Senate Passes START Arms Control Treaty
The NY Times reports:
The Senate gave final approval on Wednesday to a new arms control treaty with Russia, scaling back leftover cold war nuclear arsenals and capping a surprisingly successful lame-duck session for President Obama just weeks after his party’s electoral debacle.
The 71-to-26 vote sends the treaty, known as New Start, to the president for his signature, and cements what is probably the most tangible foreign policy achievement of Mr. Obama’s two years in office. Thirteen Republicans joined a unanimous Democratic caucus to vote in favor, exceeding the two-thirds majority required by the Constitution.
The ratification vote was the third bipartisan victory for the president in the waning days of the session, while Democrats still control both houses of Congress. The treaty had assumed such symbolic importance for Mr. Obama’s presidency that Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. took the rare step of presiding personally over the vote, in his role as president of the Senate. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, a former Senator, was on the floor as well.
“This is the most significant arms control agreement in nearly two decades,” Mr. Obama said at a news conference after the vote. “It will make us safer and will reduce our nuclear arsenals along with Russia’s.” Reprising one of Ronald Reagan’s famous lines, Mr. Obama added that the return of nuclear inspectors under the treaty will mean that “we will be able to trust but verify.”
Senator John Kerry, the Massachusetts Democrat who led the floor fight for the treaty, said the vote will move the world away from the risk of nuclear disaster. “The winners are not defined by party or ideology,” he said. “The winners are the American people, who are safer with fewer Russian missiles aimed at them.”
Senator Jon Kyl, the Arizona Republican who led the opposition, lamented the refusal to amend the treaty. “The precedent here that we’re establishing is that the Senate really is a rubber stamp,” he said. “Whatever a president negotiates with the Russians or somebody else we dare not change because otherwise it will have to be renegotiated to some great detriment to humanity.”
Still, the Senate did agree to several proposals by Mr. Kyl and other Republicans to rewrite the resolution of ratification accompanying the treaty to reaffirm American plans to build missile defense in Europe despite Russian objections and to modernize the nation’s nuclear weapons complex to make sure a smaller arsenal is still effective.
Arms control advocates welcomed the Senate vote. Richard Burt, head of an anti-nuclear advocacy group called Global Zero, said the vote “was imperative for national security” and “will strengthen U.S.-Russian relations.” Daryl G. Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, called the vote “remarkable in this time of hyper-partisanship” and called on the Obama administration to move to bring down nuclear stockpiles further.
But Michael A. Needham, chief executive of the conservative Heritage Action advocacy group, said the administration should withdraw from the treaty if Russia attempted to block missile defense, aid Iran or refuse to consider reductions in tactical nuclear weapons. “All eyes are now on the Obama administration,” Mr. Needham said.
The treaty obliges each country to have no more than 1,550 strategic warheads and 700 launchers deployed within seven years, and it provides for a resumption of on-site inspections, which halted when the original Start treaty expired last year. It is the first arms treaty with Russia in eight years, and the first that a Democratic president has both signed and pushed through the Senate.
While it will make smaller reductions in deployed weapons than its predecessors did, the treaty took on outsized importance in recent weeks as both American political parties invested it with greater meaning and turned the ratification debate into a proxy fight over national security in the 21st century. No other Russian-American arms treaty that was ultimately ratified ever generated as much opposition on the final vote.
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