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Henry Sokolski , executive director of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center in Washington, D.C., has written an article for Armed Forces Journal on our current missile defense capabilities. An excerpt:

“In an effort to reduce U.S. military reliance on nuclear weapons, the Obama administration is emphasizing how much more America can rely on advanced non-nuclear weapons to defend its interests, allies and friends. There’s only one problem: The White House’s plans to deploy these forces — including new non-nuclear missile defenses and long-range conventional ballistic missiles — don’t quite add up.

“The missile defense system the Obama administration has advocated may be incapable of countering the missile threat the Pentagon is projecting. Meanwhile, the long-range conventional ballistic missile system it’s working on is unlikely to be able to reach anything but a mere handful of targets.

“None of this, however, is inevitable. Both programs can be enhanced, but only at the risk of upsetting America’s two largest potential rivals: China and Russia. Still, enhancing these programs will limit the harm either competitor might otherwise be able to inflict on the U.S. and its allies. More important, it would put the U.S. in a far better position to get Beijing and Moscow to agree to deep ground-based missile reductions and to cooperate on missile defenses, which, in turn, would make all parties far safer.

“This is conceivable if the U.S. had the right offensive and defensive programs in place. Unfortunately, it doesn’t yet.

“Take the administration’s missile defense efforts. The Pentagon announced last fall it was deploying the first fully tested version of a system known as the Standard Missile 3 (SM-3) to neutralize Iran’s shorter range rockets. After 2018, it says it will begin deploying an entirely new variant to neutralize Iran’s intermediate and intercontinental-range ballistic missiles. U.S. intelligence agencies last fall said Iran was most likely to deploy these sometime after 2020.

“This all seemed sound enough until Defense Secretary Robert Gates announced in April that, with sufficient foreign assistance, Iran’s longest range rockets could fly by 2015 — five years earlier than originally projected. Some outside experts have doubted that the much ballyhooed advanced variant of the SM-3 — the SM-3 Block II B — could be effective against intercontinental ballistic missiles on any timeline. There has never been any question, though, of the Pentagon being able to field it before 2015. It can’t.”

Henry Sokolski, executive director of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center and a member of the congressionally mandated Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction, Proliferation, and Terrorism, blogged at National Review Online’s The Corner about START.

An excerpt of New START: Trust but Clarify, dated July 19:

“It could be Washington’s blogospheric impatience with argumentation or it could be the public’s overwrought desire for political clarity, but one thing is clear — the current debate over New START’s ratification has become genuinely phony.

“As I explained today at the Heritage Foundation event “Will Obama’s Arms Control Agenda Stop with New START?” the treaty’s critics need to get on with the serious business of identifying what amendments, reservations, understandings, and declarations, if any, they think the Senate should consider. And Senate supporters of the treaty need to stop dismissing critics’ concerns and blocking access to information that all sides of the debate need to have. This prescription ought to be a no-brainer; unfortunately, it’s nowhere close to where we are in the current debate.

“New START’s supporters, in a mad tear to get the treaty rammed through the Senate, have either dismissed or impugned the motives of the treaty’s critics. The loudest of START’s opponents, meanwhile, have publicly positioned themselves to block the treaty’s ratification — even though they and their staffs privately concede that the agreement is likely to pass, and that they may well end up voting for it themselves.”

In New START: Don’t Shake the Tree If the Fruit Ain’t Ripe, dated July 26, Sokolski responds to a critic.

“After my last entry on the New START treaty, the National Secuirty Network, a prominent left-of-center organization, identified me as being “among the more thoughtful right of center voices.” This made me instantly wary — is this a good thing? I asked myself — and fortunately, I read on to discover that this was merely calculated faint praise: Actually, they were quite put off by my concluding argument…First, the New START Treaty is hardly in any danger of being egregiously delayed, even if it ends up being ratified as late as the start of the new Senate session next year. Do the math. New START was submitted to the Hill on May 14, meaning the Senate will have reviewed it for 12 weeks when it goes on recess after the first week of August. If the Senate were to abide by the White House’s plea to ratify New START before the November elections, they presumably would have to do so between September 12, when the Senate returns, and October 1, when it plans to adjourn for fall elections. This would mean New START would be ratified after only 15 weeks of Senate action. Add two weeks for a possible lame-duck session, and you get 18 weeks. If you go for ratification by the second week of February (a prospect that even Majority Leader Reid has allowed as a possibility), you get roughly 20 weeks. All together, that would pass within a period just shy of eight months.

“Historically, this is relatively quick. The Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty, which was comparatively noncontroversial, was sent to the Hill January 19, 1988, and ratified by the Senate on May 27, 1987: five months. With recesses for President’s Day and Easter, the Senate was in session for roughly 16 weeks before it ratified INF. So, that’s 16 weeks of session and five months to ratify INF, on one hand, and 15 to 20 weeks of session and six to eight months to ratify New START on the other — that hardly seems like a ‘delay’ that could be construed as worrisome. START II ratification took nearly 36 months. Getting the New START Treaty ratified by the beginning of 2011 would be a period of time less than one-quarter as long.”

What’s the rush? asks Henry Sokolski, executive director of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center and a member of the congressionally mandated Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction, Proliferation, and Terrorism.

The U.S. has several nuclear arms containment options, so why rush to renew the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) and allow Russia to dictate our missile defense policy?

Last month, the U.S. and Russia agreed to honor the spirit of the expired START, as they continue to negotiate a replacement Under the treaty, signed by Russia and the U.S. in 1991, both countries agreed to reduce nuclear warheads to roughly 6,000 and delivery vehicles to 1,600. Eleven years later, the Moscow Treaty, a follow-up to START, required warhead reductions to between 1,700 and 2,200.

Russia blamed our plans to continue developing a comprehensive missile defense system for the renewal delay. Sokolski, writing at National Review Online:

“The odds of START’s being ratified before November’s elections are hardly on the rise. The next round of negotiations begins today in Geneva…As it is, 41 Senators (all 40 Republicans plus one independent, Sen. Joe Lieberman) have warned President Obama that they are in no mood to approve START unless the White House supports a ’significant’ nuclear-weapons-modernization program. The Defense Department’s Nuclear Posture Review, which details U.S. nuclear-weapons requirements for Congress every five years, was due in December. The administration is divided and has asked for two extensions; the review is now due in March and may be delayed again. Complicating matters even further, Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin is pushing to link missile defenses with offensive missiles in START, a potential killer provision for most pro-missile-defense Republicans.”

Senior officials in the administration are keen to “show progress” with Russia, in light of the mid-term elections. They may resubmit a Bush-era nuclear cooperation agreement between the U.S. and the former Soviet Union, whose approval would “pretty much be a slam dunk.” But bringing this agreement before Congress has drawbacks, the most important of which, is that it is sure to force a debate over Russia’s cooperation with Iran in the nuclear weapons and rocket fields. This is unlikely to make passage of START easier in the Senate.

If Obama stops pushing START, and the U.S. diversifies “arms-control portfolio to address nuclear threats outside” Russia , whose deployed nuclear capabilities have diminished in the last 25 years, we might make some headway, without letting Russia call the shots.

Will Obama be proactive and take the initiative in containing Russia , or will appeasement policies prevail?