START

Josh Rogin, writing at the Cable, has an interesting piece about the consequences the November elections might have on the START agreement’s fate in the Senate.

Here is Secretary of State Hillary Clinton yesterday making the case for Senate ratification of the new START agreement with Moscow:

Ratification of the new nuclear arms treaty with the Russians may not be as easy as the White House, Senate Democrats, and the media appear to expect.  The pact, called the New START agreement, faces early trouble in the Senate – serious trouble.

In last week's print edition of TWS, I wrote: 

This popped up last week, so consider it an "in case you missed it" blurb. Over at Time, Dimitri Simes has a take on the U.S.-Russia treaty negotiations that I consider extremely instructive:

Kurchatov, Kazakhstan 

United Nations secretary general Ban Ki-moon offered strong support for President Barack Obama’s recently announced shift in America's nuclear position.  

A friendly reality check for exuberant Democrats on the first day of the Nuclear-Zero Pax Obama -- this treaty is almost certainly dead on arrival. I hedge only because the Democrats might try to jam it through using reconciliation. (Is it legal? The parliamentarian will decide!) Yes, Republican criticism has been relatively muted. The treaty is a give-away to Moscow, but it isn’t a total capitulation -- the cuts are marginal and the effect will largely be to continue the status quo, i.e. a decaying U.S. nuclear deterrent and rampant proliferation. We already knew that reversing those trends isn’t a top priority for the Obama administration (excepting Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, who seems to have put up a real fight on this one).  

On March 26, President Obama announced that the United States had reached a new strategic arms agreement with Russia. He explained that the new nuclear-arms treaty strengthens “our global efforts to stop the spread of these weapons, and to ensure that other nations meet their own responsibilities.”

The timing of the Russian-American agreement, and Obama’s urgency in signing it next week in Prague, is directly linked to these global efforts. For come this May, nuclear non-proliferation will be the subject of a major international conference—a review of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT)—at which the new treaty will be held up for all to emulate.

The Moscow Treaty signed by George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin in 2002 did not require the actual destruction of a single U.S. or Russian warhead. All that it mandated was that warheads be taken from operational status—say, sitting on the tip of an ICBM—and moved to storage.  Although the treaty was ratified by the Senate by a vote of 95 to 0, along the way Senate Democrats unrelentingly slammed the Bush administration for this deficiency.

From the White House:

The Treaty does not contain any constraints on testing, development or deployment of... current or planned United States long-range conventional strike capabilities.

Has President Obama ended a second cold war? A cascade of news stories and editorials are creating the impression that his newly concluded START agreement with Moscow heralds a breakthrough in an intensifying standoff between Russia and the United States. "The new treaty represents perhaps the most concrete foreign policy achievement for Mr. Obama since he took office 14 months ago,"  gushes the New York Times.  The Washington Post, for its part, hails the treaty as "the  most extensive nuclear arms-control agreement in nearly two decades”; it represents “President Obama's first victory in his ambitious agenda to move toward a nuclear-free world."

According to Josh Rogin over at Foreign Policy, there's a "growing realization on Capitol Hill that Senate ratification of the START follow-on treaty with Russia will probably not happen this year."