Gorby Blasts Bush On Nuke Treaty Refusal

By Cernig

Wow, it's a bad week to be Junior. Chavez refused to be a Dick, the three-letter folks poured cold water on his fearmongering over Iran - and now Gorby is having ago over Bush's lax attitude to his own nuclear proliferation. The ex-Soviet leader says Junior is set to undo all the good work Poppy did.

Former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev said on Tuesday a pillar of the arms control system could fall if Washington and Moscow replace the landmark START nuclear arms reduction treaty with a less formal pact.

The START treaty, signed in 1991, set ceilings on the size of the Russian and U.S. nuclear arsenals and became a symbol of the end of the Cold War. Washington has indicated it will not extend it in 2009 but wants to replace it with a pact that eliminates strict verification requirements and weapons curbs.

..."I don't see a negotiating process actually happening," Gorbachev, who signed the START treaty with then-President George Bush, the father of the current U.S. president, told a Harvard University forum.

...Diplomatic analysts have said a U.S. position on START reflects U.S. President George W. Bush's practice of repudiating arms control as a means of curbing nuclear weapons while relying more on measures like export controls, interdiction and sanctions.

Russia has said the treaty should be replaced with a formal, binding pact, and not an informal arrangement.

Gorbachev said verifying and inspecting each country's nuclear arsenals was crucial. "It is totally wrong to declare that this system is obsolete and unnecessary after the end of the Cold War," he said. "It is totally wrong."

Yet another international treaty bites the dust at Bush's hands - joining the treaties on the Geneva conventions, human rights, refugees, small arms control, climate change, the international court, landmine proliferation and several others.

It's funny/horrific to think about, but if Bush and Cheney had to live under the strictures of the NPT and IAEA inspections as leaders of a nation that didn't have prior membership of the Big Five nuke club, their administration would almost certainly be in bigger violation than Iran is.

Can the Reagan and Bush Senior Republican adults please report to the front checkout, as their party is lost in the toy aisle.