Senator Kit Bond (R-MO) went on the radio show of right-wing extremist Frank Gaffney to lay out his problems with the New START treaty. Bond’s chief complaint is that he thinks the verification framework in the new treaty is weak and cited classified intelligence that gave him concerns about Russia’s trustworthiness. As Josh Rogin reported, Bond is using this as justification to call for a delay in holding a treaty vote. He stated:

Obviously the classified details are available to my colleagues in the secure reading room, but I can certainly share with you my conclusions. And I think by pushing the New START treaty, the administration is taking us down a very dangerous path… I think the treaty is very weak on verification, especially compared to previous treaties like START and the INF treaty.

What makes this absurd is not just that Bond is wrong about the strength of New START’s verification measures, it is also that by calling for the delay and rejection of New START on the grounds of weak verification, Bond is ensuring that there will be absolutely no monitoring of Russia’s nuclear arsenal – ever.

First things first though, Bond is wrong. The verification measures in New START are just as, if not more, vigorous than the previous START treaty. Proportionally, under the New START treaty there will be more inspections per facility than there were under the previous START treaty. Senator Richard Lugar has also noted that New START “will provide more transparency than START I, rather than less. The numbering system for warheads and delivery systems is much more transparent than before.”

The claims made by Bond and Senator Jim Risch (R-ID) about classified intelligence showing Russia can’t be trusted, were debunked not just by the Administration and Senate Democrats, but by Republican Senators Johnny Iskason (R-GA) and Bob Corker (R-TN) who saw the same intelligence just before they voted for the treaty in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

But even if New START was weaker on verification than old START the fact is that it is still better the current system of verification – which is zilch. There is no verification regime currently in place, because the old START treaty expired last December. It has been 311 days since the US has had inspectors on the ground monitoring Russia’s nuclear weapons. Bond claims to want a very strict verification and monitoring regime. Yet his approach of delaying and obstructing the New START treaty results in a situation where there is no verification regime.

If a Senator is truly concerned about Russia’s nuclear arsenal they would support New START, because without the treaty Russia is no longer constrained and could do whatever it likes with its nuclear arsenal and the US would have absolutely no idea what they were up to because of the absence of any verification measures. In other words, Kit Bond is a massive hypocrite.

This past Sunday, the Illinois Democratic and Republican nominees for U.S. Senate Rep. Mark Kirk (R-IL) and Alexi Giannoulias debated a variety of issues on NBC’s Meet The Press.

At one point, host David Gregory pressed Kirk about his support for extending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, rightly stating that doing so would conflict with the congressman’s stated goal of lowering the U.S. budget deficit. Kirk responded by noting the need for “spending restraint” to rein in the budget deficit, and complained that congressional leaders are “not interested” in it “at all.” He then went on to explain, “I back spending restraint across the board. At the DOD, like no second engine for the F-35 Fighter, closing down joint forces command, across the board reductions“:

GREGORY: Congressman, how could we afford to make permanent tax extensions now, with the Bush tax cuts in this climate?

KIRK: Because especially in this climate, we have Congressional leaders that are not interested in spending restraint at all. For example, I back spending restraint across the board. At the DOD like no second engine for the F-35 Fighter, closing down joint forces command, across the board reductions.

Watch it:

Kirk’s statement makes him the third Republican running for Senate this year who has gone on the record as saying that defense cuts are necessary in order to deal with the budget deficit. Earlier this month, Sen. Johnny Isakson (GA) told a local news station that reducing the deficit “begins with the Department of Defense.” A few days later, Kentucky candidate Rand Paul criticized Republicans for exempting the military from waste-trimming, telling Gwen Ifill that cutting defense spending “has to be on the table.”

If these Republicans are really serious about reining in the defense budget, they can look to The Sustainable Defense Task (SDTF) report released earlier this year. Assembled by Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) and consisting of the nation’s leading defense and budget experts, the SDTF identified nearly $1 trillion in waste that can be cut from the defense budget over the next ten years simply by eliminating outdated Cold War-era programs. They could also reference a recent report by CAP experts Lawrence Korb and Laura Conley that lays out $108 billion in defense cuts in the current 2015 budget forecast.

In a wide-ranging interview with Danger Room’s Noah Shachtman, North Carolina Republican Congressional candidate Ilario Pantano explains why he thinks “We’ve become too reliant on technology” in the way we fight wars:

Folks, one day we’re going to be in a fight with an enemy using [an] EMP [gadget-frying electro-magnetic pulse] and we better remember how to use a compass. We better remember how to use smoke. We better remember how to engage the enemy the old-fashioned way because one day we may lose our strong technical advantage. We certainly found that out as we fought primitives, whether it was in Iraq or Afghanistan.

I’m not sure if it’s quite right that we “lost our strong technical advantage” in Iraq or Afghanistan as much as we faced — and are facing — insurgencies that, despite being staffed by “primitives,” have developed and deployed a variety of tactics that have significantly shrunken that advantage.

But the real fun is Pantano’s electro-magnetic pulse (EMP) alarmism, which is basically the national security version of birtherism. As a Weekly Standard editor told Rob Farley for this article on EMP, “I don’t go for that EMP stuff. Kind of more interested in dangerous scenarios that might actually happen.”

Interestingly, this Stratfor article — which also happens to be posted on Pantano’s own campaign website — concludes that an EMP attack requires “the kind of complexity and uncertainty that well-trained terrorist operatives seek to avoid in an operation“:

Besides, a ground-level nuclear detonation in a city such as New York or Washington would be more likely to cause the type of terror, death and physical destruction that is sought in a terrorist attack than could be achieved by generally non-lethal EMP. [...]

The EMP threat has been around for more than half a century and there are a number of technical and practical variables that make a HEMP attack using a nuclear warhead highly unlikely.

Maybe Pantano should try reading his own website.