New START, The Unraveling

The past 48 hours have yielded some dramatic setbacks for President Obama in his drive to force the lame-duck Senate to rubber-stamp the New START arms control treaty with Russia. Yet, despite clear signals that this will not – and should not – happen, Team Obama is still insisting that this flawed treaty should be rammed through during the lame-duck session.

The administration is basically claiming that: 1) without the New START Treaty, the United States will be unable to monitor Russian nuclear forces and that, therefore, the threat from Russia may grow, unbeknownst to us; 2) should New START not be ratified, there will be a “shattering” of the “fragile consensus” about expending the many billions of dollars in additional funds needed to ensure the future viability of at least the nuclear weapons complex’s facilities (although, not those needed to replace the weapons that make it up); and 3) the present Senate has held 18 hearings on this treaty and, therefore, its members should be the ones responsible for voting on its ratification.

The single most influential member of the Senate on arms control matters – Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona, the Republican Whip – is not buying these arguments. Yesterday, he informed Majority Leader Harry Reid that appropriate consideration of the treaty cannot be accomplished during the remainder of this session of Congress. In a statement released by his office yesterday, Sen. Kyl recounted:

“When Majority Leader Harry Reid asked me if I thought the treaty could be considered in the lame duck session, I replied I did not think so given the combination of other work Congress must do and the complex and unresolved issues related to START and modernization. I appreciate the recent effort by the Administration to address some of the issues that we have raised and I look forward to continuing to work with Senator Kerry, DOD, and DOE officials.”

With respect to verification, like Senator Kit Bond, the Vice Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Sen. Kyl understands that the New START Treaty is not effectively verifiable. The Russians will cheat on it – as they have on every single previous arms control agreement. And given the accord’s limitations on inspection, telemetry and other arrangements that might actually shed useful light on Russian non-compliance, the Kremlin can be reasonably certain it will be neither caught nor penalized for such behavior.

Concerning the funding for refurbishing the industrial base, the fact that the Obama administration is even hinting that it might not support the investment necessary to replace Manhattan Project-era and other obsolete facilities in the nuclear weapons complex makes one thing perfectly clear: The budgetary inducements to buy votes for New START are unlikely ever to materialize because, in the end, the President is determined to rid the world of nuclear weapons, starting with ours. The right response should be, as Sen. Kyl has signaled: Thanks, but no thanks.

Finally, the argument that a given Senate (i.e., that of the 111th Congress) that has held nearly two score hearings on New START means that its members – and only its members – can make informed decisions is transparent nonsense. For one thing, the treaty was hardly exposed to critical examination in the course of nearly all those hearings. While there were, indeed, 18 of them, only four critics were permitted to give testimony about the treaty’s deficiencies. And, there is every reason to believe that more comprehensive, rigorous and balanced hearings conducted during the 112th Congress will afford the Senate a far more accurate basis for deliberating about this treaty.

The last point was powerfully reinforced yesterday as a bipartisan group of former Senators released a joint letter calling on the Senate’s Democratic and Republican leaders not to break with past precedent and ensure that the New START Treaty is considered only at such time as it can be carefully deliberated and fully debated – i.e., not during a lame-duck session. (The letter was reissued as former Senators Wayne Allard (R-CO) and Zell Miller (D-GA) joined with thirteen of their colleagues who had originally sent it last week.)

The signers of the letter are now as follows: Senators Rick Santorum, Jim Talent, Bill Armstrong, Norm Coleman, Conrad Burns, Slade Gorton, Hank Brown, Malcolm Wallop, George Allen, Roger Jepsen, Don Nickles, Steve Symms, Bob Smith, Wayne Allard and Zell Miller.

Sen. Miller’s opposition to the treaty on its merits – including its possible negative implications for missile defense and its failure to address the huge imbalance between the U.S. and Russia on tactical nuclear weapons, among others – marks the first time a prominent Democratic political leader has broken ranks on New START.

For his part, the Senate’s top Republican, Sen. Mitch McConnell, has repeatedly indicated that Sen. Kyl’s views would carry great sway with him. No arms control treaty has ever passed the Senate without the support of the Republican leader. Consequently, it would appear that the Arizona senator effectively has just ensured that the New START Treaty will indeed be subjected to far more rigorous scrutiny and quality control in the 112th Congress than was the case in the 111th.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton nonetheless today joined treaty-boosters and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s chairman and ranking member, respectively, Sens. John Kerry and Richard Lugar, in an impassioned joint appeal for New START’s ratification right now. She declared to the media: “We can and we must go forward now on the New START treaty during the lame duck session.”

As a practical matter, if the President keeps insisting that the Senate rubber-stamp New START – in the face of legitimate and principled opposition from Senator Kyl and, among others, the aforementioned former Senators – Team Obama may have to worry more about “resetting” its relationship with the United States Senate than doing so with respect to the irreconcilable Vladimir Putin’s Russia!