New START

The U.S. is far better off with this treaty than without it. It strengthens the security of the U.S. and our allies and promotes strategic stability between the world’s two major nuclear powers.
– Robert M. Gates, Secretary of Defense

The US Senate is considering ratification of the new START treaty with Russia. The deliberations, broadcast on C-Span, provide an opportunity to see Senators at their best and worst. A two-thirds majority will be needed to ratify the treaty, and the obstructionists are out in force attempting to deny the Obama administration any progress on any program, regardless of how much sense it makes. Ratification of START makes sense simply because the old treaty lapsed last December and without a treaty in effect, there is no mechanism to monitor the two countries’ progress toward the modest disarmament they’ve agreed upon. Sadly, ratification would be a concrete accomplishment of the administration. The take-no-prisoners competitive posture of the right-wing in America seeks to deny Obama any progress toward any goal. So, although a bi-partisan roll call of defense experts, military leadership, past and present Secretaries of State and Defense and countless others favor ratification, all it takes is thirty-four obstructionist Senators to draw down the curtain on any disarmament progress for the next four or five years.

Jeff Sessions of Alabama is a piece of work. C-Span, dry and formalistic though much of the content may be, provides an opportunity to see Sessions and his ilk at work ripping apart the fabric of the United States of America.

Coretta Scott King, Albert Schweitzer, and Benjamin Spock famously brought public attention to the horror of nuclear war when they founded The Committee for a SANE Nuclear Policy (SANE) in 1957. At that time, the US and the Soviet Union had entered an arms race with the common strategic goal of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD). They were building bombs and bombers and missiles as fast as possible in order to make sure that no one on the planet would survive a nuclear war. The MADness continues to this day, albeit somewhat less dramatically. As of mid-2009 fewer than 5000 strategic atomic warheads are deployed by the combined forces of the United States and the Russian Federation (Russian MADness, US MADness). There are oodles of tactical nukes deployed of course, but these weapons are small potatoes, their yields about the same as the modest devices that ended World War II with the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Tactical nukes don’t count in the Strategic Arms book keeping biz.

Besides the US and Russia, at least seven other countries have nuclear arsenals, but none have tied their defense strategies to the craziness of mutually assured destruction. Here’s a link to an article in support of the START treaty by Robert Gates, former Bush and now Obama Secretary of Defense.