The Obama administration's choice as envoy to an upcoming conference on disarmament can't get confirmed as her nomination gets tied up with other nonproliferation issues, an administration official tells The Cable.

The Senate cleared almost 30 nominations on Feb. 11 after Sen. Richard Shelby, R-AL, backed off his "blanket hold" due to public pressure, but Laura Kennedy, whom Obama wants to make an ambassador-level U.S. envoy to the April conference, was not among them. Her nomination is being held up by Senate Minority Whip Jon Kyl, R-AZ, who is using the issue to bargain for items related to the START follow-on treaty and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, according to the official.

"Kennedy's position has nothing to do with those items," the official complained.

Intensive negotiations conducted by Assistant Secretary for Legislative Affairs Richard Verma have failed to yield an agreement. Kyl is asking for unfettered access to the executive branch's negotiating record on CTBT, which no administration has ever provided, as well as access to more information on the ongoing START negotiations, according to the official.

"He will have every chance to scrutinize START when it is submitted for ratification.  His pleas for info now are a transparent effort to kill the negotiations," the official said.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-NV, alluded to the reasons behind Kennedy's stalled nomination in a floor speech Feb. 9.

"It is too bad the United States of America, a nuclear power in the world, does not have a representative of ambassadorial rank to represent the United States at disarmament conferences," Reid said. "Why it is being held up has nothing to do with her qualifications or background. It is some other reason."

"For the past several months, Senator Kyl has made requests with the State Department to provide information relating to START and the Iran Sanctions Act," a Kyl aide said. "For some reason they've been reluctant to respond.  Consequently, Senator Kyl is reluctant to consider their nominees."

As the Obama administration finishes up negotiations over the lynchpin of its strategy of hitting the "reset button" on U.S. relations with Russia, the "New START" nuclear arms reduction treaty, the big lingering question on everyone's mind is: Will the Senate actually be able to ratify the deal?

Senior Democratic senators, who strongly support the new treaty, aren't so sure.

"It's going to be hard to get it ratified," said Senate Armed Services Committee chairman Carl Levin, D-MI, in a Tuesday interview with The Cable. Levin said he hadn't done a vote count, but wasn't confident the treaty will get the 67 votes needed to make it the law of the land.

"I'm not even sure we'll get a referral from the Foreign Relations Committee," Levin added, promising to at least hold hearings on the issue.

Meanwhile, senior Senators such as Senate Minority Whip Jon Kyl, R-AZ, Senate Armed Services ranking Republican John McCain, R-AZ, and Sen. Joseph Lieberman, I-CT, have been sending the administration public warnings about what they don't want to see in the agreement and have been using private methods to pressure the administration on the issue as well.

Kyl told The Cable in a brief interview Tuesday that he will not announce his stance until the final text surfaces, but there were some red lines that if crossed would trigger his opposition, which would be problematic.

 "Unless it is accompanied by a [nuclear] modernization program that satisfies the requirements of the secretary of defense, it would be very difficult for the Senate to support the new START treaty," he said.

As Under Secretary of State Ellen Tauscher has said, the administration's new budget request does include a plan for what it calls "stockpile modernization," but Kyl complained that it "hasn't been fleshed out."

Administration officials tell The Cable they believe leading GOP voices like Kyl haven't yet decided whether to support ratification and are setting themselves up to be able to justify their decision either way when the time comes.

Kyl also stood by the letter that he, McCain, and Lieberman sent to National Security Advisor Jim Jones last week opposing any unilateral statement by Russia declaring its right to object to U.S. missile defenses by withdrawing from the treaty.

"I think it would be very damaging," Kyl said. "If there were a provision that the Russians would interpret as enabling them to unilaterally abandon the treaty if they didn't like what we were doing on missile defense, I think that would be very troubling to me and my colleagues in the Senate."

Levin countered that the prospect of Russia declaring its right to withdraw was no justification for standing in the way of the agreement.

"They can withdraw unilaterally for any reason, so I don't know that that's a good reason to object," Levin said, adding, "The United States withdrew unilaterally from the ABM treaty when we decided it was in our interest, right?"

The State Department today urged Iran to publicly address issues raised in a new report by the International Atomic Energy Agency regarding the Islamic Republic's nuclear activities.

"We cannot explain why it refuses to come to the table and engage constructively to answer the questions that have been raised," State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley told reporters today, "And you have to draw some conclusions from that."

Crowley noted that this was the first report on the issue from the IAEA since the agency's new director general, Yukiya Amano, took up his post and the first since the existence of Iran's secret uranium enrichment facility near Qom was exposed last September.

"There is no explanation for that facility that is consistent with the needs of a civilian nuclear program. And it characterizes the way in which Iran has conducted its relations with the IAEA and its failure to satisfactorily explain, you know, what its activities and ambitions are in the nuclear sphere," Crowley said.

Regarding the Qom facility, the IAEA report said the agency has information disputing Iran's contention that it chose the location in 2007. The agency says it was planned in 2006, when Iran would have been require to notify the IAEA. Iran has failed to answer properly several of the IAEA's questions on Qom, the report stated.

"The Agency has verified that the construction of the facility is ongoing, but that no centrifuges had been introduced into the facility as of 16 February 2010," it reads.

"The IAEA report shows in stark terms that Iran continues to obfuscate on its safeguards obligations," said Nima Gerami of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "Regrettably, results from the IAEA's inspection of Iran's enrichment plant near Qom are still pending because Iran delayed access to the facility last October and ElBaradei did little to put his foot down."

Amano is not doing much better, according to Gerami.

"If Amano wants to be successful he should report as straightforwardly as possible in explaining Iran's safeguards failures and avoid using falsely reassuring statements, as he did in this report, that the IAEA seeks to ensure its continuing ability to verify the non-diversion of declared nuclear material" in Iran.

When Vice President Joseph Biden takes to the podium Thursday to give a major policy speech on nuclear weapons policy, he will have two goals: setting the stage for a long string of nonproliferation events this spring, and setting the record straight on his boss's nuclear vision.

Barack Obama's administration is taking active steps to combat what they see as false narratives being put out by the Republicans when it comes to nuclear policy. Obama is not advocating unilateral disarmament, as many conservatives have alleged. The White House also seeks to defend itself against the perception that Republicans are somehow inherently stronger on nuclear issues. And lastly, Biden wants to dispel the notion that the goal of zero nuclear weapons is some naive, liberal pipe dream that ignores current and future threats.

"He's going to lay out what are the challenges that we face and explain why engaging in a mutual process of reducing our reliance on nuclear weapons, reducing their numbers, in conjunction with other states, in conjunction with international fora and institutions, all help toward achieving those goals," said one administration official previewing the speech to The Cable on background basis.

Biden will also tout the administration's proposed $600 million increase for maintaining the nuclear stockpile in its fiscal 2011 budget request as evidence that the Obama administration is strong on nuclear issues. The official said that despite loud rhetoric, the Bush administration underfunded these accounts.

"The speech is to further expand on the budget request and to key up the series of rapid-fire events that will be occurring this spring," the official said.

And a busy spring it will be. The administration is gearing up for a push on the soon to be finalized START follow-on treaty with Russia, the defense of its budget request in Congress, the nonproliferation conference in Washington in April, and the Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT) review conference in May.

Biden's speech, which will be given at the National Defense University after being postponed due to snow, will build off of an op-ed the vice president wrote in the Wall Street Journal last month.

No real news on either the START negotiations, missile-defense deployments, or the soon-to-be finalized Nuclear Posture Review is expected. Nor will Biden discuss new efforts to build civilian nuclear energy plants. "That's completely separate," the official said.

Under Secretary of State for Arms Control Ellen Tauscher said in a speech Wednesday that the NPR is expected to come out in early March, a little later than the March 1 deadline previously announced and much later than the original Dec. 1 deadline.

Nonproliferation advocates are encouraged by the Obama administration's actions thus far on nuclear disarmament, but worry that the NPR will not fundamentally reframe how America views the use of nuclear weapons, as they would hope.

"We've been told to expect a modest document," said Stephen Young, a senior analyst with the Union of Concerned Scientists. "The president has recognized that nuclear weapons are now a liability rather than an asset. They create more problems than they solve. He can make us more secure by changing how the United States and the rest of the world think about nuclear weapons."

U.S. Ambassador to Moscow John Beyrle's recent blog post about ongoing negotiations for a START follow-on agreement does not represent a shift in the U.S. position, despite the articles saying so.

Written in Russian, Beyrle's post says, "The treaty deals with offensive, not defensive systems, but since we acknowledge a logical link between them, our presidents have agreed that the treaty will contain a provision on the interconnection between strategic offensive and defensive weapons."

The Associated Press declared on its own authority that "Beyrle's statement indicated the U.S. stance has shifted," and that "Beyrle's statement apparently reflects an attempt by Washington to overcome Russia's suspicions of the U.S. missile defence plans."

Not so, say our State Department sources, who point out that Beyrle was simply referring to the July 8 Joint Understanding between President Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, which said that the START follow-on would include "a provision on the interrelationship of strategic offensive and strategic defensive arms," nothing more, nothing less.

Multiple senior administration officials have told The Cable that this carefully negotiated compromise was well understood to mean that missile defense would be delinked from the START negotiations -- and that was the assumption the American team led by Rose Gottemoeller was working under.

Moreover, the July 6 joint statement of Obama and Medvedev made it clear that missile defense would be dealt with separately from the START follow-on talks.

"Beyrle's post simply refers to what both presidents said they would do in July," one administration official said.

Recent statements by Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and Russian military leader Nikolai Makarov have brought the missile-defense issue back into the discussion over a START follow-on treaty. State Department officials have indicated that the specifics of a reference to missile defense in the agreement might not be finalized.

"It's possible that the treaty text will refer to missile defense, but I can't do a play by play," State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley told reporters Thursday. But Beyrle's blog post is not an announcement of any such shift, and negotiations over the remaining details in the treaty are ongoing.

With Barack Obama's pledge to rid the world of nuclear weapons faltering out of the starting gate, leaders of the arms-control community convened a major meeting Tuesday to gear up for their biggest fights in years. The next few months will be critical, insiders say, with a number of key international treaties up for renewal and battle lines being drawn in Washington and abroad.

About 50 senior think tank and advocacy executives packed the K Street conference room of the Ploughshares Fund to strategize and rally the troops for the upcoming policy war. "This is going to be the fight of our lives," Ploughshares President Joe Cirincione told The Cable shortly after the meeting concluded.

A huge part of the effort will be to hold the administration to the ambitious arms-control agenda President Obama laid out in his Prague speech last April.

"The debate on Washington on these issues has been dominated by the conservatives because the administration has yet to take the field," Cirincione said. "That's about to change ... finally!"

The next six months will see either the significant advancement or the defeat of a host of arms-control priorities. The agenda includes ratification of the still-pending START follow-on agreement with Russia, the February release of the president's budget, the March release of the Nuclear Posture Review, a major summit on nuclear terrorism in Washington in April, and the Nonproliferation Treaty conference in May. A push for U.S. ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) is also coming.

The Obama administration has been occupied with other crises and not eager to take on nuclear issues despite a heartfelt belief in their merit, Cirincione said. "They want to play it safe." The administration's window for action is open but small. By the end of summer, the congressional elections will crowd out Washington's bandwidth.

"If it doesn't get done by July, it doesn't get done," he said.

So the meeting, which included representatives from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the Brookings Institution, the Nuclear Threat Initiative, the Arms Control Association, the Council for a Livable World, the Federation of American Scientists, and others, was about marshalling those organizations' combined resources and preparing a full-on campaign to press their shared goals now.

The loosely organized group's strategy is fourfold: Push out facts and talking points supporting nuclear-weapons reductions into the press, increase the profile of the military, business, and religious leaders who back lower numbers of nuclear weapons, push sympathetic senators to be more active, and rally potential allies to the cause.

"There's really no secret to how you go about doing this, Cirincione said. "The trick is actually doing it." Crucial Senate allies include John Kerry, D-MA, Robert Casey, D-PA, Dianne Feinstein, D-CA, Jack Reed, D-RI, and Byron Dorgan, D-ND, while conservatives such as Jon Kyl, R-AZ, and James Inhofe, R-OK, are set to press the administration for maximum concessions before letting any arms control action go through the Senate.

The advocates worry that such conservatives have controlled the debate over arms control, and that they need to shift to more of a hard-nosed Washington approach in response. Sources noted that Ploughshares has hired the Glover Park Group public relations firm to aid its messaging.

There's also a growing realization that continued delays in the negotiations over the START follow-on agreement with Russia mean that time is running out before the summer election season begins.

An agreement with the Russians could come this month, with debate in the Senate by the end of March. But, as The Cable has previously reported, another Senate debate over CTBT before July is seen as much more unlikely.

Regardless, the arms-control community is girding for the fight. "It was a call to action meeting and this high-level group is primed to put the expertise and resources of our organizations behind the effort," said the Arms Control Association's Daryl Kimball.

Vladimir Putin deliberately threw a wrench into U.S.-Russian negotiations over a follow-on to the START nuclear reductions treaty yesterday when he explicitly linked the issue to U.S. missile-defense plans.

But what's not mentioned in these otherwise excellent articles by the New York Times' Ellen Barry and the Washington Times' Eli Lake on the development is that the prime minister's comments directly contradict the July 6 joint statement of U.S. President Barack Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, who made it clear that missile defense would be dealt with separately from the START follow-on talks.

Moreover, in their July 8 Joint Understanding, the carefully negotiated compromise was spelled out. The START follow-on would include "a provision on the interrelationship of strategic offensive and strategic defensive arms," nothing more, nothing less. Multiple senior administration officials have told The Cable that this compromise was well understood to mean that missile defense would be delinked from the START negotiations -- and that was the assumption the American team led by Rose Gottemoeller was working under.

Some on the Obama team are now suggesting they have already factored in these types of games coming from the Russian side.

"This is not unexpected and negotiations will resume in mid-January as we have said they would," said an administration source familiar with where things stand.

So what's going on? Well, there are two schools of thought among Russia experts. One is that Putin's comments represent a clear difference between his view of U.S.-Russia relations and Medvedev's. Medvedev, who is supposed to be in control of foreign policy, is more conciliatory and wants genuine rapprochement, the argument goes, whereas Putin ... not so much.

Under this theory, there are two power structures in Moscow and they are jockeying for control. But even in this analysis, time and time again, Putin seems to win the day by making the final decision.

"Perhaps there is a power struggle, but if there is, it's being overwhelmingly won and controlled by Putin's faction," said Alexandros Petersen, senior fellow at the Atlantic Council. "Supposedly the idea was that Medvedev would tackle these types of issues. But then all the sudden Putin steps in and completely undermines him. Every time the going gets tough, Putin steps in and takes the reins."

The competing theory is that Putin and Medvedev are working somewhat in lockstep, again with Putin calling the shots and benefiting from the illusion of a power split. For Putin, it's useful to have Medvedev out there as the nice guy (aided by the fact that he may genuinely want to cooperate), setting up a good cop/bad cop routine. That catches Western officials off guard and makes it convenient for Putin because he can wait until negotiations with Medvedev play out and then make his move at the eleventh hour.

The bottom line is that the START talks now seem to be at an impasse. Since the administration doesn't deal directly as much with Putin's faction, resolving the dispute is problematic. And although the Obama team denies that its adjustment of plans to deploy missile defense to Poland and the Czech Republic was a concession to Russia, it would be a tough sell domestically to make any further concessions on missile defense and still get START ratified in the Senate.

So what can the administration do? Petersen recalls a similar incident when Ronald Reagan was negotiating the original START agreement with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in Reykjavik. Gorby demanded that START be linked to U.S. missile defense and Reagan said it was not negotiable and walked out of the room.

"The result of Reagan taking a hard line was that it wasn't linked from the beginning," said Petersen.

More broadly, the question is: What do the current problems with the START process say about Obama's pledge to reset relations with Russia? Perhaps that Russia is looking at the long term and isn't confident that Obama's overtures will be continued by successive administrations.

"They view Obama as somewhat of an anomaly in U.S. foreign policy, and START is for decades," Petersen said.

For the U.S. side, this might also change the calculation about giving Russia concessions before a negotiation is near completion.

"You give them a finger and they take an arm," said Petersen. "With this statement [from Putin], the debate has shifted completely."

"It would certainly make the treaty dead on arrival in the Senate," said one senior GOP Senate aide, who added that senators will be watching to make sure the Obama administration won't cut any side agreements involving the missile-defense program.

As Amb. Stephen Bosworth and his delegation travels to Pyongyang to meet with North Korean officials, the State Department is setting the expectations bar low, continuing the Obama administration's wait-and-see approach to dealing with Kim Jong Il's regime.

"The purpose of their mission is to determine if the North Koreans are ready and willing to return to the Six-Party Talks and return to a serious discussion of denuclearization of the Korea Peninsula," a senior administration official said Monday, speaking on background basis. "Our agenda is quite narrow."

"After close consultation with our allies, we agreed that the best way to determine the North Koreans' intentions was to engage with them directly ... we don't have expectations one way or the other whether they are going to say yes or no."

In other words, there's no agreement yet by the North Korean regime to abide by the September 2005 declaration, which represents the last time the six parties were all on the same page, and there's no understanding that the North Koreans even want to return to multilateral talks at all.

Those were some of the preconditions that the Obama administration sought to secure in November meetings between North Korean negotiator Ri Gun and State Department Special Envoy Sung Kim when the two sides met behind closed doors informally in San Diego and New York. But even without any assurances, the Bosworth trip is going ahead.

The official praised the sanctions imposed under U.N. Security Resolution 1874, which sought to strengthen the arms embargo, and promised not to reward Pyongyang for doing things the North Koreans already agreed to, such as returning to the talks or standing by the previous agreement.

"There are no inducements or incentives, other than the fact that should they return to the talks they would be in a position to pursue some of the things that were possible should they proceed with denuclearization," the official said.

The official wouldn't comment on whether Bosworth would be able to meet with top North Korean leaders, such as  Vice Foreign Minister Kang Sok-ju, as has been reported. The delegation Bosworth is leading has broad interagency representation: Daniel Russel of the National Security Council, Sung Kim from State, and the Defense Department's Michael Schiffer are all along for the trip.

In Monday's State Department press briefing, the theme of lowering expectations was repeated.

"We are having these talks to ensure a resumption of the Six-Party Talks and to reaffirm the September 2005 joint statement and its goal of complete and verifiable denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula," said State Department spokesman Ian Kelly, "So it's a very, very simple agenda."

Many Asia hands see the Obama administration approach to North Korea as pragmatic given the intransigence of Kim Jong Il's regime and its recent saber rattling. Unlike the Bush administration effort led by Chris Hill, the Obama team doesn't feel pressured to produce incremental results quickly, especially at the expense of possible longer-term success.

"I have not seen any hints or indications from the North Koreans that they are willing to come back to the Six-Party Talks in a format that we would find remotely satisfactory," said L. Gordon Flake, executive director of the Mansfield Foundation, a think tank focused on northeast Asia.

Analysts say the Obama administration wants to simply shore up consensus among allies, another casualty of the Hill era, and put the onus back on the North Koreans to do something productive. Sending Bosworth and his delegation is meant to make it clear that America is not the obstacle to progress.

Obama had hugely productive meetings with South Korean President Lee Myung bak during his recent Asia trip, White House officials have noted, with Seoul and Washington on the same page as to how to deal with the North for the first time in a long while.

Bosworth was in Seoul today, and many observers see the spade work he has been doing to firm up positions with allies behind the scenes as the real deliverables of Obama's North Korea policy thus far.

"That's been the whole point of everything they've done publicly, to keep the expectations low and to keep low visibility on this," said former North Korea nuclear negotiator Joel Wit, adding, "I think that's the right approach."

LEE JIN-MAN/AFP/Getty Images

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gave what was touted as a "major speech" on nonproliferation issues today at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington. And while Clinton has been somewhat overshadowed in today's headlines by the clutch diplomacy of Senator John Kerry in Afghanistan and Vice President Joseph Biden's meetings with European leaders, her speech on a range of strategic issues had several interesting morsels. Here are the key sections:

On North Korea:

Within the framework of the six-party talks, we are prepared to meet bilaterally with North Korea. But North Korea's return to the negotiating table is not enough.

Current sanctions will not be relaxed until Pyongyang takes verifiable, irreversible steps toward complete denuclearization. Its leaders should be under no illusion that the United States will ever have normal, sanctions-free relations with a nuclear-armed North Korea.

On Iran:

If Iran is serious about taking practical steps to address the international community's deep concerns about its nuclear program, we will continue to engage both multilaterally and bilaterally to discuss the full range of issues that have divided Iran and the United States for too long.

The door is open to a better future for Iran. But the process of engagement cannot be open-ended. We are not prepared to talk just for the sake of talking. As President Obama noted after the October 1st meeting in Geneva, we appear to have made a constructive beginning. But that needs to be followed up by constructive actions.

In particular, prompt action is needed on implementing the plan to use Iran's own low-enriched uranium to refuel the Tehran research reactor, which is used to produce medical isotopes.

On the International Atomic Energy Agency:

Enhancing the IAEA's capabilities to verify whether states are engaging in illicit nuclear activity is essential to strengthening the nonproliferation regime. The IAEA's additional protocol, which allows for more aggressive, short-notice inspections, should be made universal through concerted efforts to persuade key holdout states to join.

The IAEA should make full use of existing verification authorities, including special inspections. But it should also be given new authorities, including the ability to investigate suspected nuclear-weapons-related activities, even when no nuclear materials are present. And if we expect the IAEA to be a bulwark of the nonproliferation regime, we must give it the resources necessary to do the job.

On nuclear negotiations with Russia:

The United States is interested in a new START agreement because it will bolster our national security. We and Russia deploy far more nuclear weapons than we need or could ever potentially use without destroying our ways of life.

Clinging to nuclear weapons in excess of our security needs does not make the United States safer. And the nuclear status quo is neither desirable nor sustainable. It gives other countries the motivation or the excuse to pursue their own nuclear options.

We are under no illusions that this START agreement will persuade Iran and North Korea to end their illicit nuclear activities; but it will demonstrate that the United States is living up to its Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty obligation to work toward nuclear disarmament. In doing so, it will help convince the rest of the international community to strengthen nonproliferation controls and tighten the screws on states that flout their nonproliferation commitments.

On the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty:

A test-ban treaty that has entered into force will allow the United States and others to challenge states engaged in suspicious testing activities, including the option of calling on-site inspections to be sure that no testing occurs anywhere.

CTBT ratification would also encourage the international community to move forward with other essential nonproliferation steps. And make no mistake. Other states rightly or wrongly view American ratification of the CTBT as a sign of our commitment to the nonproliferation consensus.

We are well aware that we have our work cut out for us. The CTBT was rejected 10 years ago, and it has not been brought up since then. So we do have a lot of outreach and very intensive consultations to engage in with the Senate. I think that -- having been honored to serve in the Senate, I think every senator has a right to ask whatever questions and raise whatever concerns he or she might have.

But the fact is, we've essentially had a moratorium on testing. It's been bipartisan through these four administrations over these last 20 years. And we recognize the legitimate questions that some in the Senate have posed about how we take steps to ensure the sustainability and effectiveness of our nuclear stockpile without testing. We believe we have technical answers to that and that we will be discussing those in greater depth.

Mark Wilson/Getty Images

Lawmakers are already attacking the credibility of upcoming inspections of Iranian nuclear facilities, preparing their push for greater sanctions if and when the inspections fail to find a smoking gun.

The core of the argument being made by GOP senators is that the Iranians bargained for a lag time longer than the United States wanted before opening their newly discovered Qom nuclear facility to international inspectors, raising concerns that they will scrub the facility of incriminating material.

Sen. Richard Shelby of Alabama pressed the issue with Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg at a meeting of the Senate Banking Committee Tuesday morning and Tennessee Republican Sen. Bob Corker piled on.

"Is there any question in anybody's mind that during this period of time between now and October 25 that much of the facility that we are getting ready to inspect will be dismantled?" Corker asked.

Steinberg said that the United States had wanted inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency to take place within two weeks, but had to settle for the Oct. 25 inspection date, more than three and a half weeks after the Oct. 1 meeting between Iran and five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council plus Germany.

"It's our judgment that this is still a period of time that we can still get a good assessment of what's going on," Steinberg argued, while trying to say that the IAEA team needed some time to prepare for the inspections.

The Shelby-Corker-Steinberg exchange comes only one day after Andrew Semmel, the IAEA's Washington representative, said that there was a real danger that Iran would have too much time to scrub the Qom facility before the inspectors arrived.

"It gives three weeks for the Iranians to clean up anything they might want to hide," Semmel said, "They've been known to do this in the past, whitewashing and so forth."

Semmel also said the whole IAEA inspection exercise might be "perfunctory," because it's not clear that the Qom facility had been developed yet to the stage where really incriminating material would have been stored there.

What Iran watchers are really looking for are definitive signs at Qom that Russian scientists have contributed to the Iranian nuclear program, after reports that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delivered a list of Russian nuclear scientists helping Iran during his secret meeting with Prime Minister Vladimir Putin in Moscow.

Steinberg also indicated that the administration does not support, nor does it oppose, the bill put forth by Sens. Joseph Lieberman, Evan Bayh, and Jon Kyl, which would bar any refined petroleum products from being sold to Iran, saying that the administration wanted to preserve maximum flexibility.

That legislation has 75 Senate cosponsors.

ELIZABETH DALZIEL/AFP/Getty Images

(Correction: Netanyahu's title corrected to "prime minister.") 

As the United States touts Thursday's rare, if small diplomatic breakthrough in nuclear talks with Iran, one key component of the Obama administration's nuclear arms-control strategy remains in limbo.

Administration officials have been promising again and again to work toward ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, the 1996 agreement that prohibits any nuclear-weapons testing and has been ratified by 150 countries, but not the United States. Inside the administration, there is no clear schedule and some concerns about how and when to make the push for Senate ratification.

"The second major arms control objective of the Obama administration is the ratification of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty," Assistant Secretary of State for Verification, Compliance, and Implementation Rose Gottemoeller said in an August speech, affirming pledges from President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to get the treaty ratified.

"There is no step that we could take that would more effectively restore our moral leadership and improve our ability to reenergize the international nonproliferation consensus than to ratify the CTBT."

America's allies see the CTBT as a litmus test of America's commitment to participate concretely in the arms-control agenda it espouses. While cognizant of the challenges Obama faces on the issue domestically, they nonetheless will judge his success or failure on the issue as an indicator of whether the administration can actually implement its progressive rhetoric.

But administration officials are acutely aware of the 1999 failure to ratify the treaty in the Senate, an ordeal that stands as a cautionary tale about approaching the CTBT without a new strategy. Moreover, if ratification seems unlikely, they could abandon the push in the near term.

"We must construct a new paradigm from the debate over this same issue in 1999. Simply put, the world has changed," Gottemoeller said.

Many Republicans in the Senate, however, don't think the basis for their opposition to CTBT has gone away and are gearing up to fight a new ratification initiative.

"All of those reasons still pertain, and then some," Senate Minority Leader Jon Kyl, R-AZ, who led the successful opposition to ratification in 1999, told The Cable.

"I will lead the charge against it and I will do everything in my power to see that it is defeated," he told Congressional Quarterly.

A senior GOP Senate aide spelled out Republicans' objections and their argument going forward.

"The Republicans will say that the risks are you can't verify the agreement, countries will be cheating, and at the end of the day, we may need to test to make sure our systems are viable," he said.

They also plan to argue that the CTBT is simply not likely to actually convince countries with nuclear aspirations to forego their plans, as the administration claims.

"If you really believe that Iran is a nuclear tipping point, what's more likely to solve that problem? Is it the U.S. ratifying CTBT or is it the U.S. finding some clever way to get Russia and China to help us deal with that problem?" the GOP aide said, "It's like a drunk trying to find their keys under the streetlamp because the light is better there."

"We're only going to do it when we are going to win"

Timing is a critical factor in the administration's push for ratification. Multiple senior officials told The Cable that Senate ratification would probably be sought after the Non-Proliferation Treaty review conference, which begins next April.

The White House wants to go to the NPT conference promising to complete CTBT ratification and doesn't want to risk an embarrassing failure right before the meeting. The problem is, after the conference, the congressional time window is small before members start gearing up for the 2010 election season and put these kinds of strategic issues on the backburner.

The schedule for the CTBT will depend somewhat on how fast the START follow-on treaty is ratified, Under Secretary of State for Arms Control Ellen Tauscher told The Cable in an interview, adding that the administration will only propose CTBT ratification when the fight can be won.

She also alluded to the fact that Senate attention is scarce and even after the NPT it might be difficult to make a full-court press.

"How many arms-control treaty votes does the Senate have? They haven't done it in a long time. How long is it going to take for Senate Foreign Relations Committee to do hearings? Does the Senate Armed Services Committee want to do hearings?" Tauscher asked.

"We're going to do it, but we're only going to do it when we are going to win," she added.

Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman John Kerry, D-MA, told The Cable in an interview that a huge effort to compile scientific and technical data to support the administration's case for ratification was already underway.

"We have a lot or work to do be in a position to sit down with people and explain how this works," he said, "I think it would hard to do it before the NPT conference, just because of the complexity of the issues and the need to do the START treaty."

Kerry met with Secretary Clinton this week to discuss the CTBT and other issues. Clinton participated in a multilateral conference on the issue on the sidelines of last week's U.N. General Assembly meetings.

Key senators to watch include Maine Senators Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe, who both voted to reject the treaty the last time around.

Vice President Joseph Biden has been given the job of shepherding the treaty through the Senate, managed in his office by Jon Wolfsthal. The State team on CTBT, in addition to Tauscher and Gottemoeller, will be dependent on Jofi Joseph, who just came over from the office of Pennsylvania Sen. Bob Casey and who is a strong advocate of swift ratification.

The NSC's Gary Samore and the Pentagon's Ted Warner are also said to be important players in the CTBT drive.

"We'll take this autumn and into next year to make our case to the Senate about this and then we'll see how the actual ratification campaign unfolds," a senior administration official told The Cable, "But the effort has already begun."

As the Obama administration negotiates with Russia over a new nuclear arms reduction treaty, Senate Republicans are already planning their strategy to demand maximum concessions in exchange for their potential support.

The Senate Republican Policy Committee, led by South Dakota's John Thune, shown at left, is circulating a memo (pdf) outlining the GOP strategy to deal with the "follow on" to the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START), which expires December 5. According to the memo, obtained by The Cable, the Republicans have a long list of demands, some of which are unlikely to be met when the administration rolls out the new agreement.

"A treaty meeting the goals articulated in this paper is more likely to gain the two-thirds majority necessary for Senate consent," the memo explains.

The differences between administration plans and GOP demands are likely to complicate the push for ratification in the Senate, which is expected early next year.

The core strategy for the Senate Republicans will be to try to frame the nuclear reductions as a unilateral concession that President Obama is making to the Russians.

"The United States should not pay for what is free," the memo states. "Russia's nuclear numbers will decline dramatically in the coming years with or without an arms control treaty. The United States should not make important concessions in return for something that will happen in any event."

Republicans will also call on Obama to justify the arms reductions in the context of American security interests, not simply U.S.-Russia relations.

"Russia needs this agreement far more than the U.S. does. It is desperately trying to lock the U.S. into lower nuclear levels, not the other way around."

GOP senators such as minority whip Jon Kyl, R-AZ, have been accusing Obama of rushing to get an agreement, a theme the strategy memo says will continue as Republicans argue that an extension of the old terms is preferable to a bad treaty.

Specifically, the memo sets three basic conditions for Republican support.

First, the new treaty should not constrain U.S. missile defenses, the GOP senators argue, nor should it impinge upon the military's plans to develop what's called "global strike" capabilities -- the ability to attack any target in the world at any time.

In a previous interview with The Cable, a senior administration official said there would be no specific treaty language on missile defense, but that some verification of conventional systems such as those used in global strike might be covered in the final version.

Secondly, Republicans are demanding the administration submit a modernization plan for the nation's nuclear stockpile at the same time as the treaty. Undersecretary of State for Arms Control Ellen Tauscher has said that such a plan will be submitted in next year's budget but will not include the Bush administration's proposal for building a new type of nuclear weapon, called the Reliable Replacement Warhead.

The third condition, the one the administration won't be able to deliver to Republicans, is their call for Russian tactical nuclear weapons to be covered in the new treaty. The senior official had said that would not be part of these negotiations, but could be covered in the next treaty, what insiders are calling "the follow on to the follow on."

The administration's negotiating team, led by Rose Gottemoeller, the assistant secretary of state for verification, compliance, and implementation, has been traveling back and forth to Geneva to negotiate terms with the Russians.

And Tauscher is testifying today to the House Armed Services Committee on the administration's recent decision to alter missile-defense plans in Europe, a decision she maintains was also not a concession to Russia.

"Nothing that we did had anything to do with Russian saber-rattling or their consternation about the ground-based interceptors or the Czech radar. The decision was not part of any trade-off or quid pro quo," Tauscher said, adding, "If, as a consequence of President Obama's decision, relations with Russia improve, then we should embrace that benefit."

UPDATE: The Center for Arms Control and Non-proliferation's Kingston Reif writes in to point out that while the GOP strategy memo quotes the Perry-Schlesinger Commission more than two dozen times, it never mentions that the group of bipartisan elders actually endorses the START follow-on process. Here's a quote from the report:

"The moment appears ripe for a renewal of arms control with Russia, and this bodes well for a continued reduction in the nuclear arsenal. The United States and Russia should pursue a step-by-step approach and take a modest first step to ensure that there is a successor to START I when it expires at the end of 2009."

FILE; Mark Wilson/Getty Images

In which we scour the transcript of the State Department's daily presser so you don't have to. Here are the highlights of today's briefing by spokesman Ian Kelly:

• Regarding the news about the secret Iranian nuclear facility in Qom, Kelly said that despite the fact that the American intelligence committee has been watching it for years, "in and of itself the information that we announced today does not contradict the assessment that we made in the [National Intelligence Estimate] in 2007" which said that Iran was no longer working to make nuclear weapons. Really?
• Amid all the news about Iran's nuclear ambitions, let's not forget their detention of American and Canadian citizens without due process, Kelly said. "Individuals in detention include Iranian-Canadian journalist Maziar Bahari, Iranian-American scholar Kian Tajbakhsh, retired Iranian-American businessman Reza Taghavi, and American hikers Joshua Fattal, Shane Bauer, and Sarah Shourd. American Robert Levinson has also been missing in Iran since March of 2007."
• No release of the pending Burma policy review today, Kelly said. Should be "early next week," maybe even Monday. Has to be before Wednesday, when assistant secretary of state Kurt Campbell climbs the Hill to testify before Senator Jim Webb's subcommittee on the new strategy of engaging the junta.
• In other Asia news, President Obama has announced his intention to nominate for House Foreign Affairs Committee staffer Robert King as the new Special Envoy on North Korean Human Rights. No word on whether or not King will actually get to be in any of the meetings with the North Koreans. "I think first we have to make the decision we're going to actually have the bilateral talks, and then we'll see who actually participates in it," Kelly said.
• No announcement yet on whether Amb. Stephen Bosworth will be sent to meet with the North Koreans, but his right-hand man Sung Kim had meetings with South Korean negotiator Wi Sung-lac, which should mean that all the necessary "consultations" are done.
• And finally, responding to e-mails from readers of The Cable about yesterday's Briefing Skipper, I hereby offer you the link to the (maybe) fake sex tape that is at the center of the scandal involving Kyle Hatcher, an aide to U.S. Ambassador John Beyrle in Russia and the Russian intelligence community/press. Warning: NSFW!

The Weekly Standard is reporting that top Obama administration arms-control officials are en route to Eastern Europe right now to deliver sobering news to officials there about U.S. plans for ballistic missile defense.

Ellen O. Tauscher, the new under secretary of state for arms control and international security, and Alexander Vershbow (right), the Pentagon's assistant secretary for international security affairs, are reportedly set to meet with Polish and Czech leaders to give them the results of the administration's policy review on the matter, including their verdict on Bush administration plans to build sites in their countries.

State Department sources would neither confirm nor deny whether the officials are on the move.

President Obama has promised to overhaul the missile-defense program throughout his campaign and presidency and Tauscher led the charge in Congress to prevent construction of the European sites from commencing.

Tauscher was also the State Department's representative on the Pentagon-led interagency task force assigned to make the new recommendations.

Those recommendations were expected later this month, but the secret reported trip could be an indication that Obama himself has signed onto whatever the decision is.

In interviews with The Cable that were conducted before the news of the trip broke, two senior officials explained the administration's thinking about the missile-defense review.

"This is a recharacterization of what the threat is and how you respond to the threat," one official said, explaining that previous designs were geared toward the future threat of Iranian long-range missiles, whereas the Obama team wants to focus on the missiles Iran has now, which are short- and medium-range and can only reach Europe.

In an interview with The Cable, Tauscher herself made that argument and also said she wanted to spend more on existing technologies and less on development of futuristic systems.

"What is important is to get the priority of the threat right, current versus emerging. The point of this is to understand the threat, understand what you need to deter and defeat the threat, and what you have to deploy that's proven technology to deter and defeat the threat," said Tauscher, "You get those right, it leads you to a place."

Lawmakers are concerned that abandoning the current plan leaves new allies Poland and the Czech Republic twisting in the wind, after governments there spent so much political capital on selling the sites to their parliaments and publics.

"Whatever is done needs to be done in a way that continues our strong support for the Poles and the Czechs," said Carl Levin (D-MI), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. "That's important whatever way we decide to go."

The administration review focused on alternatives for the long-range interceptor planned for Poland, which include short-range interceptors and sea-based missiles.

A senior GOP Senate aide said that the effect of the administration's switch to short- range systems, such as the Standard Missile-3 (SM-3), was that the program would no longer have any capability to defend the U.S. homeland and would only be able to protect parts of Europe.

"The important fact here is that if you go with the land-based SM-3s, you don't protect the United States," said the aide.

"It changes the nature of the debate," the aide continued. "Why should the U.S. spend 6 or 7 billion dollars just to protect Europe? That's going to be a completely different argument."

UPDATE: "Administration officials were expected to brief lawmakers and government officials in Poland and the Czech Republic on results of the review on Thursday," the AP reports, citing "an administration official and a congressional aide."

File Photo by CHOI WON-SUK/AFP/Getty Images