from this threat."
• Watch the video below: