Frank returns to discuss the START follow-on treaty, where Team Obama goes about seeking parity with strategic arms with Russia. Then, Cyrus Nowrasteh, director of The Stoning of Soraya M. (For a limited time: every 10th subscriber to the new Secure Freedom Radio mailing list gets a free copy of Soraya M on DVD!) Frank discusses the new YouTube ad from Keep America Safe, Who are the al Qaeda Seven?. Finally, Secure Freedom Radio regular Andy McCarthy drops in.
MONOLOGUE March 3, 2010
Let’s start with START- now shall we? Or START follow on, I guess they call it— it’s not the original START treaty, the original START expired at the end of last year. President Obama desperately tried to have something in place that would continue the START regime but he insisted on making much deeper cuts. And being no fools— and they are no fools; the Russians saw an opportunity. President Obama’s determination to pursue the agenda of deep reductions on route to a world without nuclear weapons became an opportunity for the kind of jujitsu or stratagem that the Russians specialize in (they are after all, the people who are among the foremost practitioners of chess in the world). They’ve got a relatively weak hand; their economy has contracted so much that they’re widely believed to have to make deep cuts in their own nuclear forces. Well here you have a President of the United States who’s insisting on cutting ours too, in the interest of maintaining parity with the Russians that is a throwback to the Old Soviet Union.
And oh by the way, the deep cuts that President Obama has in mind are such that the Chinese could easily build up their nuclear weapons to that level and thereby become a peer with the Russians and the Americans, not exactly the kind of environment I think that produces greater stability or security for us. But this is only part of the problem with this treaty that the President is desperately trying to secure from the Russians. You know the old adage: you want it bad, you’ll get it bad, it applies in Spades to strategic arms control with outfits like the former Soviet Union.
So the Russians have to make these cuts anyway, but they’re rapidly modernizing their nuclear forces. In fact, it’s estimated I think in a few years that something on the order of 80% of their strategic arsenal will be comprised of modern nuclear weapons. You know how large the percentage of our arsenal will be composed of modern nuclear weapons? Zero! Most of them are 20 years old, in some cases much older.
Now we may say to ourselves, well that doesn’t matter. This isn’t Cold War, this isn’t an environment in which the nuclear weapons are poised to be launched at one another—Thank God, let’s get away from that, right? Well if you want to get away from that, I believe history suggests be prepared for it. And what President Obama is doing is systematically dismantling the American nuclear deterrent by failing to modernize it. Now it’s true that after 41 United States Senators, all of the Republican Senators plus an independent Democrat by the name of Joe Lieberman put the President on notice that they were not going to vote for a strategic arms treaty (a so-called START treaty follow on) if there were not a comprehensive modernization program built into the President’s budget. And Joe Biden came out a couple weeks ago and said oh yeah we’re going to put some money into that modernization stuff.
Well, they’re not putting it into actually modernizing our arsenal; they may or may not actually put some money into – But if you’re not going to modernize the actual delivery system and the weapons aboard them, inevitably what happens is—well what happens with anything? Your car, your dishwasher, your computer. Except these are most complicated pieces of equipment arguably that man has ever made, these sophisticated nuclear weapons that make up the US nuclear deterrent. And they age too, and as they age they become less reliable, less safe, and indeed they become less effective as deterrence.
Now if all this weren’t bad enough—we’ve got verification problems, we’ve got an imbalance that may actually rise from having an obsolete arsenal on the United States side, even if it’s the same size as the Russians, and a modern one on their side. All of which is too small, ours at least, as relates to some of the dangers that are rising, and certainly not appropriate to some of the dangers are rising. These are some of things that cry out for serious review, and I’m confident that the United States Senate will give any treaty this President produces that kind of review.
I think we’ll find this Administration’s treaty wanting, assuming it can get some kind of deal from the Russians, and here’s the real kicker. We talk about missile defense a lot here. This is a world in which unfortunately there are lots of nuclear missiles in place and proliferating. President Obama has made it a matter of ideological commitment to cut back our missile defenses, and now the Russians who’ve never liked the idea of us having any missile defense, who were furious with George W. Bush when he decided to get rid of the treaty we previously had that prevented us from having any missile defense, the so-called Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty—and they’ve been trying to get back into the position where they could veto our missile defenses again. And it looks folks as though in the endgame President Obama and his negotiations may just give them that kind of concession.
If they do, I think this treaty is toast, whether that will mean that we will take the steps to maintain and modernize our deterrent (as we should) will depend in part on you, whether members of the Senate, members of the Congress, your elected representatives, those you entrust with the responsibility for keeping you safe here how important these kinds of issues are to you and I think they have to be, because we’re in a world where deterrence may matter more than it has in a long time and ours is increasingly wanted.
Well that’s what I think. We’ll be talking more about this to be sure, but I’d like to know what you think. Let me know here or on the Frank Gaffney facebook and twitter accounts. Tell us what is on your mind about deterrence, about nuclear safety.
