An old saw in arms control circles is that, at any given time, there are probably 20 to 25 senators who instinctively view arms control treaties as unwelcome curbs on U.S. sovereignty and military freedom of action. As the Obama administration prepares to send its freshly inked New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty with the Russians up to Capitol Hill for ratification, no senator will be more closely watched than Republican Whip Jon Kyl of Arizona, who in 1999 helped lead the Senate's successful rejection of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. If the Obama administration fails to gather the 67 Senate votes needed for ratification of New START, the junior senator from Arizona figures to be a pivotal reason.

At a breakfast with the National Defense University Foundation on Tuesday, Kyl previewed some of his likely objections to New START, and the possible price for overcoming them.

"I'm not convinced today that ratifying the New START treaty is in the best interests of the United States," Kyl told the audience. The Obama administration agreed to cut delivery systems "dramatically" to 800 deployed launchers, he noted, a number that "some experts believe is too low"; negotiators also "dramatically watered down" verification standards of the recently expired START I treaty, at the Russians' insistence and against Kyl's advice; and they included language that would pressure a U.S. president to constrain development of a missile defense system to cover only "regional threats," or else risk Russia's withdrawing from the treaty altogether.

"More important to me, the Obama administration negotiators were disingenuous at best in the way they described the wording on missile defense, and some would go further than disingenuous to describe what they did," Kyl said. "And what did we get out of the Russians in return? They will go down to levels [of nuclear arms] they were heading toward anyway. They tied one hand behind our back on missile defense, and we did nothing to address the Russian advantage in tactical nuclear weapons. So we're going to have a very robust debate on whether or not the United States is better off with this treaty. Personally, I'm not sure the treaty is worth what we give up."

In his talk and follow-up question-and-answer session, Kyl praised some measures contained in the treaty and the Pentagon's recently released Nuclear Posture Review. Despite considerable pressure from the arms-control community to go further, for instance, the administration continued to endorse a sizeable nuclear umbrella large enough to cover more than 30 U.S. allies, and that includes the present "triad" of bombers, land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles and submarine-based missiles. The NPR also commits the administration to spending an additional $5 billion to modernize the nation's nuclear weapons infrastructure.

"The bad news is the NPR muddies the waters on situations where the United States would use, or threaten to use, nuclear weapons against non-nuclear states that attack us with biological weapons, and I don't see any reason to muddy the waters that way," said Kyl. The NPR also sets a "very high bar" before a decision can be made to replace components of aging nuclear warheads to maintain their effectiveness. "That's not just bad news -- I find it very alarming," he said. "So I am not yet convinced that ratifying New START is in our best interests, and I know it won't be if the Obama administration does not commit adequate resources to a robust modernization program for our nuclear deterrent."