August 4, 201- Beth Galinsky, Jim Hanson & Rep. Frank Wolf

Some thoughts about a very important setback dealt to Barak Cbama’s efforts to win quick ratification in the United States Senate of his new START treaty. This is a treaty that we’ve talked about many times at Secure Freedom Radio, is deeply flawed, it should not be ratified, it should not impose on us the various problems that it will entail. Making reductions, deep reductions in our remaining strategic nuclear forces, imposing restrictions on the conventional forces we need to be able to promptly strike targets around the world. Giving the Russians a new veto over our missile defenses, which is something we thought was totally behind us and is completely inconsistent with our national security needs. And on and on. But what happened yesterday, when Senator John Kerry, Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was obliged to postpone for at least 5 weeks until mid-September the vote in his foreign relations committee on this treaty?

This I think has implications not just for the treaty which I think is in trouble, I have a piece in BigPeace.com on the subject that I recommend to you, but I think the treaty is in trouble, but more to the point the president’s strategy or ambition to as he puts it, to rid the world of nuclear weapons, is also in trouble. And thank G-d. What happened is that Senator Kerry is trying to push forward on this treaty, the president and his team is trying to push forward on this treaty and they ran into some real obstacles. Because Senators are quite properly concerned on a number of different scores.  For example they have indicated that they wanted to make sure they have hundreds of questions for the record that they have put foreword are fully responded to by the administration. It hasn’t happened yet.  They have indicated that they believe there needs to be more balance in the testimony of witnesses before the Senate. Senator Kerry believes that the record is sufficiently complete, he’s had two witnesses that believe the treaty is defective, and 10 times that number who assure him and his colleagues that all is well and they should just go ahead and rubberstamp the treaty. Well there does need to be more balance, its misleading to members of the Senate to convey this sense that all is well. Other Senators, actually 41 of them have written saying to the president there needs to be a modernization program if we are going to support this treaty. Why? Because we have allowed the armed forces, the nuclear component of the armed forces to atrophy in this country and this is for decades. This is not simply an indictment of the Obama administration, though I think it is compounding the danger that is represented. But there has been either malign or benign neglect of our nuclear forces going back for years, to the point where now we have on average weapons in that nuclear deterrent of ours, that are 30 years old or older. We have on average weapons that are15 years beyond their design life, and not one of them has been tested. And the only way that really fully validates that they still work, namely underground detonations, in over 18 years.

Now you put all of this together and you realize when Senators talk about modernization they can’t simply be talking about fixing up some obsolescent facilities that are part of the nuclear weapons infrastructure, complexes they call it, many of which date back to the Manhattan Project, if you can believe it. Many of which are falling down around years of our workers n those vital facilities. But they also, these Senators when they talk about modernization must also be talking about modernizing the deterrent itself. The president has said that since we are not going to get rid of these weapons as much as he wants to in his lifetime as long as we need them they are going to be safe, they are going to be affective. He does not say they are going to be reliable, but they have to be all of those things. They have to be in short, a competent deterrent in a world that’s getting more dangerous by the day. Senator Kerry couldn’t get this blown through the Senate, or through the Senate Foreign Relations Committee event, he is now going to have 5 weeks to try to put Humpty Dumpty together.

We’ll see if he can. In the meantime, we’re going to be doing everything we can here, at Secure Freedom Radio, BigPeace.com and everywhere else to ensure that the American people understand the truth of what’s going on here. Not just the defects of this new treaty, the new START treaty, but the defects of this administration’s pursuit of a very dangerous idea, denuclearizing not the world, but our country because it’s the only one that it can actually disarm. And doing so at a time when the world is actually becoming much more dangerous and our deterrent much, much more important, and needless to say, so is our missile defense capability. So, for all of these reasons, we will keep you informed about this debate. We hope to engage you in this debate. We’d love to hear from you, with your thoughts about it on Secure Freedom Radio dot com and the Frank Gaffney Twitter and Facebook accounts.