Final Vote on New START Expected Today

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

Stories we're following today, Wednesday, December 22, 2010:

New START treaty: Final Vote Could be Wednesday - Howard LaFranchi for The Christian Science Monitor [link]

• The Senate’s 67-to-28 vote Tuesday to close debate and move to a final vote on the new START nuclear-arms reduction accord with Russia means that President Obama is all but certain to get the foreign-policy Christmas present he wanted.
• A final vote to ratify the new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty that Mr. Obama signed with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev in April is expected as early as Wednesday. If, as expected, New START is ratified, it will be the first time that an arms-control treaty negotiated by a Democratic president has garnered the required two-thirds vote of the Senate.
• “What this [vote] represents is a victory for a broad national-security consensus,” says Joseph Cirincione, president of the Ploughshares Fund, a Washington foundation focused on nuclear-weapons policy. He predicts a final vote for ratification of about 70 senators. Ratification, Mr. Cirincione says, would signify that the opinion of the top military leadership and a broad spectrum of former national-security leaders carried the day over partisanship.

Political Brinksmanship - Fred Kaplan for Slate [link]

• The Senate seems on its way to ratifying the New START on nuclear arms, an achievement that looked unlikely to say the least just a few weeks ago.  If a Republican were president, the accord would have excited no controversy and at most a handful of diehard nays. As even most of its critics conceded, the treaty's text contains nothing objectionable in substance.
• There were two kinds of opponents in this debate. The first had concerns that President Barack Obama would use the treaty as an excuse to ease up on missile defense and the programs to maintain the nuclear arsenal. In recent weeks, Obama and his team did as much to allay these concerns as any hawk could have hoped—and more than many doves preferred.  So that left the second kind of opponent: those who simply wanted to deny Obama any kind of victory. The latter motive was clearly dominant in this debate.
• The task of Obama and the Democratic floor managers, Sens. Harry Reid and John Kerry, was to convince enough Republicans to view the issue not as political gamesmanship but as an urgent matter of national security. Hence their rallying of every retired general, former defense secretary, and other security specialist—Republican and Democrat—that anyone had ever heard of.  The amazing thing is, Obama and the Democrats pulled it off.
• The Republican leadership made this a purely political battle and—fresh off what had seemed a triumphant election season—suffered an astonishingly egregious defeat.  It is extremely doubtful, for instance, that the Obama administration will ever again bargain over national-security issues with Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., the minority whip.
• [After months of hard bargaining and accommodation,] Kyl came out against the treaty anyway. So Obama and his aides did something no legislative powerhouse should ever let happen—they went around him, treating him as just another senator, and they won.  Kyl limps away from this face-off gravely wounded—a leader unable to deliver either on his promises or on his threats.
• An astonishing 11 Republicans broke ranks to vote for cloture and thus end the debate—a measure approved by 67 senators (enough to ratify the treaty when that vote takes place, probably Wednesday) and rejected by only 28.

Lindsey Graham: Senate owes Jon Kyl an Apology for Moving Forward with New START - Greg Sargent for "The Plum Line" a Washington Post Blog [link]

• Look, I get that being an elected member of the world's greatest deliberative body is a really awesome gig, with lots of perks -- secret holds, Senators-only elevators -- that encourage a rather outsized view of the importance of individual Senators.But it seems particularly ludicrous that at a presser [yesterday], Senator Lindsey Graham actually apologized to Jon Kyl on behalf of the rest of the Senate, because it isn't doing his bidding and instead is ratifying New START:
• "I stand here very disappointed in the fact that our lead negotiator on the Republican side ... basically is going to have his work product ignored and the treaty jammed through in the lame duck. How as Republicans we justify that I do not know," Graham said. "To Senator Kyl, I want to apologize to you for the way you've been treated by your colleagues."
• Senators who have agreed to ratify New START before the end of the lame-duck session are doing this because they've been asked to by the President of the United States, the military leadership, all the living secretaries of state under Republican presidents, and a whole range of national security experts across the political spectrum. They are doing this after more than a dozen public hearings and countless private briefings from military leaders and White House officials who did everything they could do address their concerns. They are doing this because they are persuaded that it is in the national security interests of the United States and is necessary to maintain global stability.
• Tuesday, December 21 at 3:48 pm: The Senate just voted in favor of moving forward with ratification, with 67 Senators voting Yes, And as John Kerry noted at a presser just now, several certain Yes votes were not even present, so the total is more like 70.  That makes 70 senators who owe Jon Kyl a major apology.

US Hits Iran with New Sanctions - AFP [link]

• The United States imposed new sanctions Iran Tuesday, targeting the Islamic republic's Revolutionary Guard and its energy and shipping sectors over Tehran's nuclear and weapons activities.  Sanctions were placed on entities linked to the guards corp, which is seen as a key driver of Iran's suspected nuclear weapons program.  Those targeted included guards member Parviz Fattah, a former energy minister, as well as a raft of financial firms.
• The Treasury Department also hit Iran's economically vital energy sector, sanctioning the Pars Oil and Gas Company, which is responsible for tapping some of the world's largest gas fields.  The North and South Pars fields are a potential economic lifeline for the sanctions-hit nation, but leaders in Tehran have struggled to finance operations amid sanctions.  The development of the fields has been hampered by a lack of investment and technology as Western firms either have pulled out or delayed their commitments.
• The United Nations, the United States and the European Union recently imposed new punitive measures against Tehran in a bid to stop its sensitive uranium enrichment program which they fear masks a weapons drive.  Tehran denies the charge, saying the program has purely peaceful goals.
• The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and Islamic Republic of Iran Shipping Lines are both "major institutional participants in Iran's illicit conduct and in its attempts to evade sanctions," said US sanctions tzar Stuart Levey.  "We will therefore continue to target and expose their networks," he said.

US-China Firm Fined for Pakistan Nuclear Exports - AFP [link]

• The United States on Tuesday fined the Chinese subsidiary of a US firm nearly four million dollars for exporting coatings to a Pakistan nuclear site.  The fines "represent one of the largest monetary penalties for export violations in the history of the US Department of Commerce's Bureau of Industry and Security" established in 1987, it said.
• [PPG Paints Trading in Shanghai] was accused of "illegal export, re-export and/or transshipment of high-performance coatings from the United States to the Chashma 2 Nuclear Power Plant in Pakistan via a third-party distributor (in China)," it said.  In addition to the maximum criminal penalty of two million dollars, the two companies agreed to pay an additional 1.75 million dollars in civil penalties and submit to a US audit.  
• US Attorney for the District of Columbia Ronald Machen said in a statement that the case should "serve as a warning to corporations that would violate US export laws...It is not only unlawful, it is also bad business. In this case, the millions in fines to be paid by the corporate defendant are 100 times more than the gross proceeds generated by the unlawful export scheme," he said.
• The transactions took place between June 2006 and March 2007 after PPG Paints Trading unsuccessfully sought an export license to ship the coatings to Chashma 2, the Justice Department said.
• The United States has heavily restricted exports to entities affiliated with Pakistan's nuclear program since Islamabad joined the club of nuclear-armed states in 1998.  Pakistan scrambled to secure the technology after India's first nuclear test in 1974, and is now believed to have up to 100 nuclear weapons.