These Morons Won't Be Satisfied Until they Restart the Arms Race.

Impeach them all now.

Dispute delays arms-control talks with Moscow

By Jonathan S. Landay | McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON — Wrangling between Bush administration aides and U.S. intelligence agencies is holding up talks with Moscow on future monitoring of the thousands of nuclear weapons that the United States and Russia still aim at one another.

The 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) established the elaborate scheme of inspections, data sharing, advance missile test notifications and satellite surveillance. But the accord will expire in December 2009, and the U.S. spy satellites that locate and count Russian missile sites are stretched thin by the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, concerns about North Korea's and Iran's nuclear programs and other threats, current and former U.S. officials and experts said.

Administration policymakers argue that the monitoring system is an outdated vestige of the Cold War that restricts the Pentagon's ability to respond to new threats. They want to replace it with an informal system of looser inspections that would allow the United States to do things such as replacing nuclear warheads with conventional warheads on intercontinental ballistic missiles.

The end of the U.S.-Soviet rivalry makes strict verification unnecessary, and the START monitoring methods aren't foolproof, anyway, said senior administration official, who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject.

Could members of the press Please stop using anonymous sources anonymity when they are spouting the admin line???

Really.

The end of the U.S.-Soviet rivalry makes strict verification unnecessary, and the START monitoring methods aren't foolproof, anyway, said senior administration official, who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject.

"We both (Moscow and Washington) want to understand the general trends and directions of each other's forces. But we don't need to know everything all the time," the official said.

Alarmed by the stress on the limited fleet of U.S. spy satellites, however, U.S. intelligence agencies oppose weakening the on-site inspections and other means that give U.S. officials a window into the only nuclear arsenal capable of destroying the United States.

What they are saying here is that between, Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, and the DPRK (North Korea), their resources are stretched thin.

If it's not replaced, Moscow and Washington will lose the most reliable means of monitoring each others' compliance with the 2002 Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty (SORT), which calls for both sides to reduce the number of warheads on their bombers, long-range missiles and submarines to 2,200 by Dec. 31, 2012. After that, neither side will be bound by limits on its arsenal.

Moreover, because the SORT treaty doesn't require the destruction of warheads, those removed from service and stored in reserve stockpiles could be redeployed rapidly.

So this is even More destabilizing than it appears at first glance.

Russia wants a legally binding treaty mandating deeper weapons reductions. The United States favors an informal deal, opposes new weapons cuts and wants to eliminate strict verification measures.

So now we're acting like the old Soviets.

John Bolton, who served as the administration's top arms control official until August 2005, said it would be better to increase spending on U.S. intelligence than to rely on START-type verification to monitor Russia's nuclear forces.

If John Bolton is for something, you won't ever lose money going the other way. The man is a moron.