Byron Dorgan: “I understand that perhaps today or tomorrow we will have a so-called Moscow Treaty brought to the floor of the Senate…”

“I understand that perhaps today or tomorrow we will have a so-called Moscow Treaty brought to the floor of the Senate for debate. It is a treaty that has its origin in some discussions between our Presidents and the leader of Russia about the issue of nuclear arms and the reduction of nuclear arms. I want to say I will vote for this treaty, although I must say it is not much of an agreement and not much of a treaty at all. I don't see any reason someone would vote against it. But I make the point that this is an agreement between two countries--both of which have large stocks of nuclear weapons--to reduce their number of nuclear weapons by taking some and putting them in warehouses and storage facilities and at the end of the process both countries can keep the same number of nuclear weapons they had when they started. No nuclear weapons under this agreement will be destroyed, dismantled, or defused. And This treaty deals with only strategic nuclear weapons, not theater nuclear weapons. There are thousands and thousands of theater nuclear weapons, such as the nuclear weapons that go on the tips of artillery shells. That is not part of this agreement. It has nothing to do with this agreement. Strategic nuclear weapons are the very large warheads that one would put on the tip of an ICBM, for example, or to have in the belly of a bomber, or perhaps on the tip of a missile that is in a submarine. Those are the strategic nuclear weapons.”