START Stalled

A new U.S.-Russian nuclear arms agreement to replace the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) is a month overdue and will take another couple of weeks at least to complete. Most of the 100+ page document is already agreed to in principle, including the headline numbers. Daryl Kimball, the head of the Arms Control Association, predicts those numbers will be 1,600 deployed strategic warheads each, and 650-750 delivery vehicles - somewhere in the middle of the ranges laid down by Obama and Medvedev last July.  In related news, John Issacs, executive director of the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, puts the one-month delay in release of the Nuclear Posture Review into context, in a Nukes of Hazard blog post: "Dear readers," he writes, "it might just be possible that a delay is simply that, a delay. A failure to meet a deadline.  A bureaucracy that could not get its act together. An unprecedented act in Washington, DC."