Free Republic

President Obama served notice on the newly elected Senators and the constituents who voted for them on Tuesday: He does not want them to have a say in one of the most important national security issues of the day – the strategic arms reduction accord Team Obama negotiated with the Russians earlier this year, known as the “New START” Treaty. Instead, Mr. Obama wants only yesterday’s Senate to determine the fate of an agreement that will slash U.S. nuclear forces in a way that will reduce them to numbers of deployed nuclear weapons vastly inferior to those the Russians will...

Paul H. Nitze, an expert on military power and strategic arms whose roles as negotiator, diplomat and Washington insider spanned the era from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Ronald Reagan and helped shape America's cold war relationship with the Soviet Union, died Tuesday night at his home in Washington. He was 97. The cause was pneumonia, said his wife, Elisabeth Scott Porter. From the beginning of the nuclear age, whether in government or out, Mr. Nitze urged successive American presidents to take measures against what he saw as the Soviet drive to overwhelm the United States through the force of arms....