Gorbachev: New START Treaty is "Major Breakthrough"

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

Stories we're following today, Friday, April 23, 2010:

The Ice Has Broken - Mikhail Gorbachev in the International Herald Tribune [link]

• A remarkable sequence of events in April has turned the spotlight on the subject of nuclear disarmament and global security. I am referring to the signing by Presidents Obama and Medvedev of the New START treaty, the presentation of the Obama administration’s nuclear doctrine and the nuclear security summit meeting in Washington attended by leaders of several dozen countries.
• Though the cuts are indeed modest compared to those made under the treaty the first President Bush and I signed in 1991, the [New START] treaty is a major breakthrough.
• By reviving the goal of a world free of nuclear weapons, the treaty is a powerful tool for political pressure on those countries, particularly Iran and North Korea, whose nuclear programs have caused legitimate concern within the international community. 
• The Obama administration has proposed bilateral dialogues on strategic stability with Russia and China. [...] The dialogue on strategic stability is certainly in Russia’s interest. 
• Yet, the proposed dialogue should not be limited to strategic weapons. More general problems must also be addressed if we are to build a relationship of partnership and trust.
• We need collective leadership. We have recently seen examples of what it can achieve. But what remains to be done is much more than what has been done. 

U.S. Resists Push by Allies for Tactical Nuclear Cuts - New York Times [link]

• Speaking Thursday at a meeting of NATO foreign ministers here, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said the Obama administration was not opposed to cuts in these battlefield weapons, mostly bombs and short-range missiles locked in underground vaults on air bases in five NATO countries.
• But Mrs. Clinton ruled out removing these weapons unless Russia agreed to cuts in its arsenal, which is at least 10 times the size of the American one. And she also appeared to make reductions in the American stockpile contingent on Russia’s being more transparent about its weapons and willing to move them away from the borders of NATO countries.
• The push to withdraw tactical weapons from Europe has gained momentum in recent weeks, with Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and Norway jointly petitioning NATO to take up the issue. Many analysts consider these weapons a dangerous relic of the cold war, expensive to safeguard and deadly if they fell into the wrong hands.

U.S. Faces Choice on New Weapons for Fast Strikes - New York Times [link]

• In coming years, President Obama will decide whether to deploy a new class of weapons capable of reaching any corner of the earth from the United States in under an hour and with such accuracy and force that they would greatly diminish America’s reliance on its nuclear arsenal.
• Called Prompt Global Strike, the new weapon is designed to carry out tasks like picking off Osama bin Laden in a cave, if the right one could be found; taking out a North Korean missile while it is being rolled to the launch pad; or destroying an Iranian nuclear site — all without crossing the nuclear threshold. In theory, the weapon will hurl a conventional warhead of enormous weight at high speed and with pinpoint accuracy, generating the localized destructive power of a nuclear warhead.

Obama Revives Rumsfeld's Missile Scheme, Risks Nuke War - Wired's Danger Room [link]

• The Obama administration is poised to take up one of the more dangerous and hare-brained schemes of the Rumsfeld-era Pentagon. The New York Times is reporting that the Defense Department is once again looking to equip intercontinental ballistic missiles with conventional warheads.
• The missiles could then, in theory, destroy fleeing targets a half a world away — a no-notice “bolt from the blue,” striking in a matter of hours. There’s just one teeny-tiny problem: the launches could very well start World War III.
• Over and over again, the Bush administration tried to push the idea of these conventional ICBMs. Over and over again, Congress refused to provide the funds for it. The reason was pretty simple: those anti-terror missiles look and fly exactly like the nuclear missiles we’d launch at Russia or China, in the event of Armageddon.
• When the idea of Prompt Global Strike was first proposed, the goal was to hit anywhere on the planet in under an hour. Old-school weapons had proved ineffective at catch terrorists on the move. Newer, quicker arms might be able to do the job, instead. Flight tests for some of those weapons — like a hypersonic cruise missile — are just getting underway. Until then, relying on conventional ICBMs to do the job, and risking a nuclear showdown, is just plain crazy.

U.S. Tries to Buy Time for Its Iran Strategy - Wall Street Journal [link]

• The goal of American policy right now is to slow down the clock—that is, to stretch out the time Iran needs to become nuclear-arms capable. 
• So now, here's where things are headed: American officials say they hope a U.N. resolution will pass in the next few weeks. That would clear the way for step two, in which the U.S. and its European allies, with some help from Japan, would layer on additional sanctions of their own with more bite, clamping down on Iran's access to the international financial system and squeezing its Revolutionary Guards, the real power behind Iran's nuclear program.
• It's worth pausing here to note that having a credible military threat on the table is useful for both prongs of this strategy—getting biting sanctions, as well as getting Iran to take its predicament seriously. 
• Already, informed sources say, the U.S. has essentially said to the recalcitrant Chinese: "Look, you'd better cooperate on sanctions, because if we don't do something, Netanyahu is just crazy enough to attack Iran." And if there's a silver lining to the military exercises Iran just launched, it's that they suggest Tehran is taking the military threat seriously.
• If these combined pressures compel Iran's leaders back into negotiations, the goal would be to revive the kind of nuclear-swap deal Iran agreed to, then backed away from, last fall.