The Price of Benignity

Looks as if the Senate might ratify START.  Arizona Senator Jon Kyl, the pivotal Republican Senate Whip, called the treaty “benign” in his Wall Street Journal op ed article on Friday.

This unexpected blessing was followed, of course, by the Republican blackmail list.  Kyl acknowledged that part of the price for ratification has been paid - continuation of the triad, U.S./Russian agreement to negotiate further reductions, recitations about the importance of deterrence, and pledges to spend over $100 billion to maintain and modernize nuclear delivery systems and $80 billion to modernize warheads and infrastructure.

Not enough, says Kyl.  Add a next-generation bomber, ballistic missile, and air-launched cruise missile, replace two facilities that produce plutonium and uranium, approve the weapons items in the FY 2011 budget, and provide evidence that the FY 2012 budget will include “adequate” nuclear weapons funding.

Kyl is disturbed, as well, by some of President Obama’s ideas, like the “utopian” goal of zero nuclear weapons, restrictions that he thinks the Nuclear Posture Review places on the freedom of military and scientific experts to dream up new weapons designs, and the pledge to pursue another new U.S.-Russian treaty, that would achieve further nuclear weapons reductions.

Kyl contradicts the last of these objections when he complains that START does not address tactical weapons, which is exactly what would be addressed in a further treaty.

My OED offers five meanings when “benign” is applied to “things”:  favorable, kind, fortunate, salutary, and propitious.  Sorry I can’t say the same about Kyl’s doomsday list.  There ought to be a law (international) that every country’s annual military budget be accompanied by a proposal to improve the population’s security during that budget year, through graduated steps toward a world of enforced law.  If the United States initiated such an effort our country would prove itself worthy of some of the “peace loving” accolades that Super patriots love to toss.

Impossible, though, at the Presidential or Congressional level of politics. The question for threatened populations is, how to make it politically feasible for national governments to entertain such thoughts in the face of utopianism charges like Congressman Kyl’s.