On New START
One of the anti-Start campaign letters being circulated by Liberty Central against the treaty expresses alarm that the pact “limits the circumstances in which the United States is allowed to launch its weapons!” Sounds terrible. You get the impression our missile officers might be in their silos, and upon receiving an order from the President ...
One of the anti-Start campaign letters being circulated by Liberty Central against the treaty expresses alarm that the pact “limits the circumstances in which the United States is allowed to launch its weapons!”
One of the anti-Start campaign letters being circulated by Liberty Central against the treaty expresses alarm that the pact “limits the circumstances in which the United States is allowed to launch its weapons!”
Sounds terrible. You get the impression our missile officers might be in their silos, and upon receiving an order from the President to launch, would be frantically trying to find permission in Article 3, paragraph 2 or some such.
Actually, the missiles and their destructive warheads were invented to deter, to cause the other side not to take action, to be used only in the case of a last resort. They were never deployed in the Cold War for any other purpose, and they have no other purpose now. They are icons of strength, but as the years have gone by, they have actually lost much of their military utility. They are political weapons.
They had a certain ominous meaning in the Cold War. It was a time of intense, unremitting pressure between two huge systems, rival ways of thinking. But those days have been gone as long as today’s college students have been alive.
Yes, today’s Russia remains frisky, petulent, and assertive. That’s precisely the underlying logic for the treaty: to lock in lower, equal levels of fast-firing, dangerous weapons, and thus reduce uncertainty. Any deterrent value we get today from the weapons will be more effective with rules and verification than without them.
What kind of Russia will exist in five or ten years? No one knows, but we should see the country for what it has become today. It is not the Soviet Union.
There’s a fascinating article in today’s Wall Street Journal, page C8. The article points out that Russia still desperately needs foreign capital to modernize. Seventy-five percent of the country’s equity free float, as well as 70 percent of the Eurobond market and almost all of the syndicated loan market, is taken up by foreign investors. Like it or not, Russia depends on foreign capital. I suspect we are not going to target our missiles on those stock markets in Moscow which we built and where we trade. The Senate should realize that this is not a treaty with Leonid Brezhnev and his Politburo. Whatever happens with Russia, we are better off with a contract, than without it.
David E. Hoffman covered foreign affairs, national politics, economics, and served as an editor at the Washington Post for 27 years.
He was a White House correspondent during the Reagan years and the presidency of George H. W. Bush, and covered the State Department when James A. Baker III was secretary. He was bureau chief in Jerusalem at the time of the 1993 Oslo peace accords, and served six years as Moscow bureau chief, covering the tumultuous Yeltsin era. On returning to Washington in 2001, he became foreign editor and then, in 2005, assistant managing editor for foreign news. Twitter: @thedeadhandbook
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