START and CTBT Ratification Would Demonstrate U.S. Leadership, Says Robert Norris

The Senate and the START Treaty - Robert Norris in the Washington Times [link]

• The next few months will be crucial to the success of President Obama's agenda for nuclear disarmament.
• A follow-on agreement to START, the treaty that covers strategic nuclear weapons, must be completed by its expiration date, Dec. 5. The new treaty will need Senate ratification and will likely be taken up in the first quarter of 2010. In the summer or fall the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT) will go before the Senate for ratification, a goal that Mr. Obama said he would "aggressively pursue."
• The overarching reason to support both treaties is to demonstrate leadership to the rest of the world that the United States is at the forefront of nonproliferation and disarmament efforts, something sadly lacking during the former administration.

For Safety, Ban Nuclear Tests - The Register Citizen (CT) [link]

• Nuclear weapons tests are a toxic relic of a past characterized by arms races and fallout shelters. Except for outlaw nations like North Korea, the world today has quit the business of testing nuclear weapons.
• There’s a growing bipartisan consensus among experts that testing nuclear weapons isn’t in the best interests of the United States.
• Republicans in favor of the Test Ban Treaty include former Secretaries of State George P. Shultz and Henry Kissinger, and Colin Powell and former National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft. These aren’t naïve idealists. They’re men who have devoted their lives to protecting the United States.

Blix: Iran's Nuclear Work Raising Mideast Tensions - CNN [link]

• Iran can't convince the world it doesn't want nuclear weapons as long as it is producing nuclear fuel on an industrial scale, former U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix said Wednesday. 
• "The fact is that that enrichment very much increases tension in the Middle East, and it may even lead to other countries in the Middle East thinking of going for enrichment," Blix said.
• Watch Blix answer CNN viewer questions below: 

US, Japan to Call for Nuke-Free World - Reuters [link]

• US President Barack Obama and Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama plan to issue a joint statement calling for a world without nuclear weapons when they hold talks Friday, reports said.

A View from the Dark Side

Prologue for a Mistaken Policy - Louis Rene Beres, Thomas McInerney and Paul Valley in the Washington Times [link]

• What sort of national security policy can we expect from a president who seeks a "world free of nuclear weapons?" In principle, this is a reasonable objective. In reality, however, it is preposterous.
• President Obama, by failing to identify serious strategic threats and objectives, has ignored the core expectations of national survival.
• America's strategic doctrine must rest on the idea that threats of war and terrorism may now derive from a genuine "clash of civilizations."