The Plowshares Eight

This week, a Washington Post writer called out Republican hypocrisy by examining Republican support for The Moscow Treaty, negotiated under President Bush.

The Moscow Treaty passed unanimously in 2003 under President Bush. Yet twenty-four of the Republicans who voted for the previous treaty are in the Senate today, dragging their feet on START. Walter Pincus of The Washington Post writes:

“This treaty is a masterstroke. . . . It is shorn of the tortured bench marks, sub-limits, arcane definitions and monitoring provisions that weighed down past arms control treaties,” said Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.). “It assumes a degree of trust between nations that are no longer on the precipice of war.”

Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ) gazes adoringly at a nuclear weapon

While the media was obsessed with its favorite kidnapping story, they have failed to notice that Senator Jon Kyl (R-AZ) has been holding our security hostage by using partisan tactics to delay ratification of New START in exchange for $10 billion in ransom money for the nuclear weapons complex.

From the beginning, we knew that false claims about the need to “modernize” our nuclear arsenal (read: build new nuclear weapons) would enter into the debate around New START and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. Despite scientific evidence that current programs in place can safely maintain our arsenal as we reduce its size, Jon Kyl and other members of Congress are trying to argue that the exorbitant amount of money the Obama administration is allocating to the nuclear weapons complex is insufficient.

The Prague Project compiled this hilarious chart in response to the über right-wing Heritage Foundation’s claims that “the list of experts [against New START] is large”:

One of the most egregious arguments peddled by New START proponents is that no reasonable arms control expert is opposed to New START. That is blatantly false. Americans deserve honesty in this debate…

The graph speaks for itself. They also offered this brief analysis:

Over Seventy former high-level government officials and senior military officers have come out in support of New START.  In addition, every administration official supported the treaty, from Hillary Clinton, to Bob Gates, and, representing the entire uniformed military, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Adm. Michael Mullen.

Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John Kerry announced his decision this week to delay the vote on the New START treaty until mid-September. The delay has a lot to do with partisan obstructionism and Republican demands for even more money for nuclear modernization. Kerry has just 6 weeks to secure enough Republican votes to pass New START.

In his press release (for some reason not available online), Senator Kerry explained that he chose to delay the vote in order to gather bipartisan support for the treaty: