New START Gaining Ground in Senate as More Republicans Support Treaty

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

Stories we're following today, Friday, December 3, 2010:

Obama Gains Ground in Push for Nuclear Treaty - The Associated Press [link]

• President Obama gained ground in his push for Senate ratification of a stalled nuclear treaty as once-reluctant Republicans signaled a willingness to back the pact with Russia.
• The No. 3 Republican in the Senate, Lamar Alexander, said Thursday he is "wide open" to supporting the treaty if the administration addresses his concerns about modernization of the remaining U.S. nuclear arsenal. He praised the White House for working with lawmakers.
• The administration jump-started the treaty with a series of steps this week, including outreach by Vice President Joe Biden to lawmakers and the circulation of a letter from the heads of the three U.S. nuclear weapons laboratories expressing support for Obama's 10-year, $84 billion plan to maintain the nuclear stockpile.
• The laboratory directors from Lawrence Livermore, Sandia and Los Alamos said the administration's plan "would enable the laboratories to execute our requirements for ensuring a safe, secure, reliable and effective stockpile."
• Sen. Richard Lugar, the top Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee and a proponent of the treaty, distributed the letter to more than a dozen Republican lawmakers at a closed meeting late Wednesday. Several Republican senators, including Olympia Snowe, emerged from the session more positive about completing the treaty in the lame-duck session.
• "Speaking for myself, I think there is that reflection and recognition that we can get it done this year," Snowe said.

Put the Inspectors back to Work - Lt. General John Castellaw (Retired) in the Augusta Free Press [link]

• Dec. 5th marks an important milestone in relation to America’s national security – the one-year anniversary since the U.S. inspection of Russian nuclear facilities expired. But the obstacle to resuming inspections isn’t an intransigent Russia, but Senate delays in ratifying the New START arms reduction treaty – delays that put political considerations ahead of U.S. national security.
• If the Senate drags its feet on START and doesn’t complete work on the treaty by year’s end, the best case scenario will be an indeterminate delay in America’s ability to monitor Russia’s arsenal and the worst case scenario will be the loss of on-site inspections altogether. Both of these outcomes would represent an irresponsible and dangerous failure to act in the national security interest.
• The Senate has done their due diligence. They’ve spent six months hearing testimony on the treaty. They have heard from Secretary Gates, from Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Admiral Mullen, from General Chilton, and from a who’s who of Republican and Democratic officials from the past seven administrations, all of whom have testified that the New START Treaty makes the U.S. safer and advances our national security objectives.
• At this point there is simply no good reason to delay a full vote on ratification...The Senate should ratify the New START and build on the pattern of success that was begun more than twenty years ago.

Egypt Considering Nuclear Arms if Iran Gets Them - The Associated Press 

• Egypt's president would consider turning his country into a nuclear power if Iran acquired atomic weapons, leaked U.S. diplomatic cables revealed.
• A cable from May 2008, one of hundreds of secret diplomatic documents released by the WikiLeaks website over the past week, described how President Hosni Mubarak told a U.S. Congressional delegation that everyone in the region was "terrified" of a nuclear Iran.
• "Egypt might be forced to begin its own nuclear weapons program if Iran succeeds in those efforts," the cable said in reporting about a meeting between Mubarak and the delegation on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh.
• Iran's growing nuclear program, which it insists is only for peaceful energy production, has sent chills throughout the region and several Arab countries expressed their concern to the U.S. about it, included support for military strikes.
• The head of Egypt's intelligence service, Omar Suleiman, however, cautioned against military strikes against Iran in the same briefing, according to the cable. He said such an attack would not only leave Tehran's nuclear capability intact but would unite its people against the U.S.
• Instead he recommended pursuing sanctions.
• Suleiman offered the U.S. Egyptian assistance in taking on Iran around the region. "If you want Egypt to cooperate with you on Iran, we will ... it would take a big burden off our shoulders," he said, according to the cable.

Showdown in the Senate - Joseph Cirincione in The Hill [link]

• When the President, the Secretary of Defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff are united, they usually get what they want. And they really want the New START treaty.
• America’s national security elites have come out in force in support of New START. Just this morning, five former Republican secretaries of state urged the Senate to ratify the treaty in an op-ed for The Washington Post. They wrote, “we have here an agreement that is clearly in our national interest.”
• The military’s case for the treaty is as clear. As Lt. Gen. Donald Kerrick (USA, ret.), former Deputy National Security Advisory and defense intelligence official, said, New START “makes America safer.” It is a simple, uncontroversial treaty, based on a framework that Ronald Reagan established decades ago.
• The U.S. military argues that every day that passes without the treaty is another day that the military remains in the dark on vital intelligence about Russian nuclear forces. Without this intelligence, the military will have to resort to worst-case scenario planning and divert intelligence resources to observing Russia more carefully – including reconnaissance satellites that will have to be moved from Iraq or Afghanistan to cover Russian missile sites.
• It is time to vote with three words in mind: The National Interest.

A New Start in Washington - Peggy Noonan for The Wall Street Journal [link]

• Republicans on Capitol Hill are right on taxes and wrong on the New Start treaty. The former should not be raised, and the latter should be ratified.
• Treaties must be judged on their merits, and the essential merit in this case is obvious. In requiring the U.S. and Russia to reduce the number of deployable nuclear weapons in a way that allows for verification, it would do nothing to make an insecure and unstable world less secure and stable, and could arguably make it more stable.
• But the primary reason Start should be ratified is that we are at a point where we have to show the world that we are a grown-up, capable, functioning republic that can negotiate, agree to and ratify a major treaty with a world power.
• There is much at this point to be gained by a re-emergence of the old bipartisan foreign-policy establishment to the extent it existed, and to an extent it actually did. We saw this with the statements of James Schlesinger, George Shultz, James Baker, Lawrence Eagleburger, Brent Scowcroft, Warren Christopher, Madeleine Albright and Colin Powell in support of the treaty. It looked like the grown-ups were back.
• The Senate should pass the treaty with grace and stand with the president. It will be good to show the world: America can still do this.

View From the Dark Side

Stop START - Mitt Romney in The Boston Globe [link]
[Morning Joe editor's fact check notes in red.]

• WHY THE hurry, Mr. President? It’s a question we’ve asked twice before. There was a rush to pass his $787 billion “stimulus’’ to hold unemployment below 8 percent. Congress obliged, and now we are saddled with higher unemployment and crushing debt. Then there was his health care assault: no time for our representatives to even read the bill. As ObamaCare has been revealed, it has frightened business into retreating from hiring. Now the president is in a hurry again: affirm the New START treaty right away, he insists, during the lame duck session. Fall for his rush once, shame on him; twice, shame on Congress; a third time, shame all around.
• A treaty so critical to our national security deserves a careful, deliberative look by the men and women America has just elected. The president is in a hurry for the same reason he has been in a hurry before: he knows that if his vaunted treaty is given a thorough review by the Senate, it will likely be rejected. And well it should be.
• Does New START limit America’s options for missile defense? Yes.
  • “As the combatant command also responsible for synchronizing global missile defense plans, operations, and advocacy, this treaty does not constrain any current missile defense plans.” General Chilton, Commander of U.S. Strategic Command, 6/16/10
• Is the treaty’s compliance verification program inadequate? Yes.
  • "The New START Treaty, signed by the United States and Russia in April, renews and makes major improvements in on-site inspections. This is one of the most important reasons why New START has the overwhelming support of America’s national security leadership, including Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mike Mullen, six former secretaries of state, and seven former U.S. strategic commanders." Lt. General John Castellaw (Retired), 12/2/2010
• The administration excuses these lapses by insisting that Russia is not the bitter Cold War enemy of the past. Thus, more trust and less verify. But isn’t the administration also arguing that the Senate must immediately confirm the treaty in order to keep a Russian foe from taking imminent and dangerous nuclear steps? The president can’t have it both ways.
  • "Reaching agreement on this treaty was a key step in a new and broader relationship with Russia, and with President Dmitry Medvedev. Of course, Russia and the U.S. remain rivals and adversaries in many ways. But the cooperation we have received on sanctions toward Iran--including especially the Russian refusal to send potent S-300 missile systems to Tehran--and on the drug trade in Afghanistan, among other things, has been a major plus. The failure of START in the Senate would endanger future cooperation and be a major embarrassment to Medvedev and a big boost to Prime Minister Vladimir Putin." Norm Ornstein of The American Enterprise Institute, 11/22/2010

The Lighter Side

 Cartoon courtesy of The Arizona Daily Star [link]