Henry Sokolski on New START
Henry Sokolski, executive director of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center and a member of the congressionally mandated Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction, Proliferation, and Terrorism, blogged at National Review Online’s The Corner about START.
An excerpt of New START: Trust but Clarify, dated July 19:
“It could be Washington’s blogospheric impatience with argumentation or it could be the public’s overwrought desire for political clarity, but one thing is clear — the current debate over New START’s ratification has become genuinely phony.
“As I explained today at the Heritage Foundation event “Will Obama’s Arms Control Agenda Stop with New START?” the treaty’s critics need to get on with the serious business of identifying what amendments, reservations, understandings, and declarations, if any, they think the Senate should consider. And Senate supporters of the treaty need to stop dismissing critics’ concerns and blocking access to information that all sides of the debate need to have. This prescription ought to be a no-brainer; unfortunately, it’s nowhere close to where we are in the current debate.
“New START’s supporters, in a mad tear to get the treaty rammed through the Senate, have either dismissed or impugned the motives of the treaty’s critics. The loudest of START’s opponents, meanwhile, have publicly positioned themselves to block the treaty’s ratification — even though they and their staffs privately concede that the agreement is likely to pass, and that they may well end up voting for it themselves.”
In New START: Don’t Shake the Tree If the Fruit Ain’t Ripe, dated July 26, Sokolski responds to a critic.
“After my last entry on the New START treaty, the National Secuirty Network, a prominent left-of-center organization, identified me as being “among the more thoughtful right of center voices.” This made me instantly wary — is this a good thing? I asked myself — and fortunately, I read on to discover that this was merely calculated faint praise: Actually, they were quite put off by my concluding argument…First, the New START Treaty is hardly in any danger of being egregiously delayed, even if it ends up being ratified as late as the start of the new Senate session next year. Do the math. New START was submitted to the Hill on May 14, meaning the Senate will have reviewed it for 12 weeks when it goes on recess after the first week of August. If the Senate were to abide by the White House’s plea to ratify New START before the November elections, they presumably would have to do so between September 12, when the Senate returns, and October 1, when it plans to adjourn for fall elections. This would mean New START would be ratified after only 15 weeks of Senate action. Add two weeks for a possible lame-duck session, and you get 18 weeks. If you go for ratification by the second week of February (a prospect that even Majority Leader Reid has allowed as a possibility), you get roughly 20 weeks. All together, that would pass within a period just shy of eight months.
“Historically, this is relatively quick. The Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty, which was comparatively noncontroversial, was sent to the Hill January 19, 1988, and ratified by the Senate on May 27, 1987: five months. With recesses for President’s Day and Easter, the Senate was in session for roughly 16 weeks before it ratified INF. So, that’s 16 weeks of session and five months to ratify INF, on one hand, and 15 to 20 weeks of session and six to eight months to ratify New START on the other — that hardly seems like a ‘delay’ that could be construed as worrisome. START II ratification took nearly 36 months. Getting the New START Treaty ratified by the beginning of 2011 would be a period of time less than one-quarter as long.”
Tags: Henry Sokolski, START