Kaplan Fisks Romney
rherrick — Wed, 07/07/2010 - 16:18
Fred Kaplan has a great response to Mitt Romney's Washington Post OpEd yesterday. I read Romney's article and it certainly sounded suspect to me, but I'll admit that's because I assumed that, as a Repandercan, anything Mitt Romney "writes" is going to accord with the by-laws and stipulations of Asinine Conservative Nation as currently constituted on the Tea Party-Ron Paul-Glenn Beck Axis (ACNACCOTPRPGBA for short). But arms control is one of the most arcane, esoteric, and technical areas of political science and public policy and that's coming from someone who specialized in both international and East Asian politics at university. So that's some arcane and esoteric shit right there.
But this certainly didn't make sense to me:
Similarly, multiple nuclear warheads that are mounted on bombers are effectively not counted. Unlike past treaty restrictions, ICBMs are not prohibited from bombers. This means that Russia is free to mount a nearly unlimited number of ICBMs on bombers—including MIRVs (multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles) or multiple warheads—without tripping the treaty's limits.
But... OK, given, I don't know a whole lot about this stuff, but... we don't put ICBMs on bombers. See, because ICBMs drive themselves to the party. That's the B, OK? Ballistic. They launch up into the air quickly with great force provided by a powerful rocket engine and then they just stop and coast relying on their ballistic properties to carry them to their targets. Putting them on bombers is fundamentally at odds with how they work. As the Fred Kaplan article notes, there are indeed cruise missiles that are bomber launched, but those are just a whole different species of transport mechanism. It's sort of like saying that they've banned putting race cars on the back of tow trucks. There are times when putting a stock car on a tow truck makes sense, but it's not like you're going to beat Jimmy Johnson with your new secret weapon "stock car on a tow truck" or something.
So in other words, this point is specious to the point of drooling stupidity.
"[New START] explicitly forbids the United States from converting intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) silos into missile defense sites."
Who freaking cares? Are we running out of Montana and Nebraska or something? There's no magical missile mojo that will be wasted because we used it all to paint the walls of the existing silos and now our interceptors are fucked. First, our interceptors have never been proven to work anyway, we just keep trotting them out like they have. But, second, the structure and requirements for an interceptor launch point are different in JUST ABOUT EVERY IMPORTANT RESPECT from an ICBM facility. To bring up another tortured and terrible analogy, it's like complaining that a treaty wouldn't allow us to use our vacuum cleaners as tea cozies. It may be true, but the cost of that restriction is non-existent since we'd never do that or be able to do that even if we really wanted to try.
And finally, another thing I noted when reading the article originally:
Under New START, the United States must drastically reduce our number of launchers but Russia will not—it already has fewer launchers than the treaty limits. Put another way: We give, Russia gets.
So in other words, we set some limit X on launchers. We have X + 100. Russia has X - 100. Therefore we have to cut, but Russia doesn't! We're getting fucked!
Well, not really. I mean, is a treaty a disaster if we have to give up anything at all? If a treaty consists of anything other than whoever we're treating with giving shit up, then we've gotten taken, hoodwinked, screwed? That's idiotic. So it restricts our launchers and we'll still have more. Big deal. Now, as Kaplan notes and I wasn't aware of, Russia really gives up the big thing here, in that it has way more actual warheads than we do, and those will have to come down precipitously. Yay! Except, sorry, BOO we had to give something up!
Anyways, the Kaplan article is worth a read. I really think that Romney's smarter than this shows and that he wouldn't be the disaster that Bush was, but it also shows what a craven wuss he is and how willing to sell out anything like principles and rationality to get his precious gig.
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