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The Global Citizen: START Treaty
Last week Senator Lugar got on C-SPAN and stated that "for the moment, this [New START treaty] is not a crucial situation," implying that a delayed vote wouldn't really make a difference for American intelligence on Russian nukes. But a few weeks ago he told Washington Post reporter Mary Beth Sheridan that a delay in the ratification schedule for New START "is very serious and impacts our national security."
So which is it? As so many experts have pointed out, perhaps the most important selling point on New START is the fact that there haven't been inspectors on the ground in Russian nuclear facilities in 270+ days. Senator Lugar embraced the idea, but now his tune has changed. It's a surprising about-face, even if it's a subtle one. Especially since it's coming from Lugar - the Senate's in-house nuclear disarmament expert and the voice of reason on New START.
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.
As published in the Huffington Post:
Thinking about sitting out the November elections because President Obama and Congress have let you down? Think again. The 2010 mid-term could prove to be the most pivotal election of our lifetime.
This is already the most cutthroat contest I have experienced during the last 15 years of working on federal elections. According to The Cook Political Report, there are now 73 highly competitive House races, compared to 51 in August of 2008. 66 of these 73 endangered seats are currently held by Democrats, compared to 20 out of 51 in 2008. Senate Democrats are equally pressured.
Two members of Maroon 5, a widely popular American rock band, recently taped a PSA in support of new-START and the film Countdown to Zero. They are part of a growing number of musicians who have spoken out in support of the new-START treaty. You can watch the video below. The video is somewhat NSFW and includes questionable content, but it's ok to drop the f-bomb if it is supporting a nuclear weapons free world.
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.
As the United States works to pursue a "reset" of relations with Russia, culminating in the recent signing of the New START treaty, what does this new bond mean for the countries of Central and Eastern Europe (the CEEs) and their relationship with the U.S.? This was among the questions addressed by Czech Republic Senator Alexandr Vondra during his presentation at the Atlantic Council on May 24th, as he discussed his county's view on the future of transatlantic cooperation.
Sen. Vondra described himself as "optimistic" about the relationship between the U.S. and Central and Eastern Europe. However, he noted that several difficult test lie ahead:
As hopefully everyone remembered, Sunday was Mother's Day!
This weekend, Citizens for Global Solutions held its May Partners Call, a nationwide conference call with CGS members and expert speakers on nuclear security issues. This call, we focused on the New START Treaty with Russia that will cut back strategic nuclear weapons in each country by almost one-third. During the call, we learned quite a bit about the prospects of the New START treaty being ratified by the Senate as well as the Non-Proliferation Treaty Review conference that is going on right now.
The US and Russia pledge to have a new nuclear missile treaty worked out very soon. Negotiators from both countries say they are very close to completing a successor to the Cold War-era agreement that has cut both countries stockpiles of nuclear weapons, START. The current START treaty, created in 1991, expires at midnight tonight, amidst ongoing negotiations for a new treaty. Kremlin sources have been optimistic that some agreement can be made while President Obama is in Europe next week to receive the Nobel Peace Prize.
The Hudson Institute hosted a panel on June 24th to discuss the stakes of Obama's planned visit to Russia in July. The panelists- David Kramer, David Satter, and Andrei Piontkovsky- warned of a different Russian culture that did not place human rights in the same light as the U.S did. In a perverse way, Russia seems to need to maintain enmity with the U.S. in order to justify the state's iron grip and suppressive policies. This is unfortunate, as the U.S.
In Geneva, Switzerland today, the United States and Russia began a three-day series of talks to continue negotiating the terms for renewing the soon-to-expire Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START). START was agreed upon by both nations in 1991 in an effort to significantly reduce the nations' nuclear stockpiles and is set to expire on December 5th of this year.
While the two countries have suffered a strained relationship over the past several years, President Barack Obama said in his first press conference:
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