With today’s signing of the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START), it now moves on to the Senate to be ratified. And as the White House quickly reminded everyone, it’s a process that has always been the ultimate in bipartisan cooperation:

Reagan/Bush I Appointee To GOPers:
Don’t Mess with Start Treaty

Reagan/Bush I Appointee To GOPers: Don’t Mess with Start Treaty, Mother Jones, April 8, 2010, 10:11 a.m., by David Corn.

President Barack Obama and Russian President Dmitri Medvedev on Thursday morning signed a new Start treaty that would cut Russian and American warheads by 30 percent—to about 1550 warheads for each side. During the signing ceremony in Prague, Obama hailed the accord as an “important milestone for nuclear security and nonproliferation.” But the treaty has to be approved by two-thirds of the Senate—which means at least eight Republican senators will have to join with the 57 Democrats and the two independents who caucus with the Dems to okay this pact. And arms control advocates in Washington are concerned that Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) might try to derail or delay ratification. Kyl hasn’t yet declared a position. He may want to kill the treaty outright, but arms control advocates suspect he might block it to gain leverage in his efforts to expand missile defense and to defeat a comprehensive treaty banning all nuclear weapons testing. But former President George H.W. Bush’s chief arms negotiator has a message for Kyl: don’t mess with this treaty.

At a Washington press conference on Friday morning, Richard Burt, who negotiated the first Start treaty in 1991, was asked what he would say to Kyl or other Senate Republicans considering obstructing ratification of the new treaty. Burt, who was also a senior State Department official in the Reagan administration, replied in strong terms:

I can say as a former political appointee of two Republican administrations, it will be very difficult for anybody to come up with a strong set of coherent arguments against this treaty. This treaty itself does not take sweeping steps to reduce either the United States or Russian deployed arsenal…..It’s a very small step toward further reductions.

Burt noted that this treaty would put the US-Russian arms control process “back on track” and “could lead to a much more profound set of agreements.” He noted that in the Senate, there will be “some outliers” who will vote against it. But he added,

Anyone who would vote against [the treaty] needs to think about the consequences of the signals we would send to the rest of the world….What would be the impact on proliferation?….What would it do to US leadership…on a whole range of international order issues?”

See, Abolition: The Only Path to Nuclear Security, Truthout, April 8, 2010, by Dr. Joseph Gerson:

Comment by Evans Liberal Politics owner Paul Evans: I don’t quite know about any total abolition of nuclear weapons, as idealistic liberals and progressives of course wish for. I remember an age of Brezhnev and Gorbachev and “mutually assured destruction,” and I think about China’s rising nuclear ambitions, and I think perhaps it may be a few hundred years before there’s any hope of fully doing away with these weapons. Rigorous opponents of disarmament need to remember, though, that it only takes 100 detonations to cause nuclear winter, and then it’s all over for mankind. Just keep THAT in mind when you start opposing the new START treaty, Republicans. It’s all well and good to have some kind of a nuclear deterrent, but nuclear winter means an end to everyone’s ambitions, and we should make the world as safe as we can, isn’t that right?

See, Nuclear Disarmament Proponents Hail Start Treaty, ABC News, The Note, April 8, 2010, by Huma Khan.

4/6/10: White House Press Briefing