Council for a Livable World

When the START I treaty expired at the end of 2009, the U.S. lost the ability to inspect Russian nuclear arsenals to make sure they are not building new nuclear weapons.  It has now been over 355 days since we’ve had inspectors in Russia verifying their arsenal and it is time we get back to Ronald Reagan’s “trust, but verify.”

The New START treaty fixes that problem and makes Americans safer by making significant cuts in the U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals. While the treaty enjoys strong support from foreign policy experts on both the left and the right and multiple polls show the American public overwhelmingly favors the treaty, Republicans in the Senate are fighting against holding a vote on treaty ratification.

It is crucial to put pressure on the Senate to pass New START this year.  Below is a list of Republican Senators who will be important in deciding the fate of this treaty.  If you live in one of these important states, please take a few minutes to call your Senators and let them know that you support New START and urge them to swiftly approve this treaty! Click here to get your Senator’s numbers and a call script you can use to speak with their office!

Sen. John McCain – Arizona
Sen. Saxby Chambliss – Georgia
Sen.  Johnny Isakson – Georgia
Sen. Mark Kirk – Illinois
Sen.  Richard Lugar – Indiana
Sen. Susan Collins – Maine
Sen. Olympia Snowe – Maine
Sen.  Scott Brown – Massachusetts
Sen. Johnny Cochran – Mississippi
Sen. Judd Gregg – New Hampshire
Sen. Lindsay Graham – South Carolina
Sen. Bob Corker – Tennessee
Sen.  Lamar Alexander – Tennessee
Sen. Bob Bennett – Utah

In an op-ed in The Washington Post, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates wrote:

Before this session of Congress ends, we urge senators to approve an arms control treaty that would again allow U.S. inspectors access to Russian strategic sites and reduce the number of nuclear weapons held by both nations to a level not seen since the 1950s.

New START is a top national security priority and we cannot let this drop off the agenda this year.

We need your help to get this done! Click here to call your Senator!

Help spread the word. Please pass this message along to your friends and family in any of these eleven states!

Thanks for all of your hard work!!

The Council for a Livable World’s 2010 Senate contest officially ended November 16th, and we have a winner. Two winners, in fact.

The first prize winner of $100 goes to Jeremy Bratt, who works for Senator Byron Dorgan of North Dakota.

Jeremy only got two contests wrong. Both, coincidentally, were in Ohio – the race for Governor and the Ohio 16 House contest. The $100 will come in handy, because with his boss retiring at the end of the year, he needs a new job.

Perhaps he can now become a political wizard.

There was a five-way tie for second place of those who only predicted three contests incorrectly. Using the first tie breaker by correctly guessing that there would be 53 Democratic Senators in the new Senate, the second place winner was our own Guy Stevens, Chief Operating Officer of Council for a Livable World…but…

As Guy is a member of the Council family, he is ineligible to receive any money.

The others who tied for second place are Jeff Lindemeyer, Stephen Schwartz, Peter Ferenbach and Leonard Weiss.

Using the second tie breaker — how many Democrats would be elected to the next Congress — Jeff Lindemeyer is our next winner and collects $50. He guessed that the Democrats would hold 205 House seats, (although the actual number is 190 Democrats as of today, because there are still about half a dozen House races that have not officially been called).

Honorable mention goes to nine people who got four wrong: Bob Segal, Mark Anderson, David Culp, Arlen Grossman, Shawn M Werner, Arnold Kohen, Audrey Sheppard, Roger Hannah and Henry Bethe

We also discarded from the calculation the Alaska Senate race, which was decided after our November 16 deadline.

A total of 470 people participated in the pool.

Thank you all, and on to the next contest!

Straight from the mouths of our military leadership and current and former high-ranking government officials from both parties…

Gen. Chilton: Russians unconstrained, lose insight into Russian nuclear arsenal
Without New START, we would rapidly lose insight into Russian strategic nuclear force developments and activities, and our force modernization planning and hedging strategy would be more complex and more costly. Without such a regime, we would unfortunately be left to use worst-case analyses regarding our own force requirements.  Further, we would be required increasingly to focus low-density/high demand intelligence collection and analysis assets on Russian nuclear forces.”
 [General Kevin Chilton, STRATCOM Commander, 6/16/10]  

Adm. Mullen: Lost of trust weakens deterrence
“And as I have said many times, in many different contexts, in this fast-paced, flatter world of ours, information, and the trust it engenders, is every bit as much a deterrent as any weapon we deploy.”
[Chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff Mike Mullen, 11/12/10]

Brent Scowcroft: Nuclear negotiations thrown into chaos
“The principal result of non-ratification would be to throw the whole nuclear negotiating situation into a state of chaos.”
[General Brent Scowcroft (Ret.), President George H.W. Bush’s National Security Advisor, Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing, 6/10/10]

James Schlesinger: U.S. non-proliferation efforts undermined
“Failure to ratify this treaty “would have a detrimental effect on our ability to influence others with regard to, particularly, the nonproliferation issue.”
[James Schlesinger, Secretary of Defense for Presidents Nixon and Ford and the Secretary of Energy for President Carter, 4/29/10]

William Perry: U.S. leadership on non-proliferation forfeited
“If we fail to ratify this treaty, the U.S. forfeits any right to leadership on nonproliferation policies.”
[Former Defense Secretary William Perry, 4/29/10]

Sen. Richard Lugar: Work to secure nukes in Russia would suffer
“It is unlikely that Moscow would sustain cooperative efforts indefinitely without the New START Treaty coming into force.”
[Sen. Richard Lugar,11/8/10]

Henry Kissinger: Adversaries and allies unsettled
“This START treaty is an evolution of treaties that have been negotiated in previous administrations of both parties. And its principal provisions are an elaboration or a continuation of existing agreements.  Therefore, a rejection of them would indicate that a new period of American policy had started that might rely largely on the unilateral reliance of its nuclear weapons, and would therefore create an element of uncertainty in the calculations of both adversaries and allies. And therefore, I think it would have an unsettling impact on the international environment.”
[Henry Kissinger, National Security Advisor to President Nixon and Secretary of State to Presidents Nixon and Ford, 5/25/10]

Robert Kagan: Strengthens Putin, undermines cooperation on Iran, Afghanistan
“There’s no getting around it: Failure to pass START will help empower Putin . . . On Iran, Russia will become less cooperative . . . Russia’s refusal to deliver the S-300 air defense system to Tehran and its earlier agreement to allow the U.S. military to ship material to Afghanistan across Russian territory have been the reset’s big tangible payoffs.”
[Robert Kagan, Brookings Institution senior fellow, 11/12/10]

Los Alamos director: Less information about Russians
“Without data from new START, would that create more uncertainty for us about Russia? Certainly the country would not get as much information that the monitoring program would provide through new START.”
[Michael Anastasio, Director of The Los Alamos National Laboratory, 7/15/10]

Lawrence Livermore director: Less certainty
“I think that it is certainly true that the START treaty that is under your consideration does offer the ability to understand, provide more data on what’s going on in Russia with their systems. As a technical person, data is always valuable and so it will certainly reduce our uncertainties.”
[George Miller, Director of The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory,7/15/10]

Former Senator Chuck Hagel: U.S. leadership on non-proliferation compromised
“If this were to go down, the ripple effect consequences around the world would be the worst possible outcome we’ve seen since World War II. It would set in motion the disintegration of any confidence in the leadership of the two major nuclear powers to deal with this and it would set in motion a disintegration of any structural boundaries and capacities to deal with this. This would devastating not just for arms control but for security interests worldwide.”
[Chuck Hagel, former Republican Senator from Nebraska, 7/19/10]

Lt. General John Castellaw (US Marine Corps, retired): lose inspections, worst-case planning
“U.S. ability to conduct on-site inspections will continue to be suspended . . .U.S. is obliged to plan on worst-case scenarios with regard to our own deployments.”
[Lt. General John Castellaw (US Marine Corps, retired), 11/15/10]

Lt. General Dirk Jameson (USAF, retired): Less information about Russians
“Without it [New START] we’d be poorly equipped to monitor Russia’s arsenal.”
[Lt. General Dirk Jameson, former Deputy Commander in Chief and Chief of Staff of U.S. Strategic Command, 7/19/10]

By now you all know that arms control bulldozer John Bolton and torture apologist John Yoo penned a mendacious op-ed attacking the New START treaty in Wednesday’s New York Times.  Though Bolton and Yoo have less credibility on national security issues than a three dollar bill, it’s still important to set the record straight.

Enter Slate’s Fred Kaplan. As he did with Mitt Romney’s disingenuous diatribe against New START, Kaplan patiently and cogently takes apart Bolton and Yoo’s claims. Here’s how he begins:

Last July, when Mitt Romney attacked the New START treaty in a Washington Post op-ed, I wrote that in 35 years of following debates on nuclear arms control I’d never seen anything quite as “thoroughly ignorant” about the subject.

On the op-ed page of today’s New York Times, John Bolton and John Yoo take after the treaty with a slightly different set of arguments, and I’ve never seen anything quite as slippery and dishonest.

When Bolton was George W. Bush’s undersecretary of state for arms control, his main job was to serve as Dick Cheney’s spy inside Foggy Bottom and to derail any movement toward arms control. Yoo was Bush’s deputy assistant attorney general whose claim to fame was devising a legal rationale for torture.

I will say this: Their Times piece shows them true to form.

You can read Kaplan’s full response here. Ben Loehrke and Page van der Linden put together nice replies as well.

Though I don’t have much to add to Kaplan’s magnificent rebuttal, I want to quickly highlight the opening paragraph in the Bolton/Yoo op-ed. They write:

The sweeping Democratic midterm losses last week raise serious questions for President Obama and a lame-duck Congress. Voters want government brought closer to the vision the framers outlined in the Constitution, and the first test could be the fate of the flawed New Start arms control treaty, which was signed by President Obama and President Dmitri Medvedev of Russia last spring but awaits ratification. The Senate should heed the will of the voters and either reject the treaty or amend it so that it doesn’t weaken our national defense.

As John has noted, New START (or any foreign policy issue for that matter) did not play a role in the recently concluded election. In any event, the will of the voters appears to point in exactly the opposite direction of what Bolton and Yoo suggest. According to an AP-GfK poll conducted just after last weeks elections:

Two-thirds want the Senate to ratify Obama’s nuclear arms reduction treaty with Russia, including most Democrats, about 6 in 10 Republicans and independents — and even about half of conservative tea party supporters.

It’s nice to know that a large majority of Americans are listening to our military, which has been telling them that New START is a good thing for the country. It’s too bad that Bolton and Yoo would prefer to reject that advice.

Associated Press story on AP-GfK Poll showing strong and bi-partisan support for New START

Los Angeles Times – ALAN FRAM,Associated Press Writer
November 11, 2010

(excerpt)

“Two-thirds want the Senate to ratify Obama’s nuclear arms reduction treaty with Russia, including most Democrats, about 6 in 10 Republicans and independents — and even about half of conservative tea party supporters. Some Republican senators oppose the treaty. The Obama administration hopes to win Senate approval in the upcoming lameduck session of Congress and will need GOP support to garner the 67 votes required.”

THE AP-GfK POLL

November, 2010
Conducted by GfK Roper Public Affairs & Corporate Communications
A telephone survey of the American general population (ages 18+)
Interview dates: November 3 – 8, 2010
Number of interviews: 1,000
Margin of error: +/- 4.1 percentage points at the 95% confidence level

Should the United States Senate ratify the strategic arms reduction treaty, which would require both the United States and Russia to reduce the number of deployed nuclear weapons, or not?
67% Yes, should ratify
29% No, should not ratify
4% Don’t know

Which statement comes closest to your view?
62 % No countries should be allowed to have nuclear weapons
16% Only the United States and its allies should be allowed to have nuclear
weapons
15% Only countries that already have nuclear weapons should be allowed to
have them
6% Any country that is able to develop nuclear weapons should be allowed
to have them
2% Don’t know