Morning Joe: The Next Challenge after START

Stories we're following today:

Obama’s Big Missile Test- Philip Taubman in The New York Times [link]

• Now that Mr. Obama has set a promising arms reduction agenda with President Dmitri A. Medvedev of Russia, he faces the greater challenge of getting his own government and the American nuclear weapons establishment to support his audacious plan to make deep weapons cuts and ultimately eliminate nuclear weapons.
• Mr. Obama’s moment of truth with his generals is coming later this year when the Pentagon completes its periodic Nuclear Posture Review... If the White House does not assert itself, the Nuclear Posture Review could easily spin off in unhelpful directions.

Addressing the Nuclear Threat: Fulfilling the Promise of Prague at the L’Aquila Summit - White House Press Release on G8 Summit [link]

• Statement released by G8 Leaders proposing measures to reduce and eliminate nuclear weapons, strengthen the NPT, and prevent nuclear terrorism.

Defending U.S. Leadership on Disarmament - Acton, Goldschmidt, and Perkovich in Proliferation Analysis [link]

• President Obama’s speech on April 5, 2009, in Prague, in which he pledged “America's commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons,” was the most important statement of nuclear weapons policy in a generation. It is absolutely right to subject this policy to scrutiny.
• The critique by Senator Jon Kyl and Richard Perle in the Wall Street Journal last week is to be welcomed as a stimulus to analysis and debate. The Kyl and Perle op-ed is, however, based on a series of invalid premises.

START Follow-On: What SORT of Agreement? - Hans Kristensen of FAS Strategic Security Blog [link]

• Negotiators will still have to hammer out the details and draft a new treaty that the presidents can sign, hopefully by the end of the year, to be implemented in seven years. The Summit was a good effort to revive U.S.-Russian relations, but seven years is a very long timeline for a START follow-on that doesn’t force either side to change very much. Does it rule out deeper cuts for the rest of the Obama administration?

A View from the Dark Side

Is Russia pushing Obama's buttons? - John Bolton in The Globe and Mail (?) [link]

• If all this comes to pass, we may conclude that the “reset button” has, indeed, been pushed. Russian-American relations, after an initial uptick, undoubtedly went downhill during the Bush administration, especially after one of Russia's important trading partners, Saddam Hussein, was removed in Iraq. But the deterioration in relations came almost entirely from more belligerent and provocative Russian behaviour, not from a desire in Washington for confrontation. Thus, all the “new” directions emanating from the Moscow summit are all essentially reversals of recent U.S. policy. The Russians should be happy; most people are when they get their way.

What If Iran Got the Bomb? - Robert Farley in Foreign Policy [link] 

• Why not let Iran cross the nuclear threshold and spend time and energy focusing on how to make the deterrence of a nuclear Iran effective? After all, that now seems to look like the only realistic option.