Republican Senators Hint at Hope for New START

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

Stories we're following today, Wednesday, December 1, 2010:

2 Republicans Hint at Hope for Russia Pact - Peter Baker for The New York Times [link]

• President Obama’s hopes of winning Senate approval for a new arms control treaty with Russia by the end of the year were encouraged on Tuesday by two Republican senators, including John McCain.
• Mr. McCain, one of his party’s leading voices on national security, said he thought that Republican concerns over missile defense and nuclear modernization could be resolved in time to vote on the so-called New Start treaty during the lame-duck session of Congress this month, as Mr. Obama has sought.
• Another Senate Republican, George V. Voinovich of Ohio, also indicated for the first time that he might vote for the treaty. Mr. Voinovich told The Wall Street Journal that his concerns about Russia’s dominance of its neighbors were assuaged by statements of support for the treaty by Eastern European leaders at the NATO summit meeting.
• Further complicating the debate over the arms control treaty was a report in The Wall Street Journal about Russia’s having moved short-range tactical nuclear warheads to sites near NATO allies last spring in response to the deployment of American and NATO missile defense installations close to its territory.
• Responding to the article in The Journal, Nikolai Makarov, chief of the Russian military’s general staff, said Moscow had not moved missiles into Kaliningrad, but he left it unclear whether they had been moved to other border regions.
• “I’m a little disturbed at the news this morning that tactical nuclear weapons have been moved closer to Europe by the Russians,” Mr. McCain said. “That is not directly related to the Start treaty, but certainly is an indication of the need to have verification.”

Missile Defense Cooperation Is Not Missile Defense Limitation - Daryl G. Kimball on "Arms Control  Now" [link]

• The Washington Times is running a misleading story this morning that mischaracterizes the discussions between the United States and Russia on potential cooperation on missile defense, implying that these “secret” talks could “limit” missile defense, and suggesting that Secretary of State Clinton and Secretary of Defense Gates denied that the United States and Russia were discussing the issue of missile defense cooperation.
• The Obama administration has been open about its efforts to discuss cooperative efforts with Russia on missile defense, just as the George W. Bush administration was when it was in office.
• It is ironic and Orwellian that some opponents of New START suggest that U.S.-Russian missile defense cooperation discussions might compromise U.S. missile defense options when in fact New START preserves all U.S. options and the Obama administration has succeeded in transforming missile defense from an area of confrontation to a potential area of cooperation with Russia.
• Secretary Clinton and Secretary Gates told the Senate multiple times that the United States was engaged in discussions with Russia on MD cooperation and that neither these talks nor New START itself in any way limit the pursuit of the most effective U.S. missile defense deployment options.
• The bottom line is that failure to approve New START this year will jeopardize the chances that the United States and Russia can work together effectively on missile defense and increase the chances that the United States and Russia will be at odds over strategic nuclear offensive systems and defensive systems.

Belarus Will Relinquish Enriched Uranium Stockpile - Mark Landler in The New York Times [link]

• The Obama administration scored a victory in its drive to curb the worldwide spread of nuclear material with an agreement on Wednesday by the hard-line former Soviet republic, Belarus, to surrender its stockpile of highly enriched uranium by 2012.
• The announcement came at a European security conference here after a meeting between Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and the foreign minister of Belarus, Sergey Martynov. Mrs. Clinton said the United States would give Belarus technical and financial aid to eliminate its stockpile.
• The administration had pushed Belarus for months to relinquish its stockpile without success. As a result, the country was not invited to Mr. Obama’s 47-nation nuclear security summit last April, at which another former Soviet state, Ukraine, agreed to give up its highly enriched uranium.
• Belarus has been invited to attend the next global nuclear security summit in South Korea in 2012, and has committed to eliminate its uranium stockpile by then. In 1994, Belarus agreed to relinquish the nuclear weapons left on its soil after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Nuclear Fuel Memos Expose Wary Dance With Pakistan - Jane Perlez, David E. Sanger and Eric Schmitt for The New York Times [link]

• Less than a month after President Obama testily assured reporters in 2009 that Pakistan’s nuclear materials “will remain out of militant hands,” his ambassador here sent a secret message to Washington suggesting that she remained deeply worried.
• The cables, obtained by WikiLeaks and made available to a number of news organizations, make it clear that underneath public reassurances lie deep clashes over strategic goals on issues like Pakistan’s support for the Afghan Taliban and tolerance of Al Qaeda, and Washington’s warmer relations with India, Pakistan’s archenemy.
• The ambassador’s concern was a stockpile of highly enriched uranium, sitting for years near an aging research nuclear reactor in Pakistan. There was enough to build several “dirty bombs” or, in skilled hands, possibly enough for an actual nuclear bomb.
• In the cable, dated May 27, 2009, the ambassador, Anne W. Patterson, reported that the Pakistani government was yet again dragging its feet on an agreement reached two years earlier to have the United States remove the material.
• She wrote to senior American officials that the Pakistani government had concluded that “the ‘sensational’ international and local media coverage of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons made it impossible to proceed at this time.” A senior Pakistani official, she said, warned that if word leaked out that Americans were helping remove the fuel, the local press would certainly “portray it as the United States taking Pakistan’s nuclear weapons.”
• The fuel is still there.
• It may be the most unnerving evidence of the complex relationship — sometimes cooperative, often confrontational, always wary — between America and Pakistan nearly 10 years into the American-led war in Afghanistan.

U.S. Announces New Iran Sanctions - Borzou Daragahi for The Los Angeles Times [link]

• On the same day that Iran and the West agreed to meet next week for talks on Iran's nuclear program, the U.S. announced a set of fresh sanctions on the Islamic Republic's shipping lines, and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said defiantly that his nation would not budge "one iota" on giving up what he described as its rights.
• It was perhaps an inauspicious launch to the first set of talks between Iran and world powers over its controversial nuclear program in 14 months.
• European Union foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton and Iranian nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili agreed Tuesday to hold talks in Geneva on Dec. 6-7 in an attempt to jump-start stalled negotiations over Iran's nuclear program, an announcement said. 
• Late Tuesday, the U.S. Treasury Department cited five Iranian corporate officials and 10 businesses as having ties to either Islamic Republic of Iran Shipping Lines or Bank Mellat, which the U.S. had previously blacklisted, alleging they support Iran's nuclear and military programs.
• "As long as Iran uses front companies, cut-outs and other forms of deception to hide its illicit activities, we intend to expose this conduct and thereby counteract Iran's attempts to evade U.S. and international sanctions," U.S. Treasury Undersecretary Stuart Levey said in a news release.
  

View From the Dark Side

Heed the Need for security - Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. for The Washington Times [link]

• Here we go again. President Obama is trying to ram a legislation through Congress knowing that by so doing, he is maximizing the chances that his project's defects will not become widely understood until it is too late. Call it the pig-in-a-poke stratagem.
• This time around, however, Mr. Obama is not simply trying to socialize the economy, destroy the world's finest health care system or assault the Constitution. At the moment, national security is in his cross hairs - and the negative implications could make those associated with his domestic policy efforts pale by comparison.
• Specifically, the president is determined to with "rid the world of nuclear weapons" - and he is intent on securing the U.S. Senate's imprimatur for this truly hare-brained idea. That is the real impetus behind his insistence that senators rubber-stamp during the lame-duck session the New START arms control treaty that Mr. Obama signed with Russia last April.
• The treaty was accompanied by - and is intended to put what amounts to an international seal of approval on - an administration-generated document known as the Nuclear Posture Review (NPR). The NPR commits the United States to continue on a course that would, all other things being equal, assure the continued atrophying of the American deterrent. For example, it forswears the design and manufacture of any new nuclear weapons; precludes underground testing of the obsolescing U.S. arms; and pledges to "devalue" the nuclear deterrence mission.
• Most senators - like most Americans - have the good sense to think the United States should maintain a viable deterrent. As a result, these sorts of proposals would be unlikely to command majority support, let alone the supermajority the Constitution requires to ratify New START.