Can START turn into FINISH?

Keith Payne, Ph.D. from the Heritage Foundation believes that signing of new START treaty with Russia will put an end to the U.S. security and the entire Western civilization. We’d try to analyze this opinion. But even without any further analysis we may confidently state that failure to sign the START treaty would obviously turn the reset of Russo-American relationship into FINISH — and we may have every reason to throw out the red button, which Hillary Clinton was hilariously swinging in front of her Russian colleague, Sergey Lavrov. One needn’t be a Philosophy Doctor to make such a conclusion.

         Argumentation of PhD Keith Payne in his “New START, U.S. Strategy, and How Much Is Enough?” article may be shortly summarized into the following five talking points:

1. If America wants a credible deterrent across a spectrum of severe threats, including, for example, nuclear and biological threats to our allies, U.S. forces must have the quantity and diversity necessary to be flexible and resilient.

2. The New START treaty with Russia would limit U.S. strategic force flexibility and resilience because it requires sizeable reductions in the number of U.S. strategic nuclear launchers, and would limit some types of strategic conventional forces.

3. New START neither requires real Russian reductions nor does it provide hard limits on a renewed buildup of Russian strategic nuclear forces.

4. Administration assurances notwithstanding, New START includes limitations on U.S. missile defense options, a long-standing goal of Russia. Moscow clearly hopes to achieve further limitations on U.S. missile defense.

5. New START’s Bilateral Consultative Commission would have broad authority to discuss the unique distinguishing features of missile defense launchers and interceptors and make changes in the treaty. These could be done in secret and without Senate advice and consent.

    

The Heritage Foundation — this hive of thoughtful neo-cons — swarms with people, sharing Dr. Payne’s ideas. Yet another Doctor of Philosophy, Kim R. Holmes is trying to convince us in his “Ignoring Arms-Control History Carries a Cost” article that the USA have already done too much, having tried to please Russia and China with cancellation of decision to mount AMD systems in Poland and Czech Republic along with reduction of missile pads amount in Alaska and California. Baker Spring (not a PhD, unfortunately) — not constrained with academic rank — in his “An alternative to new START” article goes even further than that. He believes that the USA should not defend themselves against their enemies, but rather make the preventive strikes. And as long as new START treaty is to make it almost impossible, this neo-conservative “hawk” offers to prolong another agreement — SORT (Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty) — instead of signing new one, having, beforehand, added the reference to the 51^st article of the UN Charter to it.

Dear Sirs! Maybe it’s time to wake up and look at the calendar. It’s 2010 already, not 1970. Joint military might of the USA and their NATO allies excels the Russian military potential manifold. It is rather Russia that should seek guarantees for its security, not the other way around. Besides that, Russia is not the USSR and it has no ideological discords with the West whatsoever. Healthy economic competition between Russia and the Western states cannot in any way lead to the military confrontation. Even taking all the not always intelligible and pleasant features of Russian “sovereign democracy” into consideration, no one in Kremlin would dream of nuclear war against America even in the worst of their nightmares. There are no analogues to the tremendous American and Russian nuclear arsenals and not a single country in the world would be able not just to stand either of these countries, but even look askew at them. These arsenals — accumulated during the long years of Cold War — pose greater threat to their possessors rather than the world around them.

            The USA should be grateful to Russia for the dissatisfaction it expressed due to insane Dick Cheney’s idea to mount the American AMD systems in Poland and Czech Republic. This Russian expression of discontent — which had no grounds, besides the matter of prestige, at all — saved America from huge burden to the budget (trillion dollars is not a small change even for wealthy America), while ridiculous explanations of aiming American missiles in Europe against the assumed Iranian or North Korean attacks should have seemed unconvincing even to George W. Bush (who is not a Doctor of Philosophy at all). It takes a single glance at the globe to understand that distance from Pyongyang to East Coast of America is far smaller than to its West Coast and the Koreans — who are much better in geography than the previous U.S. President was — definitely know where to aim their missiles in case of impulsive insanity of their next genius leader.

            It’s quite clear that Republicans would try to disprove any Obama’s initiative. Rules of the cross-party fight wouldn’t have allowed them to adopt even the President’s bill prescribing to give every member of Republican Party a million dollars. But sacrificing the matters of national security in favor of their partisan affections is a little bit too much, isn’t it?