A New START or the Beginning of the End?

I see that Obama and Medvedev are beginning to consider a new strategic arms reduction treaty! Now we can START again where we left off a couple of decades ago. I don't see Israel joining in, however.

We and the CCCP were mutually destroying our nuclear arms and delivery systems. Teams from the opposite country oversaw the destruction of warheads, the filling in of missile silos, etc. It was not a panacea, as the treaty left enough nukes to wipe the planet out twenty or thirty times over instead of several hundred, but it was a start. It was working well. Then Bush made an agreement with Yeltsin, called the START II Treaty. "Let's not destroy our weapons and warheads, we'll just put them in storage,” and so it came to pass.

When we had a Constitution, the President was to follow the "Law of the Land." International treaties, when ratified by the Senate, were part of the Law of the Land. Abandonment of a treaty was breaking the law, a good cause for impeachment, being the violation of the public trust.

Nowadays, under the doctrine of the Unitary Executive, apparently no agreement is worth the paper (or Parchment) it is written on, if it doesn't go along with whatever the Unitary Executive of the day (And his/her master or masters) wants.

I am a nuclear veteran and have spent much of my life working for nuclear disarmament and World Peace. Nothing would make me happier than to see the nuclear scourge removed from the earth.

In 1967, the US Senate unanimously ratified the Outer Space Treaty [AKA Peaceful Uses of Space Treaty] which banned WMD’s in space. This treaty, the Law of the Land, has been derided as "quaint and obsolete" by the US Military Establishment, just like the Geneva Conventions on the Treatment of Prisoners. They were both unilaterally discarded by Bush and his cohorts. The Military has said it fully intends to "arm the high ground” which will allow the United States "Full-Spectrum Dominance," i.e. world control, a PNAC goal for many years.

It would be quite easy to correct all of this, if we still had a functioning Constitution, but alas, that apparently is not to be.

Someday, somewhere, some misguided or fearful person is going to set off one of these damned things, which will trigger a massive response. Before the contrails have had a chance to disperse, the world will be reduced to a handful of hunter-gatherers trying to live on a poisoned planet with a poisoned atmosphere. The gains, the treasures of art and thought of several thousand years accumulation and study, will become ash drifting on the wind.

And on the moon, a pile of junk and some footprints in the soil will proclaim to the universe, "Kilroy was here."