Little By Little

What has been most telling, for me, in assessing the dangers of global warming, has been the piling up of its effects: glaciers melting more quickly than expected, the continuing upward trend of temperatures, and now a 40% drop in phytoplankton.

Any one of those effects, and many smaller ones, could be from other causes. The Gulf of Mexico has long been a dumping ground, and we are now realizing how badly we've been overfishing the oceans.

It's been more than a century since the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere started marching upwards, more than a century since scientists started warning that too much of it would make the earth warmer. And our response, all of us on earth, has been to burn more fossil fuel to make more carbon dioxide for the atmosphere. We've looked at our immediate economic needs and desires and let the rest go.

One of the theories of the American founding fathers was that people, left to themselves, are likely to be shortsighted and that therefore the government should be constructed so that those who were deliberating the larger problems could give them their best thought and come up with the best answers. But a lot of water has gone under the bridge since then, a lot of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and a lot of money toward the immediate economic desires of a very small number of people.

So we've had the lies about how unregulated business and finance would make things better for everyone. Okay, thirty years of that, and we have stagnant wages and a disintegrating middle class, along with a 1930s-size financial disaster. That small number of people is doing fine, thank you, and they're still at the lies, which have captured the people in the Tea Parties.

I'm glad that E. J. Dionne finally seems to be willing to call out the lies and the media that are all too willing to propagate them. I'm also glad that one congressman is calling out the BS.



But global warming isn't on the radar screen. It took us a long time to get to where we are, and it will take a long time to undo the damage. We need to start now, but we're still avoiding it.

Bits and Pieces - July 29, 2010

Hard to see how Republicans can go against the military on ratifying New START.

Timeline for the BP Blowout.

Pretty space pictures, even if the reviewer has far too much to say.

Nice summary of Judge Susan Bolton's decision on the Arizona immigration law.

Ship abandoned in 1853 found in the Northwest Passage.

The United States and Iran plan to resume talks on Iran's nuclear program. (h/t to Steve Hynd)

Has a high Chinese official defected to Britain?

Bits and Pieces - July 28, 2010

Aliens, bad luck with statistics, or a hole in the sky?

Shining a light on police corruption in Russia.

What the economy would have been without the stimulus, from a McCain advisor.

The self-referential internets.

Regulatory uncertainty as a job-destroyer.

Nothing new about home-grown terrorism. And that's not even mentioning the non-Muslim component (Timothy McVeigh, the Michigan militias, or this guy).

Decreasing Britain's Trident costs.

Key Parts of Arizona Immigration Law Blocked

United States District Court Judge Susan Bolton stopped the most controversial parts of the Arizona immigration law from going into effect tomorrow. This is a holding action until the courts decide the suit that the federal government has brought against the law, but bmaz sees it as a positive portent of things to come.

Bits and Pieces - July 27, 2010

On WikiLeaks: Mark Mazetti from the New York Times. Is Wikileaks the new Pentagon Papers? (No)

Plastic bottles across the Pacific!

How to end the filibuster with 51 votes.

The great decoupling of corporate profits from jobs.

Quote of the Day

Van Jones:

The only solution is for Americans to adjust our culture over time to our new media technologies. The information system gives us more data than ever before, faster than ever before. But we don’t yet have the wisdom in place to help us deal with it.

The End of Secrecy

I'm not going to comment much on the substance of the WikiLeaks documents on the war in Afghanistan. I'll trust Blake Hounsell that there's not much surprising in them and conclude with Adam Serwer that this indicates reasonably good reporting on the subject.

Part of what led to the breakup of the Soviet Union and the big change that the Chinese government took after the confrontation in Tienamen Square was the ease with which information could be shared. At that time, it was fax machines and e-mail. External storage for computers still relied on desk-top boxes with media the size of half a ream of paper. Now I've got the cutest little neon-green two gegs the size of my thumbnail.

What's worse is that attitudes are changing. "Information wants to be free." We've been hung up lately on the economic meaning of that last word, but there's another meaning as well. Bloggers link to the documents they're working from; the MSM prefers to consider those documents proprietary. And you've read about the end of privacy via Facebook, Twitter, and all those other newfangled things that the commenter frequently doesn't know how to use.

So Chelsea Clinton's wedding is a sort of secret, but even the New York Times knows that it will be in Rhinebeck, New York, this weekend.

Jay Rosen points out that WikiLeaks is the world's first stateless news organization, but I think that the novelty goes beyond that. It is also a non-corporate news organization. It has had to work a strategy to get the corporate news world (suitably international: New York Times, Guardian, Spiegel) to pay attention. Will there be a symbiosis?

Depending on how deep the expectation of information being free goes, and I think it goes very deep, particularly in people aged less than forty, governments need to think about how this is going to affect business as usual. It would be interesting to know who leaked these documents and why. (Do we know it's a single person?) The comparison is being made to Daniel Ellsberg, with implied parallel motivation, but we don't know that yet. Very likely it is a parallel motivation combined with the assumption of information being free in a way that nobody in Ellsberg's time was likely to have.

Frank Munger asks today why such a heavy penalty was levied for a security breach. Again, we don't know, but it may be a reaction to reinforce the old attitudes toward secrecy. During Bill Clinton's presidency, the Department of Energy declassified an enormous amount of weapons data. Now the DOE is trying to put that horse back into the barn. The people who might want weapons data are likely to be operating from different motives than Ellsberg or WikiLeaks. But those changing attitudes will have an effect there too. It's time to think about new ways, beyond keeping control of the information, to prevent nuclear proliferation.

Bits and Pieces - Community Organizing Edition

More people seem to be moving in the direction I saw the other day.

E. J. Dionne calls enough already.

The Washington Post editorial board calls Mitt Romney's op-ed (the one they published) "lacking in substance." Mitt isn't giving up and repeats what he said in a more comfortable venue.

One of the Lords of the Universe allows as to how sometimes self-interest isn't enough. But apparently this only applies to entitlements. This one probably isn't really confirmatory of my community organizing thesis, but it's interesting to see even infinitesimal movement from these guys. Or it may just be a headfake.

The Slime Molds In My Garden

Today is the third consecutive day of rain. The monsoon season has started. Yes, a real monsoon: heating of the dry ground causes a thermal low that draws moisture in from the Gulf of California. It's late this year. There was a false start at about the right time a few weeks back, but this is the real thing.

I've been fascinated by slime molds, but I've only recently realized that they live in my own garden. After the first day of rain, I did some badly-needed weeding and noticed some white foamy stuff around a few plants. Bird poop? It was under some bird feeders. Insect spit? It didn't quite look like either. This morning showed quite a bit of the stuff, which I think is slime mold, but if an expert wants to tell me otherwise, I'll be glad to hear.



It's those white patches - quite a few of them in this part of the flowerbed. Here's a closer look at one of them.



Slime molds are fascinating because they live at the interface between unicellularity and organization into a multicellular organism. Most of the time they are independent single-celled amoebas. Then something tells them to make spores, and they come together in something like an organism. Some of those independent cells form a base and stalk, and others form spores to be broadcast. How do they decide which ones do what? Are they genetically similar enough that it doesn't matter? Or do some have a breeding advantage over others?

Here are a couple more images of that same colony, each about an hour later than the one before. They seem to like to be elevated slightly above the ground and formed on the remains of cotton plant stems in my composted cotton mulch, although not all of them insisted on that.






That last is with a different camera, more pixels so that I can enlarge it. But I'm not seeing much more when I do.

If the slime molds do anything interesting (and observable), I'll post on it.

Bits and Pieces - July 25, 2010

The guy in charge of the BP relief well effort.

Funny how conservatives would like the moderate Muslims to police the extremists.

The internet isn't destroying our ability to concentrate, just convincing us that we're smarter than we are.

One of the smarter things that's been written about racism and the Tea Party.

Stories like this always make me cry.

As the Arctic melts, the Russians try to figure out where they dumped all the nuclear junk.

Kevin Drum is indeed rambling here, but his points that there are other values beyond the economic and that liberals have accepted Homo economicus too readily are important.

More that Democrats are accepting too easily, namely the Republicans' death wish for the US economy.

Bits and Pieces - War Edition

M. J. Rosenberg prepares for Jeff Goldberg's war with Iran manifesto.

The House Republicans want war with Iran.

Juan Cole says that would collapse the American economy.

Meanwhile, here is what Iran says.

And some facts from one of the other wars we're fighting.

Bits and Pieces - July 23, 2010

The Westboro Baptist Church pickets Comic-Con, and the superheroes reciprocate.

I guess I really did need to buy that digital camera. Via. Kodachrome was my favorite film.

I've not been too worried that Obama would attack Iran, so I haven't written a lot about it. If you're worried, Steve Clemons writes more.

Why there won't be a nuke used to stop the BP blowout.

Missile defense - yes!

More about that Simple J. Malarkey problem.

Community Organizing, Continued

This week brings a small confirmation of my theory that Barack Obama is applying community organizing principles to his presidency. In community organizing, you need to get the people to police themselves. To call BS on those who want to take advantage of them. The rapid denouement of Andrew Breitbart's lies in the Shirley Sherrod matter seems to be an indication that people, the news media, and the government are getting a bit smarter about rightwing deceptions.

Flory, at Whiskey Fire, also sees a microscopically chromed lining to this cloud, and James Fallows (prematurely, I fear) sees a "Sir, have you no decency?" moment. (Simple J. Malarkey drawing from here, where there is a further explanation.) Although these two don't put it in the community organizing category, they are talking about the same sort of thing. Part of the dynamic is that the changes become clear to more and more people.

Meanwhile Ezra Klein is undercutting Tucker Carlson and his minions who are spinning out new "discoveries" from their stolen Journolist archives. No, none of the Phron crowd were on it, so you'll have to wait a little longer for our denouement.

Bits and Pieces - July 22, 2010

An Israeli court rules that Franz Kafka's papers can be made public.

Palaeoporn: ecdysis gone wrong.

A foot race across the Gobi Desert: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4

It has always seemed to me that when possible proliferators get onto technologies like fusion or laser isotope separation, that's a good thing. It keeps them busy without providing useful weapons progress.

More on Bobby Jindal, scientist.

Conspiracy theories.

Moonbase: a free game from NASA.

And I have to add this: Tank Ballet.

Yellow Pitaya

Haiti's IMF Debt

A spot of good news on a slow-developing but decent action. The IMF is waving off Haiti's $268 million debt to the Fund.

Show Your Work!

If I wanted to check the numbers on how much plutonium might still be in the environment, I’d go to the records on production, check to see if there were any updated reports, and I’d check the records of what has happened to the plutonium since. The biggest changes will be in the plutonium that has been recovered from decommissioned plants and from the environment in contrast to earlier estimates, along with reclassifications resulting from plutonium removed from weapons as a result of treaties.

I would set up a table with a column showing the earlier numbers and another showing the changed numbers, with references for all the numbers. Or maybe two tables: one with categories of how the plutonium was used (Nagasaki, weapons tests, research, lost to environment, etc.) and one with where the plutonium is. This sort of accounting for how much plutonium was produced against how much we know we have is called a mass balance.

Unfortunately, that is not what Robert Alvarez chose to do in his report claiming that the US plutonium inventory has gone up. I can’t make the numbers from Alvarez’s report add up to a mass balance, because he doesn’t supply all of them, and the ones he does supply are not all comparable. It’s possible he’s got a mass balance somewhere, but, if he does, he’s reporting only selected numbers.

Page van der Linden has compared Alvarez’s report and Matthew Wald’s New York Times article that seems to be based on it. I say “seems to” because Wald, in the MSM tradition, doesn’t make his sources available. It is possible that Wald interviewed Alvarez and based his article on that interview. I’ll concentrate in this post on problems I’ve found in the report.

Alvarez comes close to part of a mass balance in his Table 2, which gives plutonium in the waste inventories of the various DOE sites, comparing earlier and more recent numbers. The more recent numbers add up to his 12.7 metric tons, the basis for his claims and Wald’s article. What he says about how he arrived at his numbers is

Based on more recent waste characterization data (see bibliography), approximately 12.7 tons, more than 11 percent of the total amount of Pu-239 produced and acquired has gone into waste streams (Table 2). [p. 4 of report]

“[S]ee bibliography,” however, is not an explanation of method. Which numbers did he take from the sources in the bibliography? How did he treat uncertainties? Why did he choose these sources? Further, two of the references in Table 2 are not in the bibliography, and there are eleven references in the bibliography that are not referred to in the table. The report also has footnotes that are not in the bibliography. Very confusing.

Alvarez throws other numbers into the report, and it’s not clear which are included in his 12.7 tons.

This paper does not address about 7.6 tons of plutonium contained in DOE spent reactor fuel, and 61.5 tons of plutonium declared excess for weapons purposes with the exception of 3.5 tons discarded at the Rocky Flats Plant which is included in the 61.5 tons “excess” declaration. About 41.8 metric tons of the U.S. excess plutonium is expected to be processed so it can be mixed with uranium for fabrication into mixed oxide fuel for use in commercial nuclear power plants and subsequently disposed. Disposition options for 5 tons of “non-pit” plutonium include mixing with defense high-level wastes to be vitrified or direct disposal in WIPP. [p. 2 of report]

So there is a 3.5-ton exception to the exception, except it is included in the 61.5 tons to which it is an exception? Is it included in the 12.7 tons? Or is it somehow double-counted? A full mass balance would clarify this.

There are other points that are unclear and potentially misleading.

The dramatic increase from the DOE’s 1996 waste estimate appears to be due to: reclassification as waste of process residues originally set aside for plutonium recovery for weapons; underestimates of production losses; and improvements in waste characterization data. [p. 1 of report]

If material was not considered waste in the earlier estimate and it is now, that doesn’t imply errors in the earlier estimate.

“Production losses” have been a question for as long as I can remember. Material held up in glove-box ventilation systems and other production piping has been an explanation for a lack of agreement between production figures and current inventories. Now that Rocky Flats and other production buildings have been torn down, better estimates must be available for those holdup amounts. I have asked some questions on this, and the numbers are not publicly available. It would seem that releasing these numbers, if they improve the mass balance, would be good for the Department of Energy, showing that they knew what they were talking about. Does Alvarez have access to those numbers? He doesn’t say.

As van der Linden notes, Alvarez suddenly brings in the idea of having the IAEA monitor WIPP. It’s only one of several off-topic insertions, another of the features of this report that doesn’t inspire confidence. But it’s actually a good point, in my opinion. Less so is his suggestion that better knowledge of the mass balance of plutonium produced and lost over the years will improve treaty verification.

Neither the United States nor Russia have adequate records of plutonium production. I’ve tried to work with original shipping records. Secrecy, poor analytical methods, and just not seeing those records as important at the time all are factors. We simply don’t know, and won’t ever know, the amounts of plutonium produced down to tolerances of several kilograms. What will happen in treaty negotiations is that numbers will be agreed upon for the purposes of the treaty.

Something that the arms control community might make more of is IAEA monitoring within the United States. As Alvarez comments, it would be a way of indicating our transparency to the international community. I don’t understand why the US allows relatively little, and why the list of monitored sites is so closely held. I need to do more research on this to write in a well-informed manner, but maybe I’ll get around to that in another post.

America-Mehomitan

Juan Cole posted a solid response yesterday - nay, a refudiation - to a bit of mindless tweeting of which you have surely heard. I think I've previously posted the passage below at some point, but it's worth posting again (and it's worth reading Juan's entire post). This from the Treaty of Tripoli of 1797 signed by the John Adams administration and a Congress that was at the time, as Juan says, full of founding fathers. (International treaties, once signed and ratified by the US [usually by the Executive and two-thirds of the Legislative], are considered domestic law according to US Civil Code).

"As the Government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquillity, of Musselmen; and as the said States never have entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mehomitan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries."

Durian

Hot

FYI - World Simmers in Hottest Year So Far.

Double, Triple, Quadruple...

I haven't been following the Shahram Amiri story very closely. It has seemed to me that none of the stories are believable. So I don't have the back story down in any detailed way. A week or two ago, dueling videos showed up, apparently from the same person. And now he's back in Iran. Unless a double has been substituted for him.

There are lots of stories like this that I don't follow very closely, largely because they aren't central to my interests and it looks like untangling them will take more of my time than I can give to them. Juan Cole and Gareth Porter have developed coherent possible story lines.

I'll add one more layer to those possible stories: What if the CIA, in accepting Amiri's offer, was entirely aware that he could be a double agent and was just checking him out? That would mean that any information he offered would be considered not credible until confirmed in some way, but even a made-up or exaggerated story might provide some lines of investigation. The wrong lines, of course, would be part of the purpose of a double agent, but the CIA would be aware of that possibility. We don't know what use, if any, has been made of the information he offered up.

There Is A Reality

To continue my harping on the necessary relationship of science to a testable reality, I will consider Governor Bobby Jindal's insistence on building barrier islands to prevent the oil from the BP blowout from reaching Louisiana's shores. It apparently isn't working so well.

Jindal had a bright idea. He didn't bother to test it against some of the rules of thumb I've suggested, and it's not working because it fails the reality test.

It's a very easy and nice thought: Oil in Gulf. Sand islands absorb oil before it reaches the marshes along the shore. Dig up islands after oil problem abates and dispose of oily sand. Marshes remain clean.

The problem is that water moves. Not only that, but it's heavy and capable of moving other stuff, like sand. If Jindal had simply thought of other instances, like the building of jettys and other rock structures designed to change the movement of water so as to retain sand on beaches, he might have come up with the right answer. In many cases, those jettys have actually resulted in the loss of sand.

Or he could have built a sand mountain on a beach, below the tide line, and then watched what the water does to it.

The people who watch this sort of thing for a living said the sand berms would wash away, or, if they somehow stayed in place, they would prevent water as well as oil from reaching the marshes, which also would damage them. Plus it would cost lots of money, but hey, Jindal is Republican, and he was asking for the money from the feds, so that wasn't a problem in today's political world.

And now the sand berms that have been built are washing away (photos here). There is a discoverable reality, and science provides the way to find it.

Mohammed Hassan Odaini Released from Guantánamo

Andy Worthington reports that Guantánamo prisoner Mohammed Hassan Odaini has finally been sent back to Yemen by the United States (Defense Department statement here). Detained in 2002 at the age of 18, known to be innocent of any charges of terrorism, and held illegally and without charge for the past five years (if not eight) by the Bush and Obama administrations, he now returns home at age 26. One... among others held without charge. It has been known since at least 2004 that only a dozen of the estimated 800 detainees held at Guantánamo since 2002 are actually Al Qaeda operatives. The Bush administration knowingly held innocent people for political reasons. 72% of detainees who have managed to gain due process have been found by federal judges to have been held illegally (see also).

Argentina Legalizes Same-Sex Marriage

Same-sex civil unions have been legalized in Uruguay, Buenos Aires and some states in Mexico and Brazil. Mexico City has legalized gay marriage. Colombia's Constitutional Court granted same-sex couples inheritance rights and allowed them to add their partners to health insurance plans.

But Argentina now becomes the first country in Latin America to legalize same-sex marriage nationwide, granting gays and lesbians all the same rights and responsibilities that heterosexuals have. These include many more rights than civil unions, including adopting children and inheriting wealth. (via).

Argentina thus chooses to head down the precipitous slippery slope towards marriage between man and unicellular algae. (1, 2, 3).

Maprang

Drunk News

A theme that seemed to pop up repeatedly while browsing this morning.

Tiny treeshrews chug alcoholic nectar without getting drunk

“Drunk” Parrots Fall From the Trees in Australia

Mark Reckless MP sorry for being 'too drunk to vote'

Drunk man tries to ride giant alligator

Drinking buddies set friend’s prosthetic leg on fire, ditch burned man by roadside

Bits and Pieces - July 12, 2010

A couple more pieces on Mitt Romney's foreign policy mistake from Jacob Heilbrunn and Joe Cirincione.

The Armchair Generalist goes into more detail than I did on the latest call for war against Iran.

The science of the BP Blowout.

This report (pdf) seems to be the basis for this NYT article on plutonium. I have a gazillion questions. More to come. (h/t to SA.)

The Republicans and New START

It’s not easy being a Republican these days. Ask Mitt Romney. Ask Dick Lugar.

The New START treaty is a particular challenge. It revives and renews the arms control relationship between the United States and Russia, which flourished under Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev. But it is a treaty, and Republican common wisdom developed under Jesse Helms George W. Bush was that treaties encroached on American sovereignty and therefore should be eschewed. Further, the Congressional common wisdom under John Boehner, Mitch McConnell and Newt Gingrich is that President Obama must be denied any successes.

The Senate must ratify treaties with a two-thirds majority. That means that at least eight Republicans must vote to ratify New START. Party discipline has been strict on most legislation so far, so one might think that New START has no chance if the current Republican party discipline holds.

But, it has been said, politics ends at the water’s edge. And Republicans have supported arms control in the past, most especially when the nuclear arms race was on fast forward. Further, arms control has been a project of both Republican and Democratic administrations, with treaty ratification by both Republican and Democratic Senates.

The Strategic Arms Limitation Talks began in November 1969, under President Richard Nixon, who signed the resulting Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with Leonid Brezhnev in 1972. The treaty was ratified in November 1972 by a Senate composed of 54 Democrats, 38 Republicans, 1 Independent, and 1 Conservative. President Gerald Ford continued the talks after ratification. President George W. Bush withdrew from the treaty in December 2001.

The SALT II treaty was negotiated under President Jimmy Carter. It was the first treaty actually to roll back numbers of delivery vehicles and a turning point in the arms race. Carter and Brezhnev signed the treaty in June 1979. Congress (58 Democrats, 31 Democrats, 1 Independent) did not ratify it because of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

The first strategic arms reduction proposal was presented by President Ronald Reagan in 1982. That was an interesting time; Reagan was beginning a big defense buildup. The war in Afghanistan was going badly, and their defense spending was crowding out consumer needs. A series of aged Communist Party hacks headed the government and quickly died. It wasn’t until Mikhail Gorbachev became First Secretary of the Communist Party in 1985 that Reagan had a partner he could negotiate with. The Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START I) was signed in July 1991 by President George H. W. Bush and Secretary Gorbachev.

Then the Soviet Union came apart for once and all in December 1991, and some details had to be ironed out, like those nukes in the new countries of Kazakhstan, Belarus, and Ukraine. So it wasn’t until 1994 that the treaty was ratified. That Senate had 52 Republicans and 48 Democrats.

A START II treaty followed on, signed by President George H. W. Bush and Russian President Boris Yeltsin and ratified by a Republican Senate, but it never came into force, partly because the Gingrich-Helms Republican missile defense uproar of the nineties was beginning.

George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin signed the Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty (SORT) in 2002, Bush under duress because the Russians didn’t believe in his Texas handshake and wanted something in writing. Another Republican Senate ratified it. SORT has no verification provisions and uses the provisions of START I. Which brings us up to New START.

It has largely been Republican presidents and Senates that have developed and approved treaties. The Democrats kept the ball rolling, so reducing the world’s nuclear arsenals has been a bipartisan effort. And I didn’t mention that Reagan and Gorbachev almost agreed to eliminate both countries’ nuclear arsenals by the year 2000.

But that sort of bipartisanship is now anathema to most of the Republican Party.

Senator Richard Lugar has been a senator since 1976, when arms control was getting rolling. He’s worked closely with Joe Biden when Biden was a senator on arms control and, when the Soviet Union came apart, on programs to keep the Soviet legacy nuclear arms under lock and key and the scientists occupied with other things than freelancing for, say, Libya. He is now the ranking Republican member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Enter Mitt Romney, not a senator but presumably interested in the Republican presidential nomination in 2012. It’s looking like Sarah Palin is getting ready to run too. Today’s Republican Party is driven by Palin, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and the Tea Partiers, aided and abetted by the congressional caucus that believes that wrecking the country will lead to voter disgust with the party currently in power, making the Republicans electorally victorious. National interest seems to play no part in their calculation, as it did for the Republicans who supported arms control from the 1970s on.

So Romney, seeing the difficulty in being a Republican with the party’s pacifistic history of giving up its mighty nuclear arsenal for the mere historically-backed assurance that the Soviet Union would do the same, decided to go for the Palin-Limbaugh-Beck school of making it up as you go but keeping it aggressive. If you want a line-by-line fisking of Romney’s piece, Fred Kaplan does a good job.

And then Senator Richard Lugar weighed in. He didn’t point out the dumb in Romney’s op-ed the way Kaplan did. He summons the history by listing the Republican elder statesmen who support New START and firmly but diplomatically undercuts some of the same points in Romney’s op-ed that Kaplan does. And he adds a very good point: where Romney criticizes New START for not addressing Russia’s tactical nukes, Lugar points out that if New START is not ratified, there is no way that we can address those tactical nukes.

Now Romney has a real problem. He is being called out by an elder statesman of his own party. He could go the he-man route, standing up for our strong defense and saying whatever he feels he needs to in order to seem as strong as Sarah Palin when Putin is raising up his head to fly over her house. But such a response is likely to diminish him.

But Lugar has his own set of problems. He is one of a rapidly declining breed, the moderate, internationalist Republican. Others have been voted down in favor of Republicans who are more acceptable to the Tea Party. Lugar may see ratification of New START and, perhaps, of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty as the capstones of a long career, so he may be willing to let the chips fall where they may in the election of 2012 and continue his principled and intelligent stand for arms control.

[Cross-posted at Obsidian Wings and American Footprints.]