Senate starts debate over nuke treaty

WASHINGTON – A new U.S.-Russian nuclear arms treaty appears headed toward ratification – albeit a slow one – as Republicans vowed to raise procedural obstacles even though supporters claimed to have the 67 votes they need to win.

The Senate voted 66-32 to open debate on the New START treaty, and Sen. Evan Bayh, D-Ind., who wasn’t present, has said he’ll vote to ratify it, bringing supporters to 67.

“I believe we will have the votes,” Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told reporters. “We’re not going to put the vote off until next year. We intend to have a vote sometime this year.”

Senate GOP leaders acknowledged that several Republican senators intend to vote for the New START, but indicated that they intend to use as many procedural roadblocks as possible, including a stream of amendments, in hopes of kicking the treaty into the new Congress, when Republican Senate ranks will expand by five. That would at least delay President Barack Obama’s biggest foreign policy achievement to date.

The new START would restrict the U.S. and Russia at the end of a seven-year period to deploying no more than 1,550 strategic nuclear warheads on 700 strategic bombers, intercontinental ballistic missiles and submarine-launched missiles.

The new number of deployed warheads represents about a 30 percent reduction from the limit of 2,200 set in a 2002 treaty that’s due to expire at the end of 2012.

Moreover, the new accord would allow the sides to resume inspections of each other’s nuclear weapons, which have been suspended for just more than a year, a gap that worries U.S. intelligence officials.

A new inspection system agreed on in the treaty will be more intrusive than the one that ended last year. Among other measures, U.S. and Russian experts will be allowed for the first time to look inside the other’s missiles and count the actual number of warheads they carry, rather than accept agreed-upon assumptions.

Republicans complain that the treaty contains language that could hinder U.S. missile defense development, although the Pentagon denies it and every living former Republican secretary of state endorses the treaty.

“This treaty isn’t the holy grail, but in my view it’s in the U.S. interests, and this is politics at play and has been for weeks,” said Andrew Kuchins, director of the Russia and Eurasia Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a center-right policy group. “This seems so blatantly political. There’s always been an element of denying President Obama a victory.”

Obama made the treaty the cornerstone of his policy to “reset” relations with Moscow, which had soured under former President George W. Bush.