Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana lost his Republican primary yesterday to Tea Party backed conservative Richard Mourdock, after more than 35 years in the Senate. His defeat is not just a defeat for Lugar and his supporters, but a defeat for American national security and indeed the entire world. In the words of fellow Senate Foreign Relations Committee member Senator John Kerry, "It will soon almost sound cliché to say that America is safer today because of Dick Lugar's 36 years of service in the Senate, but it really does bear repeating."

Lugar's challenger, Richard Mourdock, said in his victory speech, that his campaign was about ideas for the future of both the Republican Party and our nation as a whole. Unfortunately, Mourdock's win is part of a disturbing pattern of election victories for Tea Party ideas, of unilateralists over more moderate, internationally minded Republicans.

If the people will lead, the leaders will follow. The ratification of the new START treaty, without question, was uncertain as recently as one week ago. But because of the indefatigable efforts of us, citizens who stand for global solutions to global challenges, we turned the tide. We moved the mountain. We carried the day.

Imagine what other mountains we're going to move in the months and years to come.

At the heart of the new START treaty stands a Big Idea that can be expressed in a single sentence. When both we and our potential adversaries agree to mutually limit our military muscle and to mutually open ourselves to external inspections, that's better for us, for American national security, than when we insist that we cannot allow our armaments or our sovereignty to be constrained in any way (as the right demagogically demands), and consequently our potential adversaries remain wholly unconstrained as well.

Stephen Rademaker's recent piece in the Washington Post is the latest in a series of offensives against the New START treaty with Russia.  He falsely plants the blame for the delayed ratification schedule on the Democrats, although it is the Republicans who have spent the past few months scrambling to hold the treaty hostage to political maneuvering. On the plus side, he implicitly concedes that the debate on the content of the treaty is essentially over - he has no beef with the text or implications of New START. At a loss for substantive things to critique, he turns to an otherwise tedious and boring topic: Senate processes.

Rademaker says that critics of the treaty have been unfairly excluded from the process, but the evidence is to the contrary. Claiming that Senate leaders haven't given Republicans time to formally file their complaints with the treaty is a criticism of last resort. There have been 20 hearings, three classified briefings and almost 800 questions asked on the record. There have been countless meetings between concerned Senators (primarily Republicans) Secretary Clinton, Vice President Biden, and various members of the negotiating team. 

Written by Don Kraus for the Huffington Post

What's more dangerous: the thousands of nukes that will still target U.S. and Russian cities if the New START treaty is not ratified OR the opportunistic, Tea Party pandering politicians who would derail this commonsense agreement?

If you answered "the nukes", you're wrong.

New START will reduce the global inventory of strategic nuclear warheads on hair-trigger alert to levels not seen since I was born in 1954. But these weapons are not nearly as dangerous as the obstructive "Cold War" messaging that treaty opponents are deploying to upset New START's ratification.

Seven former commanders of the Strategic Air Command and the U.S. Strategic Command who recently endorsed the pact said, "There is little concern today about the probability of a Russian nuclear attack." The terrorist bomb that takes out Washington or New York will most likely come in a shipping container rather than an ICBM.