House of Eratosthenes

A Republican senator alarmed by the Obama administration’s cooperation with Russia on a missile defense agreement says he has the votes to reject a nuclear arms reduction treaty that has been a top priority of the White House.

An aide to Republican Sen. Jon Kyl of Arizona told Fox News on Wednesday that the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty won’t pass during the lame-duck session, potentially dealing a death blow to the deal, which faces Republican opposition in the Senate that is expected to grow next year when the party gains six seats.

Many Republican lawmakers are concerned that Obama has improperly linked missile defense and arms control.

Someone explain arms reduction to me. I’ve not understood this since the SALT days…and in all that time I’ve never gotten a warm fuzzy feeling that anybody else gets it either.

A guy might not have a gun…and want to do you harm.

Another guy might have a gun, and not want to do you harm. In fact, if he has the gun and you aren’t harmed yet, that’s likely to be the case.

So since armed people may not have malevolent intentions…and unarmed people might very well have some…this establishes that the possession of arms is a property that is non-correlative with the readiness and willingness to bring harm. And, for that matter, with the threat level.

If the readiness and willingness and threat level of a person or party does not descend, commensurate with that person or party’s stockpile…then what t’heck are we doin’? We haven’t even gotten to the question of “what if they tell us they’re disarming and they’re really not?” The entire foundation is a flimsy one. It’s one of these smartest-person-in-the-room ideas. Make a world without weapons, and presto we’ll have a world without fighting.

Well, that’s what you have to believe in order to have any faith in this being the right direction.

So that whole premise needs some scrutiny, I think. Arms limitation? Arms reduction? What effects arrive from the realization of that goal, that we or anybody else is going to like? How’s that work? Where’s the evidence? Does history offer some stories to help bolster our faith in this process, or are we just cruising forward in this direction on blind faith and some empty theories that sound good?

Morgan, maybe you can do a mind-meld with our good buddy Vlad Putin and answer a question for me. And this is a question I have had for ten years.

Okay. The Soviet Union didn’t like the idea of SDI – Reagan’s large-scale missile shield – because they believed that it would mean that once such a system was in place (assuming it would even work, especially with 1980s technology in use at the time) it would mean the deterrent value of the Soviet nuclear arsenal was effectively gone. That it would mean the US could reduce the USSR to ashes with no fear of Soviet ICBM’s wiping out American cities in like fashion. As disgusting as I found the Soviets projection of nuclear ambitions to be (like we’d actually incinerate the USSR’s millions of innocent civilians just for the hell of it, like they’d probably do to ours)…this at least sorta-kinda made sense if you put yourself in their shoes.

But fast forward to the early 2000’s. Then-President Bush proposes doing pretty much the same thing as Reagan suggested – but with two critical distinctions. First, utilizing a technology of sea-based interceptors which has been proven over and over again to actually WORK – and it does work, despite what you hear from liberals. Second, a missile defense shield much more limited in scope than what Reagan envisioned – instead of a massive shield designed to protect the entire United States from 1,200 Soviet ICBMs, a smaller one designed to protect that same territory (plus chunks of Europe and perhaps Asia) from 1 or 2 missiles. A rogue Russian launch, a North Korean one, an Iranian one, an Al-Queda one.

A workable idea, an affordable one, a necessary one in an increasingly unstable post-Cold War world in which nearly a dozen countries already have nuclear weapons AND long range missiles – and yet more nations are still hard at work on joining both of those clubs. I refer specifically to Iran and North Korea, of course, both of which are not only threats, but have been suspected of sharing technology between them as well.

AND YET, AND YET….Russia still goes completely ballistic – pardon the pun – at the idea that the US would dare deploy even a rudimentary, limited system of interceptors anywhere near its borders, or even near our own over here in America. The Russians, despite no longer ostensibly being communists committed to America’s destruction – still seem worried that the sites we wanted to put in Poland and Czech Republic – to defend against IRANIAN missiles, not Russian ones – are going to render Russia’s entire arsenal obsolete and then America is going to just incinerate the entire Russian nation (and leave Russia with no means of retaliation) as they feared during the 80s.

My question – WHAT FREAKING GIVES HERE? Why are the Russians so worked-up over this? Why why why? Do they A) not realize that they’ve got more than enough missiles to overwhelm our rudimentary shield once it’s in place B) not realize we have no interest in nuking them? Or C), understand A) and B) but are dishonest enough to claim that they haven’t gotten the memo?

Anyone care to field this one? Morgan? Philmon? Severian? Anybody feeling Russian today?
- cylarz | 11/25/2010 @ 02:50
Nyet.

But I do think in a lot of ways, we are dealing with the consequences of allowing the factional infighting between our parties to traverse the “water’s edge.” This is a complicated scenario I’m attempting to communicate so let me just use a movie metaphor: Sonny should have kept his big fucking mouth shut. When Sollozzo figured out a Corleone family led by Sonny would be more receptive to the deal he was offering, that meant — could only mean — Sollozzo was given an incentive. That is why politics stop at the water’s edge. That’s way you NEVER speak out against The Family when non-family is in the room.

The world has seen the dirty laundry of our domestic politics, and put on notice that other countries can get things from us through our guilt. Out of loyalty to their own countries, they have to give it a shot. They’d be derelict if they didn’t try.
- mkfreeberg | 11/25/2010 @ 07:28
Cylarz,

I’ll give it a shot. The Russians aren’t looking to spread international communism anymore, but they do consider themselves –rightly– to be the regional hegemon in Central Asia. They want to be able to kick around former Soviet republics with impunity, as they did with Georgia a few years back. If they have nukes and we don’t have a missile shield, the ultimate threat is still in force: “are you willing to risk a nuclear exchange over Georgia or Azerbaijan?” Of course, they have nothing to fear from Our Glorious Leader on that score — he’d probably piss himself and huddle crying in a corner if Putin even looked at him cross-eyed — but administrations change (thank God!) and we might actually have a president with a backbone here before long. A scalable, transferable missile defense system means that any American ally in the region can negate, or at least seriously diminish, the one big threat still left in the Russian arsenal. That’s why they flipped out when we were going to station the thing in Poland, and why Putin’s first demand of Holy Man was to cancel the sale… which, of course, he did.

Moreover, Russians can make a ton of much-needed hard currency selling weapons and know-how to rogue regimes. Kim Jong Il already fires off a missile every time he has a headache; a missile defense system would go a long way to negating his threat, thus depriving the Russians of another chance to sell technology / generally be a pain in our ass.

The upshot is that if our enemies didn’t already know that we’re stuck with an utter pussy in the White House for the next two years, this new North Korea biz will thoroughly illustrate it. Which is problematic, to say the least….
- Severian | 11/25/2010 @ 09:42

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