Senate Minority Whip Jon Kyl, rehearsing here for his "Mr. Kyl" puppet show

In a surprise move that angered the White House and delighted nuclear weapons fans, Senate Minority Whip Jon “The License Plate” Kyl has announced that he will block a vote on the New Start treaty during the lame duck session of Congress. The treaty would have capped US and Russian nuclear arsenals and restored inspections to both countries, which lapsed last year for the first time since the Cold War. It was also widely regarded as an important step in improving relations with Russia, which country happens to hold a lot of influence over A) transport routes to Afghanistan and B) the ongoing effort to keep Iran* from developing nuclear weapons. Those sound like two compelling American interests, right there, but Kyl is concerned that the whole thing might be a little rushed. After months of negotiations, he announced that he would block cloture, “given the combination of other work Congress must do and the complex and unresolved issues related to Start and modernization.”

The “issues related to Start and modernization” mostly center on how much money Kyl gets for the defense industry. Republicans deputized him to bargain with the White House on Start months ago, and since then he has insisted on increasingly large appropriations to “modernize the nation’s nuclear arsenal.” The administration has thus far offered $100 billion over the next ten years to upgrade submarines, bombers and missiles, but Kyl wants more. Until he gets it—or until a Senate with more Republicans in it can kill the issue entirely—nuclear arms reduction and improvement of relations with Russia will have to wait.

The question of why a nation desperately trying to make up a $1.3 trillion budget shortfall should spend a hundred billion dollars on even cooler nuclear weapons has thus far gone unanswered. Kyl’s objections to the treaty, as articulated in the Wall Street Journal, center on the suspicion that Democrats will not actually fund the additional weapons spending Obama has promised. “It’s hard to see senators considering the treaty before the fiscal year 2011 funding is appropriated,” Kyl writes, “and before they confirm that the 2012 budget will include adequate funding for the next fiscal year.”

This argument, of course, requires that the White House give Kyl what he wants before he agrees to a deal. It’s the political equivalent of demanding the the tenants pay rent before you let them sign a lease, and its audacity nicely distracts from the larger policy question of why we need to spend the money at all. On the pro side of ratifying New Start, you’ve got supply lines to Afghanistan, improved relations with Russia, and the restoration of inspections to a country that could start selling tactical warheads to email spam tycoons at any moment. On the con side, you’ve got America’s ongoing need for nuclear weapons.

Kyl argues that a modernized arsenal would provide a strong deterrent—but a deterrent to whom? Currently deterring Russia from starting a global thermonuclear war is their government’s ongoing plan to sell off the old Soviet Union for parts, plus maybe expand their economy into something besides national gas and prostitution. Now deterring China is the eleventy gajillion dollars we owe them, a bad situation unlikely to be improved by spending $100 billion more. India and Pakistan are saving all their nuclear weapons so they can finally settle the question of which god is the real one, so unless Israel bombs us, I would say shit is thoroughly deterred.

Presumably, Jon Kyl knows this. If we assume that his deterrence/readiness argument is a stalking horse, and that he recognizes that international terrorism is currently a much greater defense concern than the Russian bear, we are forced to look for other motives behind his position. A clue comes late in Kyl’s Journal editorial, in which he stresses the importance of missile defense systems.

It just so happens that Raytheon rolled out a new missile defense system this year, and it also happens that the company is headquartered in Kyl’s home state of Arizona. Raytheon is southern Arizona’s largest employer, and a sponsor of the 2006 Viad Corp/Snell & Wilmer fundraiser for Senator Kyl. I’m not saying that Kyl is a former lobbyist whose nuclear policy agenda directly benefits one of his largest campaign contributors, but all known facts and numbers say that.

I am saying that Kyl has, in his small way, increased the likelihood of nuclear war. Whether he did it to funnel federal tax dollars to Arizona or just to embarrass the President is unclear, but the fact stands that at this moment, in terms of preventing a tactical exchange with Russia, we are just slightly behind where we were in 1991. Fortunately, the odds of an actual nuclear exchange are lower now than at almost any time in the last 60 years. Unfortunately, we’re going to keep spending money on it, thanks to the efforts of one Republican senator willing to do what many men would not.

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