START: How Did We Get Here?

Jeffrey Chatterton / March 31, 2010

An assistant shows the block with a red button marked "reset" in English and "overload" in Russian that US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton handed to Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov during a meeting on March 6, 2009 in Geneva.

When the United States and Russia meet in Prague on April 8 to sign the follow-on Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START), Presidents Obama and Medvedev will finalize a process that took about a year to complete. Although some claim New START is a monumental step along the “road to zero” (a world without nuclear weapons), a look back at the rocky negotiation process reveals that serious national interests were sacrificed in the interests of this idealistic goal:

On February 7, 2009, Vice President Joe Biden promised that the U.S. would “press the reset button” with Moscow during an international security conference in Munich. (more…)