According to The Hill's Blog Briefing Room yesterday:
"President Obama assured Russian President Dmitry Medvedev on Sunday that the lame-duck session will be used to ratify the START nuclear-arms treaty.
"According to the White House pool report, Obama gave his commitment to his Russian counterpart as the two met, both lauding their friendship and relationship built up over the past two years.
""I reiterated my commitment to getting the START treaty done during the lame-duck session," Obama said at a photo op, calling passage of the treaty a "top priority" of his administration."
There are a few obvious questions to ask about this commitment. Why push the treaty through in a lame-duck session when the newly-elected Congress will be seated in six weeks? Why was the treaty not considered before the election? What is in the treaty that makes the President want to push it through in a lame-duck session?
The answers to these questions may be found in a Heritage.org article about the problems with the START treaty. The article at Heritage lists twelve flaws in the treaty.
Flaw #1: New START fails to speak to the issue of protecting and defending the U.S. and its allies against strategic attack.
Flaw #2: New START imposes restrictions on U.S. missile defense options.
Flaw #3: The atrophying U.S. nuclear arsenal and weapons enterprise make reductions in the U.S. strategic nuclear arsenal even more dangerous.
Flaw #4: New START counts conventional "prompt global strike" weapons against the numerical limits imposed on nuclear arms.
Flaw #5: The Obama Administration has made New START an essential part of a broader agenda that pursues the goals of nuclear nonproliferation and nuclear disarmament concurrently.
Flaw #6: New START's limits are uninformed by a targeting policy that is governed by the protect and defend strategy.
Flaw #7: New START leaves in place a large Russian advantage in nonstrategic (tactical) nuclear weapons.
Flaw #8: New START does not appear to limit rail-mobile intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs).
Flaw #9: The BCC's mandate is overly broad.
Flaw #10: The New START limitations are unclear on whether they would permit the U.S. to counter future threats from a combination of states.
Flaw #11: New START is not adequately verifiable.
Flaw #12: The Obama Administration believes that Russian cheating under New START is only a marginal concern.
This is one of those articles I occasionally post that includes a lot of things I don't really understand. Having read through the Heritage Foundation's objections to the START Treaty, I am relatively sure that it would not be a good treaty for the United States. I think the benchmark for any treaty should be (in the words of Ronald Reagan), "Trust, but verify." We have no reason to believe that the world is a safe place for any nation. To sign a treaty that essentially steps away from our commitment to self-defense is not smart. Hopefully Congress will not approve this treaty.
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