On June 29, 2011, Senior Policy Analyst Laicie Olson appeared on “The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer” in a segment with Pentagon Correspondent Chris Lawrence on Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile programs. You can watch the entire video below or here on “The Situation Room” blog.
A Joint Study on Nuclear Terrorism
by Robert G. Gard On June 6, 2011, the Belfer Center at Harvard University released the results of a year-long study entitled “The U.S.-Russia Joint Threat Assessment on Nuclear Terrorism”. The study is significant because, between them, the U.S. and Russia possess about 90% of the world’s nuclear weapons and weapons grade nuclear materials that […]
Romney Calls New START Proof of Obama’s Inexperience, Proves his own Instead
By Kingston Reif and Trish Morris
Last summer, Mitt Romney unintentionally proved in a Washington Post Op-Ed attacking the New START treaty that his national security GPS is less effective than a broken compass.
His argument was promptly devastated by critics wielding facts.
Slate’s Fred Kaplan noted that he had “never seen anything quite as shabby, misleading and—let’s not mince words—thoroughly ignorant.” Senator John Kerry (D-MA) used words like “uninformed” and “baloney” to describe Romney’s attack on the treaty. Most devastatingly for Romney, fellow Republican Sen. Richard Lugar (R-IN) publically excoriated the former Massachusetts Governor for defying the advice of U.S. military leaders and raising “discredited objections.”
Despite these stinging rebukes, Romney held firm in his opposition to New START, which was approved by the U.S. Senate on December 22, 2010, by a vote of 71-26.
With the race for the 2012 Republican nomination for President now in full swing, Romney is revisiting his opposition to the treaty in an attempt to score political points.
In a June 15 post on his blog titled “The Price of Inexperience,” Romney stated that because Russia is already below New START’s limits on deployed warheads and delivery vehicles, “we’re the ones who now have to give, while Russia gets.” Both Keith Payne and Senator Jon Kyl (R-AZ) have made the same argument.
Like Payne and Kyl, what Romney fails to recognize is that without the treaty there would be no verifiable limits on the size of Russia’s nuclear arsenal. Whether some Russian reductions might have happened with or without the treaty is beside the point, as former STRATCOM Commander Gen. Kevin Chilton argued last April:
One thing I was pleased to see in the treaty were these limits because as you look to the future though Russia may be close to or slightly below them already, when you look to the future we certainly don’t want them to grow and they would have been unrestricted otherwise without these types of limits articulated in the treaty…
Romney also criticizes New START for failing to tackle Russia’s numerical advantage in tactical nuclear weapons. However, ratification of New START was a necessary precursor to deal with these weapons, as explained here on our website.
Romney ends his post by accusing the President of abandoning the George W. Bush administration’s Europe-based missile-defense program as part of his “reset” policy with Russia, “leaving Poland and the Czech Republic in the lurch.”
The same day that Romney filed his post, outgoing Secretary of Defense Robert Gates had the following to say about the Bush administration’s plans for missile defense in Europe at a hearing of the Defense Subcommittee of the Senate Appropriations Committee:
And let’s be blunt: The third site in Europe was not going to happen, because the Czech government wouldn’t approve the radar….And so if it was going to happen at all, it would’ve taken years longer [than the Phased Adaptive Approach] and we still hadn’t negotiated the required agreements with the Poles in terms of the interceptors.
In other words, if Mitt Romney were President instead of Barack Obama, there would be no verifiable limits on the size of Russia’s still enormous nuclear arsenal and no credible plan (at least relative to the Bush plan) for dealing with the Iranian ballistic missile threat. Talk about the price of inexperience.
North Korea-Russia Summit?
Speculation is running high in the international media that North Korean leader Kim Jong-il may sit down with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev. Japan’s Kyodo News expects the summit to take place on Thursday, June 30th in the Far East city of Vladivostok while other reports say July 1st. Media reports have also quoted Russian officials as saying preparations are underway for a summit, though Medvedev’s counterpart was not disclosed. President Medvedev is reportedly set to be in Vladivostok to check on preparations for the 2012 Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) meeting.
If realized, it would be the first time in nine years the North Korean leader traveled to Russia for a summit with its Cold War ally with whom relations have frayed over the years.
Korea watchers are closely following Kim’s reported travel plans because the expected summit would come on the heels of a meeting between U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and South Korean Foreign Minister Kim Sung-hwan on June 24th during which the allies reaffirmed that inter-Korea relations must be improved before the resumption of Six Party Talks. Seoul officials say that since the envisioned inter-Korean denuclearization discussion has been delinked from seeking an apology for the sinking of the Cheonan and shelling of Yeongpyeong Island, it is now Pyongyang’s turn to come forward.
It is highly anticipated that economic issues would top the expected Pyongyang-Moscow summit, but would still have implications on the Six Party diplomatic front.
Tactical Nuclear Weapons and Korea
by Duyeon Kim The buzz word is increasingly “tactical nuclear weapons” whenever North Korea unleashes provocations. It buzzed again earlier this year when President Obama’s Weapons of Mass Destruction policy coordinator Gary Samore said that Washington would reintroduce U.S. tactical nuclear weapons to South Korea upon Seoul’s request. Citing his personal views in response to […]
