New START Ratification Should Be Above Politics

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

Stories we're following today: Wednesday, September 22, 2010.

Partisan Politics Shouldn’t Get in the Way of New START – Susan Shaer in The Richmond County Daily Journal [link]

• For decades, we have been under a nuclear cloud, but world and U.S. leaders have risen to the occasion to provide safeguards.
• We have now gone months without critical intelligence from on-site verification and monitoring in Russia. With the expiration of the START Treaty, our inspectors lost access to dozens of Russian sites. If the new treaty is not ratified we will lose this critical information and American national security will be at greater risk.
• Failure to ratify New START would send a message of indifference to Russia and the rest of the world, voiding decades of arms control policy. Failure to ratify would be a warning sign to the world that the U.S. no longer stands behind its nuclear commitments.
• Standard-bearers and negotiators for nuclear weapons controls in the United States span the spectrum from conservative to liberal. This is a subject so momentous it defies partisan politics.
• While there is the sharp partisan divide in the Senate these days, in the past Senators have left politics at the water’s edge and risen to the occasion to address pressing national security issues.
• Note: Susan Shaer is the Executive Director of Women's Action for New Directions,  a Ploughshares Fund grantee.

Iranian President Expects Nuclear Talks to Resume – Paul Richter in The Los Angeles Times [link]

• Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Tuesday that he saw a "good chance" that talks could soon resume with the United States and its allies over Iran's disputed nuclear program because "there is no other alternative."
• Iran has been trying to make up for the loss of trade and investment by turning to other countries, especially in the developing world. Ahmadinejad has been urging countries not to enforce the sanctions, arguing that it is the U.S., rather than Iran, that stands in the way of a solution to the nuclear standoff.
• Although Ahmadinejad seemed open to renewed contacts in his meeting with journalists, he also repeated harsh criticisms of the U.S. and its allies. He blasted the U.S. for a planned $60-billion arms deal with Saudi Arabia, a regional rival of Iran. "That's how much the United States wants peace," he said.
• Afrasiabi, who was traveling with the Iranian delegation, said he believed there had been behind-the-scenes diplomatic conversations and that a resumption of U.S.-Iran talks might be announced soon. Ahmadinejad and President Obama are scheduled to address the General Assembly in speeches Thursday.

Munger: New START Could Boost Local Economy – Frank Munger for The Knoxville News Sentinel [link]

• Ratification of the New START Treaty could potentially bring billions of federal dollars to East Tennessee.
• That money would go toward improvements at the Y-12 nuclear weapons plant in Oak Ridge, including a multi-billion-dollar uranium processing facility that's proposed to replace the existing production operations.
• The resolution gets pretty specific, saying the United States is committed to providing resources necessary to achieve "at a minimum" the levels set forth in the president's 10-year plan. That plan was outlined in the Defense Authorization Act of 2010.
• The folks at Y-12 didn't do too much celebrating last week following the committee's approval of the ratification resolution. At least they didn't do so in a public way. That wouldn't have been considered good form. But you can bet they were pleased in a big way.
• Here's a somewhat muted response from Steven Wyatt, a federal spokesman at the Oak Ridge plant: "Since the treaty has not yet been ratified, it would be premature for us to speculate on its potential impact. That said, we know that the Y-12 National Security Complex will continue to play an important role in national security…Dismantlement of nuclear weapons components is and will continue to be a major mission at Y-12."

Senate Should Vote to Ease Nuclear Tensions – San Fransisco Chronicle [link]

• The U.S. Senate has become a policy graveyard ruled by political gridlock, not long-term vision. But it can repair its image by approving the new strategic arms reduction treaty with Russia.
• It also sends a message to Iran and North Korea that the two biggest players are serious about capping the arms race and will allow outside monitors to verify the results.
• But the Senate could fall short, as it did this week by failing to deliver on gay rights and immigration reform on a procedural vote on military spending. The pact will take 67 Senate votes, meaning at least eight Republicans must join the Democratic majority. It's time for the strife-prone chamber to look beyond partisanship and lower the world's nuclear temperature by approving the treaty.

Ahmadinejad Undeterred As Sanctions Take Bite – Tom Gjelten for NPR [link]

• The latest round of economic sanctions on Iran has prompted Western banks and other corporations to back out of business deals with Tehran.
• Whenever the Iranian government finds a loophole in the sanctions, the U.S. Treasury Department, or allied governments, move swiftly to plug it.
• "Today, Iran is effectively unable to access financial services from reputable banks and is increasingly unable to conduct major transactions in dollars or in euros," said Stuart Levey, Treasury undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence.
• There is even evidence that the impact of the sanctions is causing dissension within the Iranian leadership. Former President Hashemi Rafsanjani last week cautioned other Iranian leaders "to take the sanctions seriously and not as a joke."
• Though sanctions are having an effect, there's no sign they're moving the Iranian government any closer to canceling any plans it has for nuclear weapons or considering rapprochement with the United States.
• "The Iranian government may just be too ideologically intransigent to make those cost-benefit analyses," said Ray Takeyh, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.
  

View From the Dark Side

Senate Must Do More Homework on New START – Owen Graham and Michaela Bendikova on The Foundry, a Heritage Foundation Blog [link]

• In her recent op-ed, Senator Jeanne Shaheen (D–NH) expresses her favorable opinion about the New START Treaty that was voted out of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last week. However, the op-ed, as well as the committee vote, raises more questions than answers.
• The New START Treaty is flawed because its limits are based on maintaining a balance of strategic nuclear forces between the U.S. and Russia. This is the wrong way to view the balance of forces in a proliferating world, particularly one with growing nuclear threats from Iran and North Korea.
• Moreover, the arms control policy of this Administration—which is based on the mirror image assumption that if the United States lowers numbers of nuclear weapons, other nations will follow—is fundamentally misguided. Indeed, such an arms policy runs contrary to historical evidence.
• For the Russian Federation, the negotiations were like Christmas Day, with the Obama Administration leaving generous gifts—regardless of whether the Russians had been naughty or nice. As a result of this giveaway, there is not much that the United States can use as leverage during negotiations on tactical nuclear weapons.
• According to former assistant secretary of state for verification, compliance and implementation Paula DeSutter, the U.S. NTM infrastructure is “broken.”Also troubling, all experts and members of the arms control community agree that as the number of nuclear weapons go down, verification becomes more, not less, important.