Sen. Levin: Senate Should "Promptly" Ratify New START Treaty

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

Stories we're following today, Monday, July 12, 2010:

New START Treaty Makes Us Safer Today and Tomorrow - Sen. Carl Levin in The Niles Daily Star [link]

• When we have an opportunity to help make the people of Michigan, the United States and the world a little safer, we should jump at it. I believe that’s my obligation as a father and grandfather, let alone as a senator and as chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee.
• That’s why I support a new treaty on reducing nuclear weapons that the Armed Services Committee recently discussed in a hearing before our committee.
• The [New START] treaty is also a strong statement that the United States is committed to reducing the dangers to the world that nuclear weapons present.
• There have been many statements suggesting that the treaty imposes constraints on our missile defense plans and programs. That is simply incorrect.
• I hope the Senate will promptly ratify this important agreement. The New START treaty will make us safer today, and leave a safer world for our children and grandchildren.

Romney's Worst Foreign Policy Mistake - Joe Cirincione in the Huffington Post [link]

• Mitt Romney this week ignored our top military leaders, deepened the split in GOP ranks, made profound factual blunders rivaling Michael Steele's and turned his back on Ronald Reagan's legacy. So why don't you know about this?
• This story lit up the blogosphere, but so far the major papers and networks have largely ignored Romney's error-filled screed.
• Here is just one of the more than twenty fallacious or factually wrong statements Romney presents in his piece. Romney said: "Russia will retain more than 10,000 nuclear warheads that are categorized as tactical because they are mounted on missiles that cannot reach the United States. But surely they can reach our allies."
• Russia does not have 10,000 tactical nuclear missiles that can reach our allies. They don't have even 1,000.
• Romney's willful misunderstanding of the strategic nuclear situation confronting the United States and its allies should be major news. Journalists have an obligation to explain to the public when a presidential hopeful commits such egregious errors on national security.

On Bombing the Bomb - Joshua Pollack in Arms Control Wonk [link]

• This morning’s Washington Post features an op-ed on Iran policy by former U.S. Senator Charles (Chuck) Robb and retired U.S. Air Force general Charles (Chuck) Wald. The gist of [their argument] is this: we cannot “compel Iran to terminate its nuclear program” unless we threaten to bomb it.
• You can bomb an enrichment facility, but you can’t bomb an enrichment program. (Or not one as well-developed as Iran’s.)
• So if we can’t bomb their enrichment program, why haven’t the Iranians already started making bomb material? One possibility is, maybe they’ve decided they don’t want to. A second possibility is, they think the price of forging ahead would be too high.
• A third and related possibility is that they think that the price might involve not just the bombing of an enrichment facility here or an air defense system there, but an attack that would threaten the regime’s grip on power.
• As Tom Schelling pointed out some decades ago, threats are much more useful for trying to deter action than for trying to compel action. The real Iran “nuclear timeline” has to do with leadership decision-making more than technical milestones. Bombing might well accelerate that timeline, not slow it.

The GOP's Grown-Up Contingent Speaks Up - Steve Benen in The Washington Monthly's Political Animal blog [link]

• Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney pretended to understand foreign policy and national security this week, publishing an op-ed trashing the New START treaty.
• Senator Richard G. Lugar, one of the Republican Party's senior voices on foreign affairs, fired back Thursday at Mitt Romney over his opposition to the new nuclear treaty with Russia, accusing Mr. Romney of "hyperbolic" rhetoric that is divorced from the reality of arms control.
• It's exceedingly rare for respected, seasoned Republican senators to call out leading party voices like this, which made Lugar's remarks that much more important.
• Michael Crowley argued, "What you're seeing, it seems to me, is a struggle between the GOP's old-guard national security center and an resurgent, post-Iraq hawkish right wing."
• That sounds about right, but it's worth emphasizing that the two competing Republican wings are not engaged in a genuine debate -- one of these wings simply has no idea what they're talking about. Rather, this is people who know something about foreign policy and national security issues vs. uninformed right-wing activists trying to impress Fox News viewers in advance of the next GOP primary.

Nunn's Leading the Charge to Reduce World's Nuclear Weapons - The Macon Telegraph [link]

• Former Georgia Sen. Sam Nunn and media mogul Ted Turner founded the Nuclear Threat Initiative in 2000 to call attention to the new nuclear threat. In recent months, with the signing of the New-Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty between Russia and the United States, the subject has garnered renewed interest.
• [In response to Mitt Romney's July 6 op-ed: “I didn’t see a single reference in the Romney article ... to catastrophic terrorism, I didn’t see a single reference to U.S.-Russia cooperation required to keep materials out of the hands of terrorists,” Nunn said. “It could be captioned: ‘I’d rather run for President than learn about national security.’ Very little in that article was either accurate or relevant.”
• Nunn went on to say, “If the New START treaty were to be defeated, I think it would be a very substantial setback for U.S. security, Russian security, and world security."

A View from the Dark Side

New START: Romney is Right - The National Review [link]

• Mitt Romney caused a furor last week when he wrote a Washington Post op-ed opposing the New Start treaty. Democrats and liberal commentators rushed to accuse Romney of bad-faith politics, of ignorance, and of a dangerous extremism.
• Romney pointed out that the linkage in the preamble of the treaty between strategic offensive weapons and missile defenses could limit our defenses. His critics scoff, It’s just a meaningless preamble. They should tell that to the Russians.
• There’s every reason to believe that once the treaty is ratified by the Senate, the administration will implicitly accede to the Russian view and will, in fact, have traded away our ability to develop missile defenses for this pitiful piece of parchment.
• For those in thrall to arms-control theology, this is the product of brilliant negotiation. For anyone who can truly calculate our interests, it’s a travesty.
• All honor to Mitt Romney for setting out the case against the treaty so cogently.