Senator Jon Kyl (R-AZ) went on the NewsHour last night and artfully dodged whether he would support the START treaty, saying initially that he hadn’t read it yet, despite – as Senator Diane Feinstein noted – it is only 17 pages long. This is consistent with what Josh Rogin reported that GOP Senators haven’t yet decided whether they will support or oppose the treaty. While Kyl stayed coy, what became clear throughout the interview is Kyl will not support or oppose the treaty on its merits.

Importantly, Kyl subtly walked back from one of his previous claims that the Senate would not support the treaty if the Russians issued a unilateral statement threatening to withdraw from the treaty because of missile defense. The Russians issued such a statement – a statement that has zero practical impact -but this raised concerns that Kyl would use this symbolic measure as an excuse to kill the treaty. He still might, but when asked pointedly by Jim Lehrer if that was a “deal-breaker or just troubling,” Kyl responded by only saying: “It’s troubling.”

While this shift marked an important climb down, Kyl also effectively laid out what the President needed to do to buy his vote for ratification. Claiming that he would of course scrutinize the treaty, Kyl spent nearly all his time throughout the interview mentioning issues not connected to START – he mentioned nuclear modernization seven times for instance. He was sending a clear signal throughout the interview that his support for New START doesn’t really depend on the treaty itself, but on whether the Administration meets his demand to spend even more on nuclear modernization. Kyl explained that the:

other factor that will bear on my support for this treaty, and that is the modernization plan that the president must submit to the Congress to help take care of our nuclear weapons complex and our nuclear deterrent. Those two things go hand in hand. … I can tell you this, that I think the Senate will find it very hard to support this treaty if there is not a robust modernization plan. … I’m just saying there is a connection between this treaty and the modernization program.

This Sunbelt shakedown is particularly ridiculous, given that the Obama administration in their new budget just dramatically increased the money going to the nuclear weapons infrastructure. But Kyl now wants them to double that increase and he is threatening to block ratification if the Administration doesn’t adhere to his demands.

Throughout the START ratification process a major question will be how far the Administration is willing to go to try to get Kyl. The Administration should stand firm and realize that Kyl is playing a losing hand. This treaty has overwhelming bipartisan support amongst serious foreign policy leaders and GOP obstructionism in the Senate would have deadly serious consequences for US national security.

A common refrain from those looking to oppose the START treaty, the newly released nuclear posture review, and more broadly Obama’s nuclear agenda, is that it is reckless to cut nuclear weapons when our nuclear arsenal is aging and deteriorating. Statements from Jon Kyl, John McCain, and Joe Lieberman all throw out this argument.

John Bolton and friends take this argument to the next level, asserting that Obama is leaving America exposed by not spending enough to maintain existing US nuclear weapons. Bolton wrote in the National Review that the administration is “drastically limiting programs to ensure the safety and reliablity (sic) of our existing nuclear stockpile, the president is risking our security and obtaining nothing in return.” It is a great talking point for conservatives – except that it is just not true.

First, the Obama administration announced massive funding increases to the nuclear infrastructure – a 10 percent increase over what the Bush administration spent. Biden wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal:

For almost a decade, our laboratories and facilities have been underfunded and undervalued… The budget we will submit to Congress on Monday both reverses this decline and enables us to implement the president’s nuclear-security agenda. These goals are intertwined… To achieve these goals, our budget devotes $7 billion for maintaining our nuclear-weapons stockpile and complex, and for related efforts. This commitment is $600 million more than Congress approved last year. And over the next five years we intend to boost funding for these important activities by more than $5 billion.

Conservative’s newfound concerns about the state of the nuclear infrastructure reek of duplicity. The Obama administration is spending significantly more on maintaining nuclear weapons and labs than the Bush administration, especially compared to when John Bolton was Undersecretary for Arms Control. If Obama is “risking our security” than Bolton and the Bush administration were practically a second-coming of Benedict Arnold based on the comparatively puny amount that was spent on modernizing our nuclear infrastructure.

Second, the nuclear weapons are completely reliable. The JASON advisory panel, which is made up of actual rocket scientists, concluded that the nuclear weapons were in fine shape:

Lifetimes of today’s nuclear warheads could be extended for decades, with no anticipated loss in confidence, by using approaches similar to those employed in LEPs [Life Extension Programs] to date.

The right is now attempting to make some hay out of a letter from some nuclear lab directors that said the JASON study was too positive and that more funding was needed for the labs. Conservatives are just shocked, shocked, to find out that the heads of an organization want more money for their organization. Nevertheless, these lab directors, despite having a significant interest in receiving more funds, still did not contradict the fundamental point that was communicated in the unclassified executive summary of the JASON report – that the nuclear weapons are fine as long as we continue the modernization programs that are already on the books.

Third, we are modernizing our nuclear weapons. Conservatives like Bolton desperately want the US to build an entirely new nuclear warhead and they claim that our weapons are really old and increasingly unreliable. They must not watch any home renovation shows, because they seem to have no understanding that it is possible to renovate or modernize something, without starting from scratch. If Bolton were on This Old House he would tell Tom Silva to just tear down the house they are renovating and start from scratch. This is a foolish and costly approach. The fact is that the US is constantly refurbishing and modernizing its nuclear weapons. As Stephen Pifer of the Brookings Institution explained:

We [the US] take a missile frame and we modernize it, and we refurbish it, whereas the Russian practice is to take a missile, they use it for 15 years and then they replace it completely. So you’ll see new numbers coming up on the Russian side and you may think that, gosh, the Americans are still deploying these 1970s missiles. I suspect when they retire the last Minuteman III in 2030, it may have three of the original bolts on it from 1970 but it’s going to be a very different missile.

The reality is that our weapons are the best in the world and conservatives who attack the state of our nuclear arsenal need to answer a question posed by Kingston Rief in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists:

So those who continue to argue that Washington doesn’t show enough interest in modernizing its nuclear weapons should be forced to answer a simple question: If given the choice, would they trade the U.S. nuclear arsenal for the Russian or Chinese nuclear arsenals? Clearly, the answer is no.

A strong cap on carbon would significantly cut the flow of petrodollars to Iran’s hostile regime, a ThinkProgress analysis shows. The economic and political strength of Iran’s dictatorship is a threat to the national security of the United States and the world, and its nuclear ambitions threaten to destabilize the Middle East. Yesterday, diplomats from “six world powers have met for the first time to discuss imposing new sanctions on Iran for its failure to suspend work on its controversial nuclear program,” but negotiators have not yet figured how to achieve President Barack Obama’s goal of being “consistent and steady in applying international pressure.”

Iran, “which holds the world’s second-biggest oil and gas reserves and supplies about 4.5 percent of the world’s oil production,” uses its oil power “as a strategic asset.” One mechanism to control the flow of petrodollars to Iran — whose oil production is worth $120 billion a year at current prices — is for the United States to control its appetite for oil. ThinkProgress has found that a carbon cap that reduces global warming pollution by 80 percent by 2050 would mean Iran would lose approximately $1.8 trillion worth of oil revenues over the next forty years — over $100 million a day:

The United States is by far the world’s biggest consumer of oil, accounting for 25 percent of world production. Our demand is more than the four next biggest consumers — China, Japan, India, and Russia — combined, despite having only 11% of their population. Unilateral action by the United States to reduce oil consumption has a profound effect on the world market, and is the first step towards global climate policy that builds a zero-carbon economy.

If the world moves away from oil dependence, Iran’s regime will no longer be able to rely on petrodollars to stay afloat. Other unfriendly regimes propped up by carbon-fuel money, such as Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela, will also feel the pinch, improving our national security and making it less likely our armed services will fight battles amid the oil fields. For that to happen, the United States must pass comprehensive climate and clean energy legislation as fast as possible, the stronger the better.

On Wednesday night Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ) told a town hall of Yuma citizens that the Republican Party will filibuster immigration reform if it were proposed. Many Senate Republicans have remained skeptical of the immigration bill that Sens. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC) are working on. However, Kyl’s remarks signal the first time a high-ranking GOP member has threatened to block reform entirely. The Yuma Sun reports:

One man in the audience asked Kyl about the GOP’s strategy to curtail the efforts of the Democrat controlled congress and executive branch.

“First of all our strategy on health care included taking as long as we possibly could so the American people could clearly understand (it).. and it took a year for it to get done,” Kyl said, adding they will do their best to slow up any other bills, like immigration reform, in the same manner.

“My guess is (immigration reform) won’t have the votes to pass, but political promises have been made to key constituency of the party that is in power. Republicans will use the opportunity to filibuster…”

Ironically, in 2007, Kyl sponsored an immigration reform bill that included many of the same basic principles that Schumer and Graham have adopted as part of the framework for their own bill. Kyl has argued that this time around is different because the “consensus” behind the bill he co-sponsored “has all but evaporated.” Given the fact that Schumer and Graham have simply provided a broad blueprint of what is still only an idea for an unwritten bill, it seems odd that Kyl is so quick to come out against it — especially considering the fact that he took a much different approach to immigration reform in 2007:

“The situation in Arizona is horrible today,” he said in an interview.

Mr. Kyl said he also realized that his approach needed to change, now that Republicans were a minority in the Senate. With or without him, Mr. Kennedy and others in the new Democratic majority were poised to draw up immigration legislation that Mr. Kyl knew he would dislike.

“I had a choice,” Mr. Kyl said. “Do I sit on the sidelines and say, ‘That’s a bad bill?’ Or do I get in the fight and try to shape it as best I could to meet the objectives that I think are more appropriate?”

“I would have rather ended my political career with people saying, ‘Throughout his political career, he was recognized as one of the top reasonable spokesmen for conservativism in this country,’ ” Mr. Kyl said. “I would hope those who really know me and understand what we were able to achieve in this negotiation process, if this legislation passes, will at the end of the day continue to believe that. But I’m not sure.”

Last week, Chairman Michael Steele met with immigration advocates and, according to several groups that attended the meeting, pledged to enlist another Republican senator’s support for comprehensive immigration reform. However, the RNC promptly retreated, saying Steele “made no such commitment.”In terms of immigration and border security, things in Arizona and around the country haven’t gotten any better throughout the past three years, and Kyl and his party’s obstruction will only make matters worse.