U.S. Nuclear Security Depends Upon This Guy?

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

Sen. Jon Kyl (Ariz) has been his party's leading voice on the new START treaty and has pressed the administration to commit to a major modernization of the country's weapons labs in exchange for approval of the pact. All eyes on Sen. Kyl as Obama presses nuclear treaty:

The administration sent a delegation that included Gen. Kevin Chilton, head of U.S. nuclear forces, to Arizona to woo Kyl on Friday, and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates will meet with Kyl this week to try to seal a deal, according to two officials.

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[Secretary of Defense Robert] Gates talked to Kyl about the extra $4 billion in a telephone call Friday. That money would be on top of an earlier administration pledge of a $10 billion increase.

"The administration is going above and beyond what's required in order to get approval from Senate Republicans," said Stephen Young of the Union of Concerned Scientists.

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"We've been in a series of conversations with Senator Kyl, whose top priority is making sure that the nuclear arsenal that we do have is modernized. I share that goal," Obama told reporters Sunday.

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Kyl's office did not return a call for comment Monday. But two prominent Republican senators indicated that they could support the treaty – as long as Kyl was satisfied.

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz) said Kyl was working with the administration on how to modernize the aging labs and to ensure the ratification resolution clarified that the treaty didn't inhibit U.S. missile defense.

"If those two issues are resolved – and I think they can be resolved – then I think we could move forward with the ratification to the START treaty," McCain said at a conference sponsored by the Foreign Policy Initiative, a think tank.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said on ABC's "This Week" that if those two issues were addressed, "I would vote for the treaty."

McCain, however, said it was not clear whether there would be time to address New START during the lame-duck session.

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Kyl is the Republican whip, the party's No. 2 post. He is also one of the few people focused on nuclear issues in a Senate where such expertise has dwindled since the Cold War. But he is more conservative than the Senate's other major Republican expert, Richard G. Lugar (R-Ind.), who supports the treaty.

"The sense is, Kyl's just not going to agree to something that isn't going to meet the tests of the right," said Norm Ornstein, a scholar of Congress at the American Enterprise Institute.

Republicans "have kind of delegated [New START] to him . . . in effect, it means that the opinions of Lugar, Shultz, Kissinger and all these others outside, are kind of a little less significant," Ornstein said. He was referring to former secretaries of state George P. Shultz and Henry A. Kissinger, who support the treaty.

The U.S. military leadership, and nearly all past commanders of American nuclear-weapons forces, have called for passage of the treaty. It would reduce the number of deployed, long-range nuclear warheads on each side from 2,200 to 1,550.

So American nuclear security is held hostage by far-right billionaire-funded think tanks still pursuing the Cold War or Neoconservative fantasies of a Pax Americana empire. They object to or have reservations about the new START treaty. And Jon Kyl is their tool. God help us.

If Sen. Richard Lugar says it is good to go by him, vote on the damn treaty already!