The Senate may well confirm START, but the troglodyte position of many Republicans -- as well as Obama's political vulnerability on the subject -- might doom the larger vision of transforming the nuclear debate. As it happens, several months ago I had a long conversation about nuclear issues with Kyl. The Arizona senator is not counted among the true GOP mossbacks, like Jim DeMint or James Inhofe, but I came away thinking that he really does view Kissinger and his ilk as wimps. Kyl told me that he considers treaties "to a large extent useless "because bad actors won't honor them. The United States, he said, should be free to develop nuclear weapons as needed and should never agree to forgo nuclear testing, as the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) would require. Other countries may rail against America, but Kyl takes a dim view of them anyway.

When I asked Kyl about the central axiom of Obama and the Armchair Warriors, that states will not agree to restraints on proliferation unless the United States and other nuclear powers move toward disarmament, he snorted, "It's a great theoretical argument if you're up at 2 in the morning in the dormitory, but it has no application in the real world." The actual problem, he said, is that countries eager to stick it to the United States refuse to sign on to U.S. efforts to stop nuclear malefactors. "Have any of these countries been effectively supportive of U.S. efforts to effect a regime change in Iran?" he asked. I didn't know how to answer; I said that I hadn't known the United States was doing that.

The refuseniks seem to think the Cold War never ended, and the United States needs to keep all those B-52s around lest it tempt the Soviets -- sorry, the Russians -- with its weakness. You can't fight that kind of obscurantism. Nevertheless, Kyl's objection to the "theoretical argument" cannot simply be dismissed. After all, dismantling the nuclear arsenal is a matter of urgency not because U.S. or Russian weapons represent an imminent threat to humanity, as they did a generation ago, but rather because disarmament is said to be the sole means of persuading the non nuclear states to take nonproliferation seriously. Although the Armchair Warriors tend to view this axiom as self-evident, an Obama administration arms-control official said to me last year, "These are propositions that have to be demonstrated."

Indeed they are; and they can be. Last September, after intense U.S. lobbying, the U.N. Security Council unanimously adopted Resolution 1887 calling for strict controls on the export of nuclear materials and committing states to ratify the CTBT, negotiate a treaty banning the production of fissile material, and adopt protocols that would allow nuclear monitors to conduct intrusive inspections. At the U.N. review conference for the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in May, states reaffirmed their commitment to strengthen nonproliferation standards and, no less significantly, isolated Iran, which came to play the role of spoiler. And there's no question that it was Obama's personal commitment to reducing the size and role of the U.S. nuclear arsenal that persuaded states to adopt these measures. So it's not, in fact, a theoretical argument.

As tough as the political environment for Obama is now, it will only get worse after the midterm election reduces the Democratic majority in the Senate. The prospects for the CTBT, or for a treaty mandating much deeper cuts between the United States and Russia, are marginal. From a political point of view, nuclear proliferation looks like global warming: The problem will have to get much worse before it becomes possible to summon the political will to act effectively. The one thing we can feel confident about is that the problem will, in fact, get much worse.

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