A New START Treaty and Protocol

Putting aside events in Kyrgyzstan (which certainly bear close watching), the day’s big news for international lawyers was President Obama and Russian President Dmitri A. Medvedev signing two related international agreements on the reduction of nuclear armaments. The State Department has posted the originals of this new START treaty here (see here for the longer, more detailed Protocol to that treaty).  I’ll leave for later any substantive commentary on these agreements or their national security/foreign relations implications.  For now, let me give a quick kudos to whoever at the State Department managed to get these documents posted so quickly.  For years the major problem in U.S. treaty practice was getting access to copies of U.S. treaties.  The fact this treaty was signed and made publicly available only a few hours later suggests such information access problems are (hopefully) behind us.  Now, if they could only modernize the font — really, Courier typeface is such a relic of the Cold War.