“Hiroshima, Japan – With the mournful gong of a Buddhist temple bell and the release of a flock of doves, a crowd of 55,000 on Friday solemnly marked the moment 65 years ago when the world’s first atomic attack incinerated this city under a towering mushroom cloud…”
Martin Fackler, New York Times, August 6, 2010
On Friday, August 6th on the sixty-fifth anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb that incinerated the city of Hiroshima history was made. For the first time in all those years a representative of the United States, Ambassador Roos, participated in the annual commemoration. This raised hopes after he earlier indicated an intention to do so, that President Obama would become the first US president in office to visit Hiroshima when he travels to Japan this fall for an Asia-Pacific summit. President Obama has become very popular in Japan following his 2009 speech in Prague calling for the elimination of nuclear weapons.
President Obama has received several invitations to visit Hiroshima from its Mayor Tadatoshi Akiba and other Japanese political leaders. “We want President Obama to see with his own eyes what really happened here. This will give him stronger willpower to eliminate nuclear weapons,” said Akihiro Takahashi, 79, a survivor of the bombing and former head of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum.
United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, arriving in Japan on Tuesday, was the first UN chief ever to attend the ceremony. UN spokesman Martin Nesirsky said Ban wanted to draw attention to “the urgent need to achieve global nuclear disarmament“. As a sign of support for the goal of nuclear disarmament, Britain and France, also sent their first ever diplomats to the ceremony in Hiroshima.
So that’s the good news on the nuclear disarmament front along with successful negotiations with Russia that produced the new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) that would reduce the numbers of deployed nuclear weapons in the arsenals of the US and Russia, from 2,200 to 1,550 each. [More details: The new treaty limits the U.S. and Russia to no more than 1,550 deployed strategic warheads and 800 deployed and non-deployed delivery vehicles.]
Now for the bad news: The New Start treaty needs to be ratified by at least two-thirds of the Senate. Ratification has now been put in danger as the US Senate delays the vote until after the summer recess, bringing it closer to the November elections and further increasing the failure to ratify, given Washington’s bitterly partisan climate.
As the Friends Committee on National Legislation has said:
The treaty is also vital to U.S. national security. With the expiration in December 2009 of the first START treaty, inspections and verifications have stopped. The United States cannot send inspectors to verify Russian compliance with the old treaty limits. Those inspections can resume as soon as the new START is ratified.
If our Senate fails to ratify START, prospects dim for future ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.
The New START treaty has broad-based support from diplomats and high-ranking officials from past and current administrations. Nonpartisan supporters of this treaty include almost every past and current Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, former Secretaries of State George Shultz, Henry Kissinger, James Baker, and Colin Powell, and current Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. It’s supported by former Secretaries of Defense James Schlesinger, Frank Carlucci and William Cohen. Current Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, has supported the treaty saying that “The New START Treaty has the unanimous support of America’s military leadership.”
So what’s the problem with ratification? In a Washington Post article dated August 4th the authors spell out the situation:
“The Obama administration’s hopes for rapid, bipartisan approval of its new arms-control treaty with Russia have dimmed, with Republican senators making clear that they will not support ratification without iron-clad assurances of future spending to maintain the U.S. nuclear arsenal…
Brent Scowcroft, the national security adviser for President George H.W. Bush, said recently that the political battle was the most bitter he had seen over a nuclear treaty. “It doesn’t move the ball very much,” Scowcroft said of the pact, which he supports. “But there’s an atmosphere of great hostility.”
Many U.S. allies had assumed New START would easily be ratified this year. The treaty commits the United States and Russia to modest cuts in their long-range, ready-to-use weapons and extends a 15-year system allowing each side to check the other’s nuclear facilities. It is the cornerstone of the Obama administration’s attempt to “reset” relations with Moscow…”
What would be the real world consequences of putting nuclear security on the line to score a cynical political win against President Obama? According to former Senator Tom Daschle, failure to ratify the New START treaty could trigger “nuclear anarchy” by unraveling many decades of international agreements that have kept the spread of nuclear weapons in check.. Short sighted partisan politics could undo over three decades of nuclear disarmament agreements between the United States and Russia.
More than a little ironically, testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in May, Henry Kissinger, Secretary of State to Presidents Nixon and Ford, said, “I recommend ratification of this treaty… this committee’s decision will affect the prospects for peace for a decade or more. It is, by definition, not a bipartisan, but a nonpartisan, challenge.”