DAVID E. SANGER
NYTIMES
December 21, 2010
The new arms control treaty with Russia, whose ratification now seems assured, was initially envisioned as a speed bump on President Obama’s nuclear agenda, a modest reduction in nuclear forces that would enable him to tackle much harder issues on the way to his dream of eventually eliminating nuclear weapons altogether.
It turned out to be a mountain. And while Mr. Obama is savoring another major victory, just days after he won repeal of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” rules that dominated the lives of gay and lesbian members of the military, his own aides acknowledge that the lesson of the battle over the treaty is that the political divide on national security is widening. The next steps on Mr. Obama’s nuclear agenda now appear harder than ever.
While Mr. Obama overwhelmed Republican opponents of the treaty, called New Start, it would be a much heavier lift to get the next Senate to approve a long-languishing treaty to ban all nuclear tests. The world’s newest nuclear powers — led by Pakistan, an ostensibly close American ally — have been maneuvering to kill Mr. Obama’s plan to stop production of more fissile material, the building blocks needed by nuclear aspirants like Iran. And the next treaty with Russia on how to deal with its small, tactical nuclear weapons promises to be a bigger fight.
“If the Start treaty was this hard, you can only imagine how difficult the rest will be,” said William J. Perry, a secretary of defense during the Clinton administration and one of the four former cold warriors who helped formulate the goal of a world without nuclear weapons that Mr. Obama has embraced. “But even though it was small, it was vital — because everything we need to do in the future, starting with halting the Iranian program, requires working with Russia and showing that we are serious about bringing our own nuclear stockpiles down.”
None of that takes away from the historic nature of Mr. Obama’s victory. Democratic presidents have a terrible history of getting nuclear arms control agreements approved, especially with Russia or its predecessor, the Soviet Union. That was largely accomplished by presidents with names like Nixon, Reagan and Bush. Republicans, it turned out, would vote for such treaties only if they were negotiated by other Republicans.
So Mr. Obama’s accomplishment stands in contrast to President Jimmy Carter’s failure to win passage of the SALT II treaty, which was negotiated in 1979 but never ratified after the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. Two decades later, the Senate rejected President Bill Clinton’s treaty to ban all underground nuclear testing, in a 51-to-48 vote.
Mr. Obama came to office vowing that the United States would finally join that accord, called the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, soon after New Start passed. Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. repeated that pledge this year.
So it was telling when John Kerry, a Massachusetts Democrat and the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who led the advocacy in the Senate for New Start, gave a curt answer for a question about the test ban treaty: “There’s just been no talk about that right now, none whatsoever.”
As Mr. Obama thinks about the next steps in his nuclear agenda, particularly how to maneuver it through an altered Senate, he has to contend with the fact that the Republican Party is now split into two nuclear camps, the formers and the futures.
The list of former cold warriors who supported New Start jumped out from the front pages of the cold war and the George W. Bush administration: Henry A. Kissinger, George P. Shultz and Condoleezza Rice. George H. W. Bush, who signed the Start II treaty in 1993 with President Boris N. Yeltsin of Russia, issued a brief statement of support.
But some of the current powers in the party, including Republicans who may have their eyes on challenging Mr. Obama, from Mitt Romney to Sarah Palin, denounced it as a weakening of the United States, arguing that it limited missile defenses. Mr. Obama ultimately beat that argument back, pointing to his deployment plan of a series of layered missile defenses over the next decade, mostly aimed at containing the likes of nuclear aspirants, chiefly Iran.
“By and large, this debate has revealed two breeds of Republicans,” said Franklin C. Miller, a hawk on nuclear issues who helped devise President George W. Bush’s nuclear strategies, but also worked for his four predecessors.
“There are those who understand the history of the cold war and the need to put verifiable controls on nuclear weapons,” he said. “And there is another school which may or may not understand the issues, but is happy to treat them as a political football.”
Other opponents — including some who will remain in the Senate next year — seemed unable to let go of the dreams left over from the Reagan administration. Senator James M. Inhofe, an Oklahoma Republican and a senior member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and Jim DeMint, Republican of South Carolina, said at hearings on the treaty that they were seeking a comprehensive missile shield over the United States that would protect the country from incoming Russian or Chinese missiles.
That is a vision even the most enthusiastic missile defense enthusiasts gave up some time ago, in favor of more limited defenses against a few missiles shot by the likes of Iran or North Korea.
The advocates of the treaty responded to the opposition by making claims about its powers that even left some in the White House in wonderment.
When the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, declared recently that Republicans would have to decide that “you either want to keep nuclear weapons out of the hands of terrorists, or you don’t,” administration officials could not explain what, exactly, in the treaty’s provisions would impede terrorist access to Russia’s nuclear arsenal. (Loose nuclear material in Russia, which the United States has worked for more than a decade to remove or secure, is not covered by the treaty.)
Some of the opposition Mr. Obama faced this time was on substantive grounds. Many opponents worried about everything from whether Russia would cheat to whether Washington was tying its hands in a dangerous world, an issue that will be even more potent in the future.
Mr. Obama won the day by persuading a handful of senators that that the treaty’s failure would undercut Russian cooperation on a range of future security issues, from countering Iran — on which Moscow has been increasingly helpful — to keeping supply lines open to Afghanistan.
But on the broader argument — the argument that America could ensure its security even without nuclear weapons — Mr. Obama appears to have made little progress in his first two years. Mr. Miller notes that among America’s nuclear-armed allies, only Britain has fully embraced eliminating nuclear weapons, though NATO and the United Nations Security Council have both embraced the vision.
To keep nations in the Middle East from acquiring nuclear weapons to counter Iran, he added, “we are likely to have to extend our nuclear shield” to countries not now covered by it — something Mr. Obama’s Nuclear Posture Review, published this year, hints at.
In fact, the ultimate test of Mr. Obama’s nuclear-free vision will almost certainly be what happens with Iran. If it succeeds in its quest for a nuclear capability, “that would do more damage to the effort than anything,” Gary Samore, the president’s top nuclear adviser, said recently. “That’s the real test of where we are headed.”
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