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The Senate today voted 58 – 40 to approve a Levin (D-MI) – McCain (R-AZ) amendment to eliminate the $1.75 billion the Senate Armed Services Committee added for the F-22 aircraft.  

The vote was significant because if those supporting more aircraft had prevailed despite the fact that the plane has no utility in Iraq or Afghanistan, is egregiously expensive and is strenuously opposed by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and threatened by a veto from the President, the vote would have been widely interpreted by the media as a crushing defeat for the Obama Administration.  

The Administration is already facing great challenges over the still faltering economy and difficult bills dealing with the health care bill and climate change.

The vote was also significant because it provided an opportunity for the Defense Department and Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin to rev up their vote counting operation.  They set up procedures to count noses, persuade the undecideds and win over those who started out supporting the F-22.

This vote counting operation, with Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John Kerry, will be vital when the Senate gets to later votes on a START follow-on treaty and the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.

Read the rest of my analysis and see how your Senators voted here.

 

Last week President Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev announced a preliminary agreement to reduce the size of each country’s nuclear weapons stockpiles.

From July 6 through July 8, the two leaders met in Moscow for their first full summit. Their announcement that the U.S. and Russia will negotiate a successor agreement to the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START), a crucial accord that reduces the sizes of the two countries’ nuclear weapons stockpiles, is an excellent beginning to reviving arms control agreements and nonproliferation efforts.

The START treaty, which expires in December 2009, has already greatly reduced the dangers posed by U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals. Under the treaty, both countries cut their deployed nuclear weapons from 10,000 at the end of the Cold war to fewer than 6,000 by December 2001. In addition to reducing the number of weapons each side holds, the treaty has important procedures to verify that each country is complying.

The new agreement that will act as a successor to START will seek additional cuts of up to one-third from present levels in nuclear arsenals beyond the 2002 Moscow Treaty on Strategic Offensive Reductions.

Despite the promising rhetoric, the real work has just begun.  An initial report on the negotiations is due by the end of the month, but completing negotiations and winning a vote in the Senate is a tall order to complete by the December expiration date.  Regardless of when this new treaty is approved, it is a necessary component to restarting nonproliferation efforts around the world.

The election results in November 2010 depend a lot on who decides to run for office and who forgoes a run. In the past days, Republicans had some important Senate pickups. In Illinois, the big dog Democrat, Attorney General Lisa Madigan(D), who see…

Yesterday, the New York Times ran a 2,600-word front page article that explored the evolution of President Obama’s thinking about nuclear weapons. Council for a Livable World was featured prominently in the article for our endorsement of Obama in his 2004 Senate race.

Here are the four paragraphs about us:

But in 2003 Mr. Obama began his unlikely campaign for the United States Senate and answered a detailed questionnaire from the Council for a Livable World, an advocacy organization in Washington that evaluates candidates on arms control issues.

“He opposes building a new generation of nuclear weapons,” the organization said in a fund-raising letter supporting Mr. Obama’s candidacy. At the time, the Bush administration had proposed developing nuclear arms that could shatter deeply buried enemy bunkers.

“The United States has far more nuclear weapons than it needs,” the organization quoted Mr. Obama as saying, “and any attempt by the U.S. government to develop or produce new nuclear weapons only undermines U.S. nonproliferation efforts around the world.”

The organization said Mr. Obama also supported an American-financed effort to secure Russian nuclear arms, as well as ratification of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty, still in limbo two decades after Mr. Obama wrote about it.