Earlier this week, I was invited to a screening of Nuclear Tipping Point, which makes the case for eliminating nuclear weapons. As polemical documentaries go, it's an old-fashioned eye-glazer (unlike the far glitzier Countdown to Zero, which opens in theaters July 23). The film consists mostly of two old conservative Democrats -- former Sen. Sam Nunn and former Defense Secretary William Perry -- and two very old moderate Republicans -- former Secretaries of State George Shultz and Henry Kissinger, now as slow and grave as an ancient sea tortoise -- speaking against a black background while portentous kettledrums thump offstage. None of them cops to even the tiniest grain of guilt over the role he played in sustaining the U.S. nuclear arsenal prior to his conversion experience. But in a way, that's the point: These old Cold Warriors, founders of the Nuclear Security Project, haven't gone soft; they've realized that nuclear weapons are now more of a threat than a shield to America's national security.

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The essence of the movie's argument is that, in a world of rogue states and suicidal terrorists, the Cold War dynamic of matching nuclear arsenals into the dizzying thousands -- that is, deterrence -- must give way to a new nonproliferation model focused on gaining control over bombs and nuclear material and then eliminating them over time. The case for zero has gained almost consensual status among strategic thinkers: Two-thirds of living U.S. secretaries of state and defense and national security advisors have endorsed the Nuclear Security Project. This is no longer a left-right issue -- except in today's Washington, where Henry Kissinger counts as a sissy. President Barack Obama's administration is now fighting tooth and nail to find 67 senators willing to sign the new START treaty with Russia, an important step forward but a modest down payment on Obama's own professed goal of creating a world without nuclear weapons.

Indeed, the entire Obama agenda on nonproliferation has been warped and blunted by the exigencies of catering to Senate Republicans -- and to those elements of the military and nuclear-weapons establishment that cling to the old Cold War paradigm. In his nuclear policy review, issued in April after months of delay and last-minute editing, Obama consistently chose cautious formulations over the bold steps he had advocated during the campaign. The Four Armchair Warriors of Nuclear Tipping Point point out, for example, that removing U.S. bombers from the high-alert status mandated during the Cold War, when planes had to be airborne before Soviet missiles could take them out, is perhaps the lowest-hanging fruit of strategic doctrine reform; but the Obama report concluded that "the current alert posture . . . should be maintained for the present."

In a Q-and-A session after the film, Nunn said that he was "disappointed" with the posture review and that the caution on de-alerting "went beyond what I thought was rational." You wouldn't expect Barack Obama to position himself to the right of Sam Nunn; but, given the rabid political atmosphere, Obama was in no position to stand up to his own generals. What's more, in February the administration announced that it would grant a 13 percent increase to the National Nuclear Security Administration, which oversees the nuclear infrastructure -- the largest increase awarded to any agency. This was a ransom payment to Senate Republicans, who had written to the president in December asserting that further arms reduction would not be in the U.S. national security interest "in the absence of a significant program to modernize our nuclear deterrent."

The Obama administration has paid, and paid dearly, to ensure passage of START, a win which officials were once foolish enough to think would be fairly painless. But they might not have paid enough to satisfy the right. In recent days, conservatives have begun priming the pump of opposition, including a Washington Post op-ed by former presidential candidate Mitt Romney so ludicrously ill-founded that Richard Lugar, the mild-mannered Republican senator, felt compelled to denounce it as a "hyperbolic" peddling of "misreadings and myths." Lugar is the only Senate Republican to have pledged to support the treaty. Jon Kyl, the Republican whip and a leader of the arms-control refuseniks, has not yet revealed his view, though in his own op-ed he criticized the treaty in much milder terms than Romney and even cited several "sensible positions" adopted in the posture review (thus perhaps confirming Obama's highly pragmatic calculations). A senior administration official told me that he remains optimistic that the Senate Foreign Relations Committee will vote out the treaty before the Aug. 9 recess, but admitted that he still "didn't have a good sense" of what would happen in the full Senate, or when.

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