More Trouble for New START

Just when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Team Obama’s other boosters for the New START Treaty thought the time ripe to press the U.S. Senate to consent to the ratification of that accord, legislators were given two powerful new reasons to just say “no.”

First, the Kremlin conspicuously demonstrated last week how fraudulent are Obama administration efforts to portray U.S.-Russian relations as healthily “reset” after the bad old “Bush 43” years. On Friday, officials in Moscow announced that they will start fueling the Bushehr nuclear reactor on 21 August. As former UN Ambassador John Bolton told me in an exclusive Secure Freedom Radio interview yesterday, this is just the latest rebuff to the United States. It follows years of Russian rejections of Washington’s past pleas, first that construction of the complex at Bushehr not be finished, and then that fuel for it not be shipped to Iran.

As Amb. Bolton notes, with fuel inside the Bushehr reactor, the costs associated with destroying that facility will become, in all likelihood, unacceptably high. Any assault would likely scatter radioactive material widely, inflicting considerable collateral damage, particularly over time. And, once the site has been made in this way effectively unassailable, the reactor will give Iran a second route to nuclear weapons – a plutonium-powered one.

How many U.S. senators will want to be seen, particularly on the eve of closely contested elections, rewarding Moscow for so egregiously increasing the danger to the Middle East – and beyond? My guess is that few among those Democrats running this Fall will be willing to take on that political liability.

If that were the case before yesterday, still fewer such senators will be so inclined after a second shoe dropped: Rasmussen Reports released a poll conducted last week of 1,000 American adults. The following questions are of direct relevance to senators currently being importuned to support not just President Obama’s new arms control treaty but, by so doing, to validate his larger denuclearization agenda aimed at “ridding the world of nuclear weapons”:

1. How important is America’s nuclear weapons arsenal to the country’s national security?

51% Very important

26% Somewhat important

11% Not very important

4% Not at all likely

8% Not sure

2. Should the United States reduce the number of nuclear weapons in its arsenal?

27% Yes

57% No

16% Not sure

3. Should the United States halt the development of new nuclear weapons?

31% Yes

46% No

24% Not sure

4. How likely is it that other countries will reduce their nuclear weapons arsenal and development in response to the actions taken by the United States?

13% Very likely

24% Somewhat likely

41% Not very likely

14% Not at all likely

8% Not sure

In other words, the American people want no part of disarming this country. In stead, they expect their deterrent to be kept strong and modern; the polling data suggests how incredulous and angry the public will become when they learn the U.S. stockpile has not been modernized for over two decades, has been untested explosively for 18 years and the scientific and industrial infrastructure that supports that stockpile is now far less modern — and productive — than Iran’s, to say nothing of its Russian and Chinese counterparts. They also strongly reject the idea that underpins the Obama approach to New START and the “global zero” initiative, namely that the rest of the world will follow if the United States leads by exhibiting unilateral restraint.

Even before this fresh evidence of the native common sense of the American people became available, the New START Treaty was in trouble. On 4 August, after Senator John Kerry was compelled to postpone action by the Foreign Relations Committee on a resolution of ratification until mid-September (at the earliest), I observed that time was not on the side of the treaty’s proponents: “START is not dead just yet, of course, but Kerry’s action is an implicit acknowledgment that enough senators are not prepared to rubber-stamp an accord that is becoming more controversial – and more of a political liability – by the day.”

The margins of the responses to the Rasmussen poll (even taking into account its plus-or-minus 3% margin of error at the 95% confidence level) should serve as a warning to all members of the Senate, and most especially to those seeking reelection this Fall. They are on notice that there are real political risks associated with endorsing the New START Treaty and, thereby, legitimating President Obama’s bid to disarm the only nuclear power on earth whose deterrent he can actually render obsolete, unsupportable and incredible: ours.

The election in November seems increasingly likely to bring more Republicans to the Senate – including some who will be seated in time for the lame duck session this Fall. None of the latter will have had a chance to participate in any of the 18 hearings on New START held this year – stacked-deck affairs in which ten times more treaty proponents were heard from than opponents. Such electoral results would seem, therefore, to ensure that New START will not be ratified in 2010. And its fate will become thereafter only more problematic, especially if the other party to that accord, a still malevolent and un-reset Russia, turns out to have materially helped the Iranian mullahs start a nuclear war.