Arms Control

In a conference room in the Russian Library on the UC Irvine campus, would-be negotiators for the United States and the Soviet Union sat across the table from each other recently and signed an arms-control treaty. The negotiators were actually students of Prof. Keith Nelson, and they were learning about the nuts and bolts of world peace. They played their roles with utmost seriousness and were judged by experts in the field, some of whom actually have sat at the table in Geneva across from the Soviets.

President Obama on Monday pressed Chinese President Hu Jintao to do more to persuade North Korea to scuttle plans for a rocket launch, asking the North Korean regime's closest ally to push Pyongyang's new leaders toward internationally acceptable behavior, but getting no immediate commitment, according to senior U.S. officials. China has expressed concerns about the impending launch, which the U.S. and its allies call a violation of international law and a cover for testing a missile as part of North Korea's nuclear weapons program.

Millions of words are published every year about negotiations between the United States and the Soviet Union. Yet most of us have only the haziest notion of how such negotiations are actually organized and carried out. Now that both President Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev at last show signs of serious intent at the arms-reduction talks in Geneva, it is especially interesting to hear what people with direct experience in U.S.-Soviet negotiations have to say about the process.

Rep. Gabrielle Giffords is breathing on her own and moving both arms, both very encouraging signs of recovery, physicians at University Medical Center in Tucson said Tuesday. In an interview, Dr. Peter Rhee, the chief of trauma at the medical center, said Giffords was moving both arms, although her left arm was more active than her right, and moving her eyes. Previously, doctors had said that she was moving only her left arm, which is controlled by the right hemisphere of her brain ?

As he prepares to meet President Reagan at the summit Saturday, Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev faces a dilemma involving the arms control issue that may may represent the two superpowers' best chance for prompt agreement--intermediate-range nuclear weapons.

President Obama has scored his first foreign policy triumph by persuading the Russians to join him in a major reduction of nuclear arms. But if his initiative is to succeed, he must gain the support of another skeptical bargaining partner: the U.S. Congress. His fate in this second round will probably depend on the constitutional path he takes in gaining legislative approval. He has two choices. He can ask two-thirds of the Senate to ratify the agreement as a treaty under Article II of the Constitution.

Attempts to control or reverse nuclear proliferation come in two flavors: Either one tries to control nuclear material (uranium, centrifuges, superfast switches) or one tries to control nuclear information (blueprints, schematics, scientific expertise). For most of the last half a century, the world has shunned the material approach in favor of controlling information. But information is extremely difficult to contain, as is made clear by the growing number of countries that have acquired nuclear weapons in the decades since the United States made the first atomic bomb, from the Soviet Union in 1949 to North Korea in 2006.

I agree with Stephen Ambrose that "Ike's Arms-Control Advice Has Value for INF Debate" (Op-Ed Page, May 18). But President Eisenhower also believed that nations needed to go beyond arms control and embrace the principle of universal disarmament if world peace was to become a reality. To that end he said: "Controlled, universal disarmament is the imperative of our time. The demand for it by the hundreds of millions will, I hope, become so universal and so insistent that no man, no government anywhere, can withstand it."

President Reagan announced Thursday that he will nominate Michael P. Mobbs, an aide to Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger, to be an assistant director of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency.

Every once in a while, senators inadvertently tell the truth. The official Republican opposition to the New START nuclear arms reduction treaty with Russia is based on two incorrect assertions and an irrelevancy: There hasn't been enough time to vet it properly, it might limit U.S. missile defense efforts, and it doesn't mention tactical nuclear weapons. But a couple of GOP senators may have recently let the real reason slip out. During Senate debate on the treaty Friday, and in an interview with the New York Times, Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.

Here we go again. President Obama signed a nuclear arms control agreement — the New START treaty — with Russian counterpart Dmitry Medvedev in Prague in April to much fanfare. Senate hearings on the treaty are taking place. But in a reprise of Cold War debates, hard-liners are seeking to block Senate ratification of the treaty, where it needs a two-thirds majority, by depicting the deal as a dangerous sellout to Moscow. The treaty deserves careful scrutiny, but it is in danger of becoming the victim of a hazing campaign.

Iran's top political and religious authority lashed out at the United States at a nuclear disarmament conference Saturday in Tehran meant to counter a nonproliferation summit in Washington earlier in the week. Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, described the United States as the world's "only nuclear scofflaw." He called Washington hypocritical for advocating arms control while retaining a huge nuclear weapons stockpile, and for accepting the atomic arsenal of Israel.

President Obama devotes much of his schedule this month to arms control. He signs a new treaty with Russia in Prague, the Czech capital, on Thursday, releases a major policy statement on U.S. use of nuclear arms, and hosts a summit on arms safeguards April 12 and 13. The events, which one advocacy group is calling "Washington's nuclear April," represent the rollout of Obama's agenda for controlling nuclear arms worldwide, an issue that was a...

President Obama has scored his first foreign policy triumph by persuading the Russians to join him in a major reduction of nuclear arms. But if his initiative is to succeed, he must gain the support of another skeptical bargaining partner: the U.S. Congress. His fate in this second round will probably depend on the constitutional path he takes in gaining legislative approval. He has two choices. He can ask two-thirds of the Senate to ratify the agreement as a treaty under Article II of the Constitution.

Iran has dramatically shifted its public tone toward the United Nations' nuclear watchdog, dropping its previous deference while harshly criticizing the agency's latest report and its new director-general as an incompetent and biased lackey of the West. On Sunday, Iran's supreme leader and highest authority, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, lashed out at the International Atomic Energy Agency, which monitors Iran's nuclear program and adherence to the international Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, in a move that could signal a further deterioration of cooperation between the agency and the Islamic Republic.

In a move possibly meant to deflect attention from his domestic political woes, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Sunday ordered the nation's atomic energy agency to begin enriching uranium to a higher level of purity to serve as fuel for a Tehran medical reactor. The command to enrich uranium from 3.5% to 20% purity comes amid Iran's diplomatic impasse with the United States and its allies over a proposal to exchange nuclear fuel that the international community hopes would slow the development of Tehran's nuclear capabilities.

President Obama's ambitious plan to begin phasing out nuclear weapons has run up against powerful resistance from officials in the Pentagon and other U.S. agencies, posing a threat to one of his most important foreign policy initiatives. Obama laid out his vision of a nuclear-free world in a speech in Prague, Czech Republic, last April, pledging that the U.S. would take dramatic steps to lead the way. Nine months later, the administration is locked in internal debate over a top-secret policy blueprint for shrinking the U.S. nuclear arsenal and reducing the role of such weapons in America's military strategy and foreign policy.