New START Goes Before Russian Duma as Experts Eye Future Agreements

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

Stories we're following today: Tuesday January 4, 2011.

The Next Treaties - The New York Times [link]

• Even after the herculean effort required to win Senate ratification of the New Start treaty, President Obama has no time to rest. The treaty, which mandates modest cuts in long-range nuclear weapons, is on its way to approval by the Duma, the lower house of Parliament in Russia. Once that happens, Washington and Moscow should quickly begin discussing other, more far-reaching agreements.
• Two decades after the end of the cold war, the United States and Russia still have many thousands of nuclear weapons. The two countries cannot credibly argue for restraining the nuclear ambitions of Iran, North Korea and other wannabes unless they keep working to bring their own numbers down.
• One of their most urgent tasks is slashing — or better, doing away with — their tactical nuclear weapons.
• President Obama is already committed to negotiating cuts in tactical nukes. And he may have some new allies: Republicans who pushed through a side resolution to the New Start treaty requiring negotiations on tactical weapons within a year. If they meant what they said — and weren’t just trying to kill New Start — they need to support the president in any negotiations and commit to swift ratification of a treaty.
• The two sides cannot stop there. They also need to reduce their number of stored warheads — their hedge… Russia will want to include missile defenses in any negotiations. That doesn’t need to be a deal breaker. The administration has already made important progress by persuading Moscow to cooperate with NATO in jointly developing a system intended to intercept short- and medium-range missiles.
• We also strongly urge President Obama to press Congress to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.
• President George W. Bush scoffed at arms control treaties as old think. President Obama was right to revive negotiations, but he still has a lot of work ahead. The threat of nuclear proliferation and nuclear terrorism are all too clear and present.

Russian Lawmakers Begin Endorsing New START - Global Security Newswire [link]

• Russia's State Duma on December 24 offered preliminary endorsement of a new nuclear arms control treaty with the United States, but lawmakers in Moscow indicated they were unlikely to rapidly finalize approval of the pact, Agence France-Presse reported.
• The lower chamber of Russia's parliament voted 350-58 in support of the New START treaty.
• However, amendments the U.S. Senate made to its New START ratification document would delay the next of three mandatory Russian votes on the pact until this month or later, State Duma International Affairs Committee Chairman Konstantin Kosachyov said.
• Urging lawmakers to support the agreement, Russian Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov emphasized the pact's sole focus on reducing strategic nuclear stocks
• Much like their counterparts in Washington, members of Russia's parliament were expected to submit additions to the ratification document. The defense minister called on them to address U.S. missile defense plans, which Moscow says could threaten Russian strategic security and could lead the nation to withdraw from the nuclear pact.

A New START Towards Nuclear Sanity - Katrina Vanden Heuvel in The Nation [link]

• Passage of the New START treaty at the end of the 111th Congress should have been what Ploughshares Fund president and nuclear weapons expert Joseph Cirincione called a “no-brainer.” It is, after all, a renewal of a treaty originally negotiated by President Reagan and it will make America safer.
• Yet the fact that herculean effort was required to win Senate ratification of a modest arms reduction treaty is a stark reminder of how tough it will be to strike needed, more far-reaching agreements — for example, slashing tactical nuclear weapons and ratifying the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.
• The cynical Republican leadership mounted a ferocious and often mendacious opposition campaign to ratification of START. It was striking during the debate just how far this extremist GOP has strayed from common sense or rational thinking on national security.
• In the end, only 13 Republicans voted to support the treaty; the majority chose retrograde party ideology over commonsense security.
• The next steps towards nuclear sanity will be extremely challenging.
• When President Obama stood in Prague’s Wenceslas Square over a year ago and proclaimed his commitment to a nuclear-free world, what was striking was how this bold idea had become the widespread view among moderate mainstream security experts and officials. This new realism proposes a vision of a nuclear weapons-free world—coupled with practical steps on how to achieve it—as the best defense against rising nuclear threats.

The Nuclear Clean-Out by David Hoffman of Foreign Policy [link]

• The last few months have been busy ones for the nuclear express: trucks, trains and ships have been hauling giant protective casks containing highly-enriched uranium, plutonium, and spent nuclear fuel from vulnerable locations to safe harbors.
• These delicate operations in the former Soviet bloc point to progress in President Obama’s promise to secure all vulnerable nuclear materials in four years. He may not make the goal, but step-by-step, more and more weapons-useable material is being cleaned out and locked up.
• In November, the United States and Kazakhstan completed the transfer to a new storage site of some 300 metric tons of spent fuel, containing more than 10 metric tons of weapons-grade plutonium, enough to make 775 nuclear weapons.
• In December, the NNSA announced the removal of 28 pounds of highly-enriched uranium from the Vinca Institute of Nuclear Sciences in Serbia.
• Also in December, the government of Belarus announced that it would give up its stock of highly-enriched uranium, which the United States has been seeking to remove for years.
• Still, there are problems ahead…The GAO says that while the National Security Council has developed a classified seven-page government-wide strategy for meeting Obama's goal of securing all vulnerable materials in four years, the scope of all these nuclear materials creates some uncertainty about whether Obama's ambitious goal can be met.
• Not surprisingly, the NSC officials said they do not consider Obama's promise to be "a hard and fast deadline."

Can Warren Buffett Stop the Spread of Nuclear Weapons? - Michael Crowley in TIME [link]

• To a billionaire investor like Warren Buffett, $50 million is pocket change. But when Buffett invested that amount in an unusual project four years ago, he watched it as closely as some of Berkshire Hathaway's biggest holdings. The project is an international effort to thwart the spread of nuclear weapons. And Buffett believes the return on his modest investment could be vastly more valuable than any of the lucrative stakes he holds in corporate America.
• On Dec. 5, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) unanimously approved the creation of a nuclear fuel bank overseen by the U.N. that would offer countries that agree to pursue nonmilitary nuclear programs a guaranteed source of fuel for their atomic reactors.
• The vote took months of diplomatic wrangling even after funds were raised to match Buffett's original 2006 donation of $50 million, which he offered on the condition that the additional $100 million required to buy the first stockpile of nuclear fuel come from other sources.
• Some, like Buffett and Sen. Sam Nunn, see it as an urgent matter of national security. A world in which more and more nations can enrich uranium at home, they contend, is a far more dangerous world. Not only does a domestic uranium-enrichment program allow a country to divert its nuclear fuel to military purposes, it also multiplies the sources from which terrorists or rogue states might steal nuclear material or purchase it from corrupt insiders.
• That's why Nunn argues that a fuel bank is just one step toward a long-term goal of putting all the world's nuclear material under IAEA safeguard. "Over time, my belief is that we'll end up with regional enrichment centers where countries pool their resources to make [enrichment] economically viable, and make the process under IAEA safeguard," Nunn says.