The new START treaty only slightly reduces the threat of nuclear annihilation in the sense that it allows both the U.S. and Russia to maintain thousands of nuclear weapons even as they reduce their arsenals. Which is part of why, as I explain over at Greg's place, Republicans shouldn't be resisting ratification:
Ratification of the new START treaty shouldn't be controversial. It maintains a basic trend in the reduction of the U.S. and Russia's nuclear arsenals that started in the 1980s, when the first START treaty was proposed by President Reagan, signed by his successor, George H.W. Bush, and ratified by the Senate by overwhelming margins. The current military leadership and a number of Republican foreign policy experts, including Former Secretaries of State James Baker, George Schultz, Henry Kissinger and Colin Powell have urged ratification, and three Senate Republicans actually voted the treaty out of committee. That's left the arguments against ratification to the GOP's foreign policy fringe, whose objections -- that the treaty leaves the U.S. with "only" thousands of nuclear weapons, undermines U.S. efforts at missile defense, and limits the use of conventional warheads -- are as Fred Kaplan points out, basically nonsense. That hasn't stopped conservatives from engaging in a dishonest propaganda campaign against the treaty, hoping to deal the president a humiliating political defeat.
[...]
The new START treaty isn't a massive shift towards Obama's vision of a world without nuclear weapons. As Max Bergmann explains, it mostly retains and modernizes an existing framework under which both countries agree to reduce their arsenals and American inspectors are given access to Russian nuclear facilities. Failing to ratify the treaty, however, could have serious consequences, from disrupting the current non-proliferation regime at a time when the U.S. is trying to pressure Iran to abandon its nuclear program to soiling our relations with Russia when the U.S. is engaged in a nearly decade long war in their backyard. Most importantly, it would eliminate the method by which the U.S. monitors Russian nuclear capabilities.
Now either the entire non-insane Republican foreign-policy brain trust has suddenly decided to embrace a bottle-cap based currency system or it's really dumb that ratification of START is even an issue.
