Trading Safety for Votes

Mitt Romney’s outrageous attack on President Obama in yesterday’s Washington Post, posing as a learned critique of the START Treaty, shows again the incapacity of nations to protect their populations. Even if the Senate ratifies the Treaty, such attacks disable the President politically from from building security through enforced law instead of violence.  They also disable him from slowing the global missile defense race that compels nations to build ever more deadly offensive weapons to counter the defensive weapons (read, “double the profits for Boeing, Lockheed, et al”). 

The huge variety of weapons, and the fact that every nation concentrates for various reasons more on some weapons systems than others, means that arsenals always are asymmetrical and that a negotiated treaty may reduce Nation A’s x weapons more than B’s while it reduces B’s y weapons more than A’s. A hotshot like  Romney can pick and choose, disregarding the bottom line of security.

Romney states that Russia retains the right to 10,000 tactical warheads, which, he suggests, are mounted on missiles that cannot reach the U.S. but could reach other nations.  In fact, tactical nuclear weapons are generally taken to mean artillery shells, mines, etc., i.e., battlefield weapons, not missiles at all. Missiles that are not intercontinental are generally called intermediate range missiles, not tactical weapons.  He seems ignorant of the fact that previous START treaties also omitted tactical weapons and that the U.S. and Russia have signified a mutual intention to progress to tactical weapons, once both countries ratify START. 

Romney and other Republicans concentrate their strongest criticism on the assertion that START will prevent the U.S. from developing missile defenses.  The Treaty does nothing of the kind, and what they are referring to is the reservation that a country can withdraw if it feels threatened, or weakened, by the other side’s missile defense deployments.  Either side can withdraw for any other reason as well, and the Obama Administration has given Russia clear advice that our missile defense program will proceed. 

He goes on to bemoan the agreement not to use missile silos for missile defense sites, neglecting to note that the Pentagon has advised against such use. 

He complains that ICBMs are not prohibited from bombers, a strange gaff. Bombers carry cruise missiles, but not huge ICBMs.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates published a piece in the Wall Street Journal on May 13, “The Case for the New START Treaty,” reporting that he has worked on START treaties since 1970, that all Presidents have favored them, and that bipartisan votes in the Senates have always ratified them. “The New START Treaty has the unanimous support of America’s military leadership...” START will provide “an extensive verification regime...that will help us track - for the very first time - all accountable strategic nuclear delivery systems.” He concludes, “It strengthens the security of the U.S. and our allies and promotes strategic stability between the world’s two major nuclear powers.”  What more could one ask for, unless one were running, desperately, irresponsibly, for President?

Newsweek For Sale

The Washington Post is trying to sell Newsweek Magazine because it lost $28 million last year, with circulation down more than a third since 2000. A journalism professor explains that a mass circulation publication is “just not going to cut it in this highly niched, politically polarized, media-stratified environment that we live in today.” (NYT, 5-6-10)

The Times writer, Stephanie Clifford, comments, “The notion of a cultural common ground that Americans could all share was changing.” Newsweek Editor Jon Meacham observed that “national coherence was still a worthwhile goal...There are not that many common denominators left.”

You said it! We had better figure what we have in common, speaking of Americans and of the rest of humanity as well. May I suggest security as the common ground - security from war, from terrorism, from Weapons of Mass Destruction, from environmental disaster. Plenty of people would agree - question is, do they have enough civic, political spirit and gumption to act on it, to get beyond the supplication of sign holding and marching and reach for power that can counter the vested interests in mayhem.

On display at this very moment are ratification of START and progress on non-proliferation. The nuclear targeted populations have projected no effective voice about Senate ratification or about the NPT five year review conference, though lives by the million, and civilization itself hangs in the balance.

If targeted populations exercised the survival instincts that they would exercise if they were hunted animals in a forest, which they are beginning to resemble, their clamor would batter down every political, monetary, ideological, and historical block to replacing the world of war with a world of enforced law. They might even discover they still needed common sources of news instead of clicking away separately at their favorite web feeds.