The debate over the New START arms control treaty with Russia is winding down. Senate committees have held nearly 20 hearings, and treaty opponents are now repeating the same tired arguments that have already been thoroughly debunked and discredited. With the debate over START largely exhausted, Sen. John Kerry (D-MA), the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has moved to schedule a committee vote for next week. If passed, the treaty will go to the Senate floor, where it will need 67 votes to be ratified. The efforts by those opposing the treaty — like Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK), former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, and the Heritage Foundation — to rally Republican opposition seem to have largely failed with few GOP Senators arguing against the merits of the treaty. A growing number of Republican senators have now expressed hope that the treaty can be ratified. But instead of expressing their intention to vote for the treaty, many of these senators — including Bob Corker and Lamar Alexander of Tennessee — are now demanding backroom deals to get more pork for the home states’ nuclear weapons bureaucracy — something that should have absolutely nothing to do with START. Having vigorously attacked side deals during the health care debate, these Senators are now engaging in their own sunbelt shakedown. In the midst of complaining about government spending, they are demanding wasteful pork that would have the United States absurdly spending vastly greater sums on its nuclear infrastructure, when it is planning to significantly reduce its nuclear stockpiles. Senators should not put pork and politics over American nuclear security, and the White House should resist efforts to succumb to such blackmail.

DEBATE IS OVER: After the New START treaty was signed in early April in Prague, opponents and skeptics initially sought to nitpick and take down the treaty on its merits. Their arguments on issue after issue — from missile defense to verification — have been disproven, debunked, and shown to be extremely dangerous. To make matters worse for treaty opponents, the top military brass unanimously came out in support of the treaty, the Senate’s foremost nuclear expert Richard Lugar (R-IN) vigorously supports it, and a litany of Republican foreign policy establishment figures, such as Henry Kissinger, James Schlesinger, Brent Scowcroft, and Stephen Hadley, have all testified in support of this treaty. And yesterday, seven former commanders of U.S. Strategic Command — the military commander in charge of overseeing missile defense and the nuclear arsenal — expressed their support of the treaty. Faced with a growing bipartisan consensus, Senate conservatives — led by Jon Kyl (AZ) and John Thune (SD) — insisted that the Senate was rushing the treaty, and in a ploy reminiscent of the health care debate, called for slowing things down. But the debate, with nearly 20 hearings completed, has become so stale and repetitious that claims of “rushing” have lacked credibility. Few Senate Republicans are actually arguing against the merits of the treaty now.

THE SUNBELT SHAKEDOWN: The main obstacle to treaty passage now appears to be demands from certain Republican senators for even greater funding for the nuclear weapons infrastructure and bureaucracy. In other words, the START debate is no longer about the treaty. Kyl, long an advocate for building new nuclear weapons and conducting explosive nuclear tests in the deserts of the southwest, is widely seen as attempting to extract a large price from the administration on START in order to undercut its broader arms-control agenda. Kyl seems to have immense sway. Sen. Bob Bennett (R-UT), for instance, told Foreign Policy’s Josh Rogin, “I think [START is] a step in the right direction and a continuation of the thawing of the relationship between the United States and Russia that goes all the way back to the Ronald Reagan [administration]. We’re now at the point where this is probably a good idea.” But Bennett added, “I’m waiting for Senator Kyl to finish his analysis, but he’s leaning yes and I’m leaning yes.” Corker, who sits on the Foreign Relations committee, told Politico this morning that “there is about a $10 billion gap over 10 years. It’s something that can be dealt with,” noting that if the administration gave into his demands, “it’s very likely” that he would support the treaty. Corker’s chief interest is the Uranium Processing Facility in Oak Ridge, TN, which Corker seemingly arbitrarily determined needs between $4-$5 billion, well above the projected $1.4-$3.5 billion that the facilities own in contractor projects. He concedes, however, that “certainly, there’s no official estimate.” Similarly, Alexander claimed “it will depend primarily on whether we can have an adequate nuclear modernization program going forward. … I’m working very closely with Senator Kyl to make that happen.”

DEFICIT PEACOCKS GO NUCLEAR: By publicly emphasizing that their votes on START have nothing to do with the treaty and are tied to receiving more nuclear pork, many Senate Republicans are showing how little they actually care about deficits. They may insist that such funds are vital to our national security, but they aren’t. The Bush administration neglected the nuclear infrastructure, and having expressed few concerns about the nuclear weapons complex during the ratification of an arms-control treaty under Bush, Senate Republicans have now latched onto this issue demanding an arbitrary annual spending increase of about 30 percent. What makes these demands so absurd is that the Obama administration has already proposed massive increases in funding for the nuclear weapons complex. They are increasing funding this year by 15 percent over the levels during the Bush administration and are pledging $80 billion over the next 10 years. This level of funding, if anything, is excessive. Linton Brooks, George W. Bush’s nuclear administrator for five years, even said that “I’d have killed for that [Obama’s] budget.” Additionally, it is clear that the nuclear weapons refurbishment and modernization programs are working. The U.S. nuclear arsenal remains the most reliable and technologically advanced in the world and the JASON advisory panel — made up of top nuclear scientists — found in a study last year that the nuclear arsenal was reliable and could be “extended for decades, with no anticipated loss in confidence,” as long as existing programs were maintained. Furthermore, it makes little sense to spend up to 30 percent more on an infrastructure when there are plans to substantially reduce the U.S. nuclear arsenal. But all that aside, the fact is that New START is a very modest treaty that requires the U.S. to actually cut few nuclear weapons, which makes efforts to tie the treaty to concerns about the nuclear weapons stockpile disingenuous at best.