Framing “New START”
With a new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) recently signed, President Obama, together with President Medvedev of Russia, has taken a great step to lessen the danger faced by the world from nuclear weapons. President Obama has repeatedly said that it is his goal to have the U.S. lead the world down a path towards the complete abolition of nuclear weapons, because he believes that a world without these catastrophic weapons is a world in which everyone is safer. Not everyone agrees with the President on this topic, including some highly influential Members of Congress. It is now up to the Administration and their allies on this subject to gather enough support in the Senate to ratify New START (as the new treaty is being called), which will involve convincing skeptics that the massive U.S. nuclear arsenal does not make the country safer but instead does the exact opposite.
In a recent Op-Ed in The Boston Globe, Senator John Kerry lays out the case for why his colleagues in the Senate should join him in supporting treaty ratification. The article discusses the bi-partisan history of arms control with Russia, how the administration worked to get the best arrangement possible in negotiations over the treaty’s conditions, and updating our national security strategy to reflect a post-Cold War world. But despite all these great points, USITW’s work on this issue suggests that Senator Kerry and other advocates are missing an opportunity to make their case even stronger – and may even inadvertently be weakening their arguments – by failing to link arms reduction and non-proliferation into the larger narrative of enhancing global security and stability, and therefore making all Americans safer. The treaty is presented as a noble goal, but a goal in and of itself. This opens up the ratification process to partisan attack and bickering, as with many treaties.
Instead, if New START was promoted as part of a larger strategy, which has bipartisan support, for reducing the risk posed by nuclear weapons and making the world a more stable and secure place (a larger strategy that includes other initiatives like repairing the U.S. image in the world, strengthening alliances, enhanced diplomacy and humanitarian work, etc.), then perspectives on the treaty might be more likely to shift. Rather than being just a singular act between two countries, it becomes part of the process in which the U.S. and its international allies take leadership in trying to ensure global stability and national security. At the heart of this argument is the notion that nuclear weapons themselves are a liability and not an asset in the modern security climate, where accidents and/or thefts involving nuclear materials are very real threats (see USITW’s report Talking About Nuclear Weapons With the Persuadable Middle).
If this reframing were to be achieved, supporting the reduction and eventual elimination of the U.S. nuclear arsenal would become a much tougher position to argue against on partisan grounds.
