Observers Report New START Has the Votes in Senate

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

Stories we're following today, Monday, December 13, 2010:

Nuclear Arms Pact Has Votes for Senate Ratification, Aide Says - The Boston Globe [link]

• A spokesman for Indiana’s Dick Lugar, the leading Republican supporter of the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, said yesterday that enough senators are prepared to vote for the pact’s ratification. The treaty needs two-thirds support in the Senate to be approved.
• “We’ve got enough Republican support to pass the treaty,’’ said Mark Helmke, Lugar’s spokesman. “We are hopeful that [majority leader Harry Reid] sets the schedule as soon as possible.’’
• Reid, a Nevada Democrat, plans to bring up the treaty for a vote before Congress adjourns for the year, spokesman Jim Manley said. The Senate first plans to finish debates on pending legislation to extend expiring tax cuts and a measure to finance government operations.
• Maine Republicans Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe said that they support ratification.
• Snowe said she would support the treaty if there is “sufficient’’ opportunity for debate and amendments to the ratification resolution. She said concerns about “our ability to verify Russian compliance’’ and “to develop and deploy effective missile defenses, and to modernize our nuclear weapons complex, have been satisfactorily resolved.’’
• Collins said in a statement that she will support the treaty’s ratification after Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton assured her in writing that the administration was also committed to reducing Russia’s estimated 3,800 tactical nuclear weapons.

Ratify New START Before It's Too Late - Members of the Consensus for American Security in Politico [link]

• As military officers who have dedicated our lives to U.S. security, we have one piece of advice: Make ratifying the New START Treaty a top priority. It should be ratified before the year is out.
• It makes us more secure by reducing the Russian nuclear arsenal by roughly one-third. Perhaps equally important, it restores our ability to conduct on-site inspections and resume directly monitoring the strategic nuclear weapons Russia has and how they are deployed.
• Eight of the last eight commanders of our nuclear forces also urged ratification. The Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell told reporters “We need it [ratification] sooner rather than later.” If the Senate fails to ratify the treaty, and the issue is pushed aside until the next Congress, we may go as long as another year without inspections. And the possibility exists that they will be postponed indefinitely.
• It is important to understand, however, that restoring on-site monitoring isn't the only issue. New START continues the process of eliminating unnecessary, expensive and redundant weapons.
• We recognize that there will be many issues facing the Senate. We are not in the business of politics and we can't weigh all those issues. We are, however, in the business of attending to our nation's defense. On that basis, we urge the Senate to ratify this Treaty before the year is out — and increase our security.
  

Missile Defense Looms Over START Ratification - Mary Beth Sheridan in The Washington Post [link]

• White House senior adviser David Axelrod said on "Face the Nation" on Sunday that "the support is there" to pass the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) if it comes to the floor. The White House said Friday that Obama is willing to postpone his vacation until the U.S.-Russia pact is ratified.
• But it has become clear that Obama is facing a fight over the same issue that derailed President Bill Clinton's quest for a similar accord - missile defense, a cherished Republican goal dating back to Ronald Reagan's presidency.
• Treaty supporters say the outcry over missile defense is unfounded - and suspect it is a tactic to score political points. They note that there is almost nothing on missile defense in the treaty, which runs more than 300 pages with annexes, and Obama has continued many of George W. Bush's missile-defense policies.
• The United States responded that it would "continue improving and deploying its missile defense systems" against limited attack. Obama administration officials, including the head of the Missile Defense Agency, Lt. Gen. Patrick O'Reilly, have said the treaty will not constrain U.S. missile defense and actually will remove some old restrictions.

U.S. Nuclear Weapons: They're Not Out of Date - Lisbeth Gronlund in The Hill’s “Congress Blog” [link]

• In leading Republican opposition to the New START agreement that would reduce U.S. and Russian nuclear stockpiles, Sen. John Kyl (AZ) has argued that U.S. nuclear weapons need to be “modernized.” That suggests that existing U.S. nuclear weapons are somehow out-of-date, which simply is not true.
• For many years the nuclear weapons labs have assessed the reliability of U.S. weapons through a surveillance program in which they remove them from deployment, subject them to extensive tests, and then return them to the field. Currently, the labs examine 11 of each of the seven warhead types in the U.S. stockpile each year.
• Also, the U.S. weapons labs have programs dedicated to maintaining the reliability, safety, and security of the nuclear arsenal. Under these Life Extension Programs (LEPs), all U.S. nuclear weapons either have undergone or will go through a program to extend their functional lives.
• Senator Kyl can get a lot of attention by raising the specter of an out-of-date nuclear arsenal. But what we need to focus on is what really matters--the reliability, safety, and security of U.S. nuclear weapons. That means making sure that the weapons labs devote enough resources and staff to test the full complement of 11 weapons for each warhead type each year.

U.S. and Allies Plan More Sanctions Against Iran - David Sanger in The New York Times [link]

• President Obama’s chief nuclear adviser said Friday that the United States and its allies planned new sanctions in an effort to test “Iran’s pain threshold” and force the country into suspending its production of nuclear fuel.
• By increasing the economic pressure, White House officials say, they hope to raise the cost to the Iranian leadership of letting the talks drag on. But it is possible, some concede, that the Iranians could react by pulling out of the discussions.
• Mr. Samore suggested that Iran may have decided to resume the talks with members of the United Nations Security Council and Germany “because it believes it can manipulate the appearance of negotiations to weaken existing sanctions and avoid additional measures.”
• The current sanctions, imposed by the Security Council in the spring and embellished by the United States, some European nations, Japan and Australia, are making it increasingly difficult for Iranian businesses and the government to conduct banking operations around the world, to get insurance for shipping lines and to refuel airliners at some airports in Europe.
• But these sanctions have yet to persuade Iran’s leadership to heed the Security Council’s demands that the country stop enriching uranium and answer a series of questions from international nuclear inspectors.
  

A View From The Dark Side

Groundhog Day on U.S.-Russia Arms Control - Douglas Feith in The Wall Street Journal [link]

• President Obama's pleas for quick Senate approval of New Start, his nuclear arms treaty with Russia, remind me of long days nine years ago in the Russian Defense Ministry—where I helped negotiate the Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty (SORT).
• Russian officials oppose American plans for missile defense. In the SORT negotiations, they demanded that the treaty recognize an "interrelationship" between offensive arms reductions and missile defense.
• The foundation for SORT was the Pentagon's 2001-02 review of the U.S. nuclear posture. We had concluded that America was deploying far more warheads than necessary, as the Cold War was long over and there was hope of friendlier relations with Russia. We reckoned we could cut our arsenal by approximately two-thirds, and that it was not necessary to condition our reductions on any reciprocal Russian promises.
• So President Bush announced that the U.S. would make the two-thirds cut on our own. Russia was not our enemy, and given other threats such as North Korea and Iran, there was no sense anymore in making Russia our touchstone for all strategic weapons.
• Mr. Obama agreed to treaty language linking offensive reductions with missile defense, limiting launch vehicles, and restricting conversion of ICBMs for missile defense purposes. He accepted counting rules that would impede us in converting nuclear ICBMs, say, to conventional missiles. They would still count as nuclear weapons and could force us to give up other nuclear weapons. Mr. Obama also accepted ineffectual verification measures that establish a bad precedent.
• The American arms-control priesthood was quick to praise New Start. But the U.S. Senate has the responsibility to evaluate Mr. Obama's concessions. At a minimum, that requires reviewing the negotiating record—which has yet to be provided to the Senate.