Don't Mess With A Streak

Like him or not, your President has been on a bit of a win streak lately. There was that fracas of a health care bill down drama, then he showed off a nice outside touch when he beat Clark Kellogg in a game of HORSE. After slinging one high and outside on opening day, he went back to what he does best: signing stuff.
Barack Obama and Russia's Dmitry Medvedv sat down in Prague on Thursday to sign a new nuclear arms treaty. The new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, or "ReSTART," will replace the old one that is now almost twenty years old. In other words, it's been a while since we were actively reducing our strategic arms. You know the ones we're talking about: the ones that can be lobbed from missile silos continents away, or dropped from bombers miles in the sky, or launched from deep beneath the sea on a submarine. The ones that showed up as colorful dotted lines on the big board in "WarGames" with Matthew Broderick. The limit on those bad boys is now seven hundred. The United States currently has seven hundred and ninety-eight. The Russians are sitting somewhere just below six hundred. It used to be that being ahead of the Russkies was a good thing, now they've got a clear advantage on us in the stockpile reduction race.
Then again, we've still got the edge when it comes to having fewer actual warheads. They've got around twenty-six hundred, while we top out at around twenty-two hundred. While we're busy trying to dismantle our missiles, they'll be just getting started taking apart those extra four hundred warheads. And when it comes to short-range nuclear weapons, Russia has ten times the number we have yonder in Eastern Europe. Those are not currently up for discussion under this treaty, but limits for those will have to be part of the next round of negotiations. That should give Mister Obama a chance to work on his hanging curve.