Political Quotes

“Mr. President, let me take 3, 4, 5 of those minutes. I appreciate my colleagues' compliments about important issues being brought up, and I also appreciate their concern that amendments of this significance would cause heartburn for the Russians and might well require them to want to renegotiate aspects of the treaty. I am trying to address that through the mechanism of the side agreement rather than amendment to the treaty or some kind of other more restrictive method. I thought that would be the preferable way to do it. It is not my intention, as with the previous amendment, to delay things. I do not think it necessarily would. But I do appreciate that on a couple of these items the Russians would not likely want to renegotiate. I am not so sure that would be the case with regard to the covers, this question of the kind of shroud or cover you put over the missile bus, the top of the missile that has the warheads since the treaty does deal with it, as my colleagues have pointed out, but I do not think it does so in a conclusive way. The 2005 compliance report issued by the State Department to discuss compliance of the Russian Government with respect to the START I treaty had a couple of longstanding issues. The issue of shrouds was one that they characterized as of long standing. They had a very hard time getting that resolved with the Russians. In the end, there was a particular accommodation reached, but it took forever.…”