Reid Says Senate Has Votes to Ratify Russia Treaty

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

Stories we're following today, Wednesday, December 15, 2010:

Reid Says Senate Has Votes to Ratify Russia Treaty - Viola Gienger and Laura Litvan in Bloomberg [link]

• Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said the chamber will have the 67 votes needed to ratify a new U.S.-Russia nuclear arms treaty and that he intends to complete work on the agreement before lawmakers leave Washington.
• “I share the confidence that if we can get the treaty on the floor, we can ratify it,” Kerry told reporters on Capitol Hill today.
• Maine’s two Republican senators, Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe, said in separate statements on Dec. 10 that they support ratification.
• The president won backing from a parade of former military leaders as well as former Democratic and Republican secretaries of defense and state and national security advisers who have called Republican senators in efforts to sway them.

US Senate to Open START debate - Olivier Knox in AFP [link]

• President Barack Obama's Democratic allies in the US Senate said Tuesday they would kick off formal debate on a landmark nuclear arms control pact with Russia and predicted its ratification this year.
• Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid told reporters he could bring up START late in the day or on Wednesday despite stiff objections from Republicans who say there is not enough time for a full debate.
• Just three Republicans have publicly said they will back the treaty, but others have broadly signaled that they will support the accord as long as Democrats allow suitable time for debate.
• Several Republican senators were readying amendments that would kill the treaty by forcing new talks with Russia, though they were all-but-certain to fail to muster the 51 votes needed to do so.
• And the White House has responded to worries from Kyl and others about funding the upkeep of the US nuclear arsenal by budgeting some 84.1 billion dollars over ten years for modernization and maintenance.

Kyl 'Will Work Very Hard' to Kill START This Year - Ken Strickland for NBC [link]

• Senate Republican leaders’ top point man on the new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty said Tuesday that he "will work very hard" to ensure that the treaty is not ratified if it's brought to the Senate floor in the waning days of the lame duck session.
• Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., argues that there is not enough time to thoroughly debate and possibly amend the START measure before the Senate adjourns for the year. Majority Leader Harry Reid plans to bring the treaty to the Senate floor following completion of the tax cuts bill this week.
• "I let the Majority Leader know that's an issue for a lot of my colleagues," Kyl told reporters Tuesday. "And if he does bring it up, I will work very hard to achieve that result, namely that the treaty fails."
• At a news conference today, Reid said he had enough Republican support to secure the 67 votes needed to ratify the treaty, which is a top priority of the White House.
• But Kyl was quick to disagree with that assessment.  "I will resist the temptation to go over the record of things where the Majority Leader had predicted something prematurely," Kyl said.  After standing at the podium silently for a few moments, he added with a grin, "If I'm really going to resist the temptation, I better resist the temptation."

North Korea Digging Tunnel for Spring Nuclear Test - Jack Kim for Reuters [link]

• North Korea appears to be readying for a possible third nuclear test as early as next March, a newspaper reported on Wednesday, as a U.S. politician travelled to Pyongyang with a message for the North to "calm down."
• South Korea's Chosun Ilbo daily on Wednesday cited an intelligence official from Seoul as saying a tunnel was being dug at the country's nuclear test site that could be completed in March next year, possibly heralding a new nuclear test.
• U.S. and South Korean intelligence have been watching the North's nuclear sites for any activity. Analysts say the North could use a test to try to gain leverage in international talks it is seeking and secure aid to prop up its destitute economy.
• Analysts say ailing leader Kim Jong-il's plan to transfer power to his son Jong-un is also creating domestic political pressure, as the regime resorts to military grandstanding to try to build legitimacy for the untested and previously unknown successor.

New Nuclear Treaty is the Latest Crusade of George Shultz--at 90 – James Goodby and Les DeWitt in San Jose Mercury News [link]

• History is made by individuals, and once in a while events come along to remind us of that.
• George Shultz, the former secretary of state, secretary of the Treasury and secretary of labor, turned 90 Monday. He continues to work for causes he believes in, and he enjoys considerable success in doing so.
• Probably closest to his heart is the vision of a world without nuclear weapons. His advocacy of this goal, added to Reagan's own vision, nearly led to an agreement with the Soviet Union's last president, Mikhail Gorbachev, in 1986 in Reykjavik, Iceland. Then, the idea was attacked. Now, it is seen as a highly desirable goal around the world.
• Without the New START treaty, the barriers built to block the spread of nuclear weapons to additional countries will erode.
• Shultz, at 90, is still working hard to prevent a nuclear catastrophe by advocating ratification of this treaty. As he frequently says, democracy is not a spectator sport.
  

View From the Surrendering Dark Side

Senate Has Votes to Ratify START Treaty - Rick Moran for American Thinker [link]

• Either the GOP has caved on START or the president has convinced enough Republicans that the treaty is an overriding issue of national security.
• The Obama White House has the votes to ratify the New START nuclear arms treaty with Russia, with the Senate preparing for a vote this week, the Sun-Times has learned. The debate could come as early as Wednesday, after the vote on the tax package Obama negotiated with the Republicans.
• The New START vote will proceed because of a loophole in the Nov. 29 letter all 42 Republicans signed not to advance legislation until the tax deal and government funding bills are passed. The Senate is tentatively set to take up the funding measure at the end of the week.
• Call it the "Let's not be beastly to the Russians" treaty. Flawed as it is, not approving the treaty will have serious repercussions in our relations with Putin. With the Joint Chiefs behind it and most of the foreign policy establishment, you either have to make the argument that these people want the US to approve a bad treaty, or that it is as good as we can get and won't damage national security.
• I lean toward the latter, although I think the verification regime is weak. But I have faith enough in our national technical means to discover if the Russians are cheating or not. So I'm not going to be too hard on Republicans who vote for it.
• It won't sit well with the missile defense crowd but there is nothing specific in the treaty that precludes us from deploying our own missile defense. All in all - like every arms control treaty that's come down the pike - it is a barely passable exercise in diplomacy, but hardly "arms control" in any real sense.