New START's Importance for the U.S. Intelligence Community

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

Stories we're following today, Friday, November 19, 2010:

No Arms Treaty Means U.S. May Divert Satellites to Cover Russia - Eli Lake for The Washington Times [link]

• In the absence of a U.S.-Russian arms control treaty, the U.S. intelligence community is telling Congress it will need to focus more spy satellites over Russia that could be used to peer on other sites, such as Iraq and Afghanistan, to support the military.
• The demand for these satellites - one component of the "national technical means," or NTM - has increased the urgency for the Obama administration to get the Senate to ratify the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) in its lame-duck session.
• "Having the inspections [in New START] will allow us to focus our resources on other targets right now," a U.S. intelligence official told The Washington Times.
• The treaty, which was signed in April, would restore on-site inspections of Russian nuclear missile silos, bombers and submarines that have stopped since the old START expired in December. The new treaty also bars the Russians from interfering with or jamming spy satellites and restricts where various nuclear weapons can be located.

The GOP's Dangerous Nukes Game - Leslie Gelb in The Daily Beast [link]

• There seems to be nothing Republicans won’t do to deny President Obama a political success at home—even if it means jeopardizing U.S. national security…To be specific, Republicans, led by Senator Jon Kyl, look as though they are trying to kill the new strategic-arms limitation treaty between Russia and the United States.
• Their arguments—against the treaty…are totally without merit. That’s a charge I hardly ever level because it’s so serious.
• [New START] is the essential element in efforts by Obama to “reset,” or firm up and increase the benefits of, relations with Russia. To put it simply, Russia can still do us significant harm or good on issues like Iran. And if the White House can’t deliver a treaty ratified by at least 67 Senate votes, Moscow will write off the United States. As Obama said on Thursday, passage of the treaty this year is a “national-security imperative.”
• Now, if the Republican reasons for opposing this new treaty are so silly, what are they really thinking?…hey plain don’t want him to succeed, for that will only strengthen his image and his political hand. And that’s the last thing they want. They just want to damage him and continue to beat him up, whatever the consequences for American security.
• To today’s Republican Party in Congress, this might seem like a bunch of diplomatic mumbo-jumbo. But to all those former secretaries of state and defense and national security advisers who fully endorse the treaty, and to Richard Lugar, the senior Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, it is something called The National Interest. Senatorial Republicans would do well to remember that old and quaint phrase: The National Interest.
• In the face of all this, Obama said that he was “confident” on Thursday that at least 67 senators would vote for the treaty before the arrival of the new Congress next year. So it comes down to Sen. Kyl. Let us hope that in the end, he will remember The National Interest.
  

Time to Ratify New START - Radoslaw Sikorski for Project Syndicate [link]

• The US remains the world’s most powerful state, however, and the senators’ decision will inevitably have an impact beyond their country’s borders. It will be particularly significant for Poland, a staunch ally of the US in NATO. So it is important to make clear: my government supports the ratification of New START, because we believe it will bolster our country’s security, and that of Europe as a whole.
• For almost a year now, since the expiration of the original START treaty in December 2009, no US inspectors have been on the ground in Russia to verify the state of its nuclear arsenal. The START verification provisions provide crucial information that is essential for the force-planning process.
• Without a treaty in place, holes will soon appear in the nuclear umbrella that the US provides to Poland and other allies under Article 5 of the Washington Treaty, the collective security guarantee for NATO members. Moreover, New START is a necessary stepping-stone to future negotiations with Russia about reductions in tactical nuclear arsenals, and a prerequisite for the successful revival of the Treaty on Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE).
• Also in the cards is more substantive cooperation between NATO and Russia in the field of missile defense, an issue discussed at this year’s NATO-Russia Summit in Lisbon, and that has the potential to transform NATO-Russia relations. In order for that to happen, Russia’s leaders must come to view missile defense as an opportunity to work together to address common threats, rather than a threat in itself.
• Ratification of New START will increase mutual trust and show that the West and Russia, despite our disagreements, can work together on issues critical to our common security. Any delay to the treaty, however, will embolden those in Moscow who would rather have the West as an enemy than as a partner – and who thus would like to see the tenuous progress made in recent months to be undone.
• Radosław Sikorski is Poland’s Foreign Minister.

Russian Arms Pact Faces New Obstacle - Jonathan Weisman for The Wall Street Journal [link]

• The Senate's No. 2 Republican said Tuesday that he opposed a vote this year on President Barack Obama's signature arms control treaty, dealing a blow to a top White House foreign policy priority and possibly to U.S.-Russian relations.
• Senate Minority Whip Jon Kyl of Arizona said there wasn't time to deal with his concerns over a treaty that would cut U.S. and Russian strategic nuclear weapons deployments by about one third and restore weapons inspections that were halted nearly a year ago.
• Mr. Kyl's announcement took the White House by surprise. A White House official said that just last Friday, officials from the Defense Department, the National Nuclear Security Administration and the U.S. Strategic Command briefed the senator and offered an additional $4.1 billion over the next five years that he had demanded to modernize the remaining nuclear arsenal.
• Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana, the top Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and a treaty supporter, said Tuesday he still wanted the vote...Mr. Lugar "believes it is imperative we keep the verification process going, and he's fearful if we don't do it this session, it would throw a major road block in U.S.-Russian nonproliferation arrangements," said Mark Helmke, a Lugar spokesman.
• Arms control advocates on both sides worry that tension over the treaty could jeopardize cooperation on Iran and Afghanistan.

Start Must Not Be Stopped - Editorial in The Guardian [link]

• Barack Obama's decision to overturn the neoconservative policy of containing Russia has become the major foreign policy achievement of his presidency. It was meant to be only the start of a series of moves to cool international tensions – including direct talks with Iran, and starting final status talks on Israel-Palestine.
• They are worth listing, because they stretch beyond Europe's borders. It transformed Poland's fraught relations with Russia. It produced a new strategic arms reduction treaty (Start), cutting the number of deployed strategic warheads by one-third; it secured Russia's (reluctant) backing for sanctions on Iran and stopped it delivering S-300 air defence missiles to Tehran.
• It helped non-proliferation efforts as Russia shut down its last remaining weapons-grade plutonium-producing power plant. Russia became a vital route for supplies and troops heading for Afghanistan, and provided one-third of the fuel US troops use. When ethnic violence broke out in Osh and Jalal-Abad in Kyrgyzstan, Russia and the US sang from the same hymn sheet.
• All of this progress and more has now been put in jeopardy by Republican threats to put a stop to Start.
• It is time for the concessions to stop and for the tables to be turned on the Republicans, who have a nauseating habit of wrapping themselves in the national flag and calling their stands patriotic. Yesterday Mr Obama said ratifying Start without delay was no longer a party political matter but an issue of national security. America would be weakened without it. And he was not exaggerating.

Worm in Iran Was Perfect for Sabotaging Nuclear Centrifuges - William J. Broad and David E. Sanger in The New York Times [link]

• Experts dissecting the computer worm suspected of being aimed at Iran’s nuclear program have determined that it was precisely calibrated in a way that could send nuclear centrifuges wildly out of control.
• Their conclusion, while not definitive, begins to clear some of the fog around the Stuxnet worm, a malicious program detected earlier this year on computers, primarily in Iran but also India, Indonesia and other countries.
• “We don’t see direct confirmation” that the attack was meant to slow Iran’s nuclear work, David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security, a private group in Washington that tracks nuclear proliferation, said in an interview Thursday. “But it sure is a plausible interpretation of the available facts.”
• The paternity of the worm is still in dispute, but in recent weeks officials from Israel have broken into wide smiles when asked whether Israel was behind the attack, or knew who was. American officials have suggested it originated abroad.