Political Quotes

“Mr. President, I wish to add parenthetically a footnote to the chairman's presentation. As has been mentioned frequently during this debate, for a variety of reasons, the Russians reduced the number of ICBMs below the totals that were required by the former treaty. Some Senators, in fact, have said the New START treaty, by imposing these limits of 1,550 warheads and 700 launchers, inhibits only the United States because, according to those who have argued this, Russia has already fallen below these limits. Let me add, as a point of personal recollection, one of the reasons the Russians are below some of the standards that have been suggested is, as they thought more and more about the rail mobile situation, they decided this was either useless, expensive, or so vulnerable to potential attack that it was not worth maintaining. As a result, as has been suggested, as it turned out, using the Cooperative Threat Reduction Program, the United States and Russia, quite outside of the last treaty, decided we would proceed under the Cooperative Threat Reduction Program to simply destroy all the rest of the rail, which we did. Just for the sake of exhibit, I have a piece of one of the last rails to be destroyed. It was presented to us by the Russians with a proper inscription on the back of it, recognizing their appreciation to the United States for this destruction.…”