ConvoTracker: Obama Will Do Everything He Can To Get Rid Of Nukes

Dylan Matthews is a research assistant at the Washington Post, a president of Perspective: Harvard’s Liberal Monthly, and a biweekly columnist for the Harvard Crimson. He blogs intermittently at his personal blog, Minipundit.

The US doesn’t have that many real national security threats. Great power conflict has become a thing of the past, and conventional terrorism is rare and a largely criminal matter. One of the few challenges that remains is that posed by loose nuclear weapons. Despite efforts like the Nunn-Lugar program, the Russian nuclear supply is still not nearly secure enough. While the more breathless predictions of analysts like Graham Allison–who puts the chances of a successful nuclear terrorism attack at 50/50–strain credulity, even a small chance of an attack that would result in hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of casualties is frightening enough.

While there are measures that can and should be taken to secure nuclear supplies, the best way in the long-run to prevent a detonation of a nuclear weapon, whether by a terrorist group, a state, or any other actors, is to reduce the global supply of weapons, period. This insight is at the core of the Global Zero campaign, a coalition of foreign policy elder statesmen united in their commitment to eliminating nuclear weapons from the earth. President Obama has embraced this cause, and to his credit, appears to be taking strong action in this direction. After Secretary of State Clinton left Russia this past week, reductions in US and Russian nuclear deployments appeared to be forthcoming:

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and the Russian foreign minister said after talks here that they awaited word soon from negotiators in Geneva who have been working 18-hour days to wrap up the agreement.

The Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) is a top priority of President Obama, who initially had pledged to finish it by last year. Obama spoke by phone with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev last weekend to iron out remaining obstacles, giving new momentum to the talks, officials said.
…The new START pact would replace a 1991 treaty that expired in December. Obama and Medvedev agreed last year that it would reduce deployed “strategic” or long-range warheads from the current ceiling of 2,200 to somewhere between 1,500 and 1,675. It also will trim the number of bombers and missiles that launch the nuclear weapons.

“We have every reason to believe we are now at the finish line,” [Russian Foreign Minister Sergei] Lavrov told a news conference Thursday.

Like all treaties, however, START faces a vote in the Senate, where the 2/3 supermajority requirement for treaties will be tough to meet, especially with Senators like John Kyl, John McCain, and Joe Lieberman criticizing proposed deals before they’re even reached. Every sign to date suggests that the Obama administration will go hard in trying to get START passed, but whether the Senate GOP puts partisanship above the security of the United States and the world remains to be seen.

–Dylan Matthews