I was thinking tonight, talking to a group of colleagues about the Khodorkovsky trial, where the judge's decision is expected soon, and why it is that nobody links human rights and disarmament any more. Human rights groups have protested the injustice — but neither they nor the media nor any public figures conceive of these sorts of cases in relationship to how the START agreement — or any other disarmament measure — is going.

I mean they don't even discuss the connection between the fields — I don't mean to suggest that one should be held hostage to the other — "conditionality" — although that used to be the debate.

To be sure, the Washington Post — which does have a historical memory about these things — produced an op-ed with the appropriate title of "Mr. Putin's Pig" (as in the lip-sticked pig referenced in one of the WikiLeaks cables about the workings of "justice" in the Khodorkovsky trial). In it, they reference this "interconnectedness," but in a different way — noting that it's possible to raise human rights cases even while pursuing arms control and that need not harm the arms talks:

The Obama administration has offered no public indication that this lawlessness will have any effect on its "reset" of relations with Moscow. U.S. officials may believe that quiet diplomacy will be more effective, and they understandably wish to preserve the benefits of their outreach to the regime, such as greater Russian cooperation on Iran. But as previous U.S. presidents have demonstrated, it is possible to challenge and even to penalize Kremlin rulers for their human rights violations while still pursuing initiatives such as arms control.

It seems the most natural thing in the world to me to have the START talks debate also discuss the current state of human rights in Russia, and cases like that of Khodorkovsky and Lebedev, businessmen in jail now facing a new set of charges in a case widely viewed by lawyers and human rights activists as grossly violating due process and intended as retaliation for political activism. Or cases like Oleg Kashin, the journalist who wrote about the forest controversy and was brutally assaulted, or Sergei Magnitsky, the lawyer who died in detention — and should never have been incarcerated in pre-trial investigation given the nature of the offense — which appears likely fabricated as well.

In the old days (the 1980s), this topic of "linkage," as it was known, was fiercely debated. If you were in the human rights movement, wishing to raise the cases of those years (Sakharov, Orlov, Sharansky), you were accused of harming peace. If you were in the peace movement, seeking reduction of missiles, you were expected not to agitate your Soviet partners in this movement by raising human rights problems. This sort of tortured debate among peace activists is a very good example of some who were trying to do the right thing in those days, but still found it terribly discomforting to speak publicly on behalf of a jailed dissident, or even to take up any cases that didn't fit a certain paradigm — those "working for peace". I knew the Soviet-era independent peace activists very well, and it was only the most concerted and vocal protest that finally did get some of them released from jail and given permission to emigrate. The same was true, of course, for the more famous cases of the scientists Sakharov, Orlov, Sharansky and hundreds of their colleagues — it was only by raising their cases on the eve of each arms talks summit, by making the connection between better trust in the Soviets if they would stop arbitrarily and injustly jailing people for their free speech and writings, that we got them released.

Today, I hear far, far more reluctance to discuss these issues in the same breath as a public matter. If you type "nuclear disarmament human rights" into Google, the first entry that returns is the page of Andrei Sakharov, who wrote a great many essays trying to explain to the West what he saw as the indissoluble connection between peace and intellectual freedom, between disarmanent and human rights. Keep reading, and you see that today, these ideas have morphed into a bureaucratic UN-speak about "human security" — but while merited, that isn't the same idea.

It's pretty simple. If you are an American congressmen contemplating whether to agree to the START treaty, you are going to assess whether you can trust Russia to abide by it. How will you do that? Well, you can go by all sorts of written positions and negotiations and deals, looking at charts and studies and throw-weights. But there's also your hunch. There's the chemistry of the situation. There's the psychology of relations. And if you are conservative, in particular, you just don't feel comfortable signing up for disarmament when you are dealing with a former enemy who still feels like an adversary because he presides over the jailing of businessmen, the death of lawyers in detention, and the breaking of journalists' arms. Some peace!

I'm not sure in fact congressmen today consciously think this — if anything, what we see are linkages of more odd sorts, for example, John McCain talking not about Khodorkovsky's case but about Obama's willingness to postpone the tax cut — and if he does that, then helping him with START. It's about political log-rolling at home, not "indissoluble linkages" in international affairs abroad.

So here's the thing. It seems to me START ought to be signed. That is, who can be for nuclear weapons? Even involving a former-enemy-yet-continuing-adversary. If there is a way to reduce them, and resume inspections, by all means. Of course, the Citizens for Global Solutions were very misleading in that regard, making it seem in a mass-emailing campaign yesterday, fretting about the lack of inspections in Russia without a new treaty as if they were hawks  — but then glossing over the fact that Russia isn't trustworthy due to its international behaviour (Georgia) and its internally repressive policies (beatings of demonstrators, Khodorkovsky, Lebedev and others kept in prison despite credible defenses). It would never occur to them, being "progressive" to ever in their lives raise human rights issues in connection with arms control — although this came naturally for Democrats as well as Republicans in the Soviet era.

There are likely arguments against START on its own terms — I'm always made uneasy when I hear the Soviet propaganda slogans of the 1980s debated at the Socialist Scholars' Conferences and peace meetings emerge out of our Community-Organizer-in-Chief's mouth, phrases like "No First Use!" (which we parodied as "No First Use of a Bad Argument" — because it was easy for the Soviets to call for no first use of nuclear weapons, given that they could roll over Europe with conventional weapons where they had superiority. Today, not only is Obama reciting the "No First Use" argument as if it were never a staple of Soviet propaganda in the 1980s and some of us don't know that (and it's a phrase that still brings smiles to some European diplomats when they hear it), he's calling for a "world without nuclear weapons" which was the sort of droony peacenik stuff we also had to endure in the 1980s — as if that were possible.

It's silly to keep harping on it; it's especially silly when Obama has in fact embarked on an expensive modernization of nuclear weapons — $85 million over ten years.  Of course, I've always wondered, given that we have the same people heading the Pentagon as we had under Bush, what this is all about, but…there it is. Hardly a world without nuclear weapons, with those kinds of price tags.

In some sources you read that the START treaty would give the Russians an advantage. And they haven't exactly been peaceniks lately, either; Putin came to speak on the Larry King show very strategically, and told us that — alas! — the Russians will have to start building up nuclear weapons again if we don't sign, they will have no choice.

Again, there is no liklihood that even the hawks, preoccupied with other fish to fry, are going to hold up START over dissidents — something they in fact didn't do in the Reagan era, either.

BUT, unlike the 1980s (in both the Carter and Reagan years), congressmen and the news media aren't willing to have the conversation about just what does make for a trustworthy partner in peace and just how much the breaking of journalists' arms and the leaving of lawyers to die in prison — or worse, standing by while they are gunned down in cold blood — doesn't make you feel like reaching for the delete button on the nuclear stockpile.

In the old days, at least when there were major deals involving grain or arms or summits or any kind of big world event, we would get a political prisoner or two. "Hostage politique" human rights groups called it — and sometimes I would call it "the catch and release program" — you would see the Soviets round up dissidents before the Olympics, say, in order to then appear gracious in releasing them later in a "bargain". Pretty shabby.

Linkage of sorts was floated after the summit last summer when it came time to deal with the Russian spies — we exchanged them, and we got some people who we didn't view as spies, but as victims of human rights violations (Igor Sutyagin). We expected this might be a face-saving time for the Russians to let out Khodorkovsky, as was speculated by some emigres at the time — it wasn't.

As it stands now, if START is decided by the lame-duck Congress before the Christmas holiday, it will be signed the day before the Khodorkovsky verdict (not a word I like to use about non-independent courts not speaking the truth). So then we'll see — could we turn this around as a positive integration, that a cooperative deal and the signing of START might lead to a gracious ending of the Khodorkovsky imprisonment and finally a release of this man to go back to his life or leave the country as he choses?

Conversely, if START drags with the lame duck, if it begins to encounter problems in the new, more conservative congress, could Medvedev and Putin sweeten the atmosphere by making that "verdict" December 15 be an acquittal? Or at the very least, a face-saving "return for further investigation" and release of the prisoners.