START clears Senate on 71-26 vote

The New START treaty has finally cleared the Senate after a months-long campaign by the Republican leadership to kill it. Passage was finally assured when nine Republicans joined the Democrats to provide the two-thirds majority required to ratify the treaty and break a Republican filibuster.

Treaty ratification was a surprise win for the Obama administration, which for months had been trying to persuade Republican senators, notably Senate Minority Whip Jon Kyl of Arizona, to vote in support of New START. Both Kyl and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) voted against passage, along with 24 of their colleagues.

New START is the first arms control treaty to be ratified by the Senate in a lame duck session. The treaty would cut US and Russian strategic warheads by more than 30% and reintroduce, after a year without them, verifiable inspections of the remaining strategic warheads.

“Today’s bipartisan vote clears a significant hurdle in the Senate,” said Sen. John Kerry (D-MA), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee , shortly after the Senate voted to close debate . “We are on the brink of writing the next chapter in the 40-year history of wrestling with the threat of nuclear weapons.”

By last weekend, the Obama administration could count on six Republican senators to vote in favor of New START—senators Richard G. Lugar (R-IN), George V. Voinovich (R-OH), Susan M. Collins (R-ME), Olympia J. Snowe (R-ME), Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) and Scott Brown (R-MA). Only in the last few hours of Tuesday morning did the administration get word that other Republican senators, Lamar Alexander (R-TN), Johnny Isakson (R-GA), Bob Corker (R-TN), and Bob Bennett (R-UT), were willing to oppose the Republican leadership and vote in favor. At the last minute, Sen. Judd Gregg (R-NH) also joined those in favor of ratifying the treaty , although he missed the initial vote.

A sweet victory

The debate over New START was unusual, partly because the treaty itself was designed to be so uncontroversial—there are no new verification techniques in it beyond those in the expired START treaties, and the language of the treaty was written in such a way that the US could continue to develop and deploy missile defense systems.

Moreover, the Obama administration agreed to increase modernization funding of such nuclear weapons complexes as Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) to $84 billion over 10 years in order to assure the Republicans that the US wasn’t weakening its nuclear defenses.

When Kyl announced in November that he wouldn’t support New START and that the Republicans needed more time to study the treaty, it came as a shock to Democrats. The treaty with Russia was signed in April, and more than 18 hearings had been held on it.

Unexpectedly, the Democrats, nudged by Vice President Joseph Biden, started a three-pronged effort led by President Obama, Sen. Kerry, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to gather enough support for passage by sidestepping party leadership and approaching Republican senators individually. Obama telephoned and lobbied senators throughout the process. Kerry and Clinton organized both a public and private campaign, which included getting the endorsement of current and former military leaders and the six living secretaries of state from Republican administrations, from Henry Kissinger through Condoleezza Rice. The final clincher appears to have been a weekend classified briefing for senators.

Despite the satisfaction that the administration can feel from today’s success, the process provides a warning that further attempts to negotiate with Russia to disarm and dismantle the thousands of tactical nuclear warheads stockpiled by each side may be difficult, since the Republicans gain six seats in next year’s Senate. “It is now clear that arms control is fair game in domestic politics and is no longer controlled by the foreign policy elites in either party,” writes arms control analysts Nikolai Sokov and Miles A. Pomper of the vote .

The final step before New START goes into effect, ratification by the Duma, the Russian parliament, is expected in the next two weeks.

Paul Guinnessy