Political Quotes

“The other subject I would like to address today is news on a totally different front, but it is a subject that will be familiar to us from last December when the Senate argued the New START treaty and ultimately passed it. I am going to speak primarily about questions of missile defense cooperation with Russia, which was a big part of that discussion. I wanted to first call attention to the fact that the Department of State released a fact sheet last Wednesday. It was entitled ``New START Treaty Aggregate Numbers of Strategic Offense Arms''--a long title. But the statement from the State Department confirmed what we had argued during the time of this START debate and what I thought was pretty widely understood at the time, despite administration protestations to the contrary; namely that the New START treaty is perhaps the first bilateral treaty that resulted in U.S. unilateral reductions in nuclear forces. As this fact sheet makes clear, Russia was already below the deployed strategic forces and deployed delivery vehicle limits of the treaty when we ratified the treaty. This is something we tried to point out. We said this is not a two-way street. Russia has already reduced its weapons below the levels called for in the treaty. The only country that will have to reduce levels from what currently exists is the United States. Now this information is confirmed by the State Department.…”