Jim Inhofe: “first of all, I concur in everything the Senator from South Dakota said, and I join him in encouraging people to vote…”

“first of all, I concur in everything the Senator from South Dakota said, and I join him in encouraging people to vote favorably on his amendment. It seems as though the other side has had the opportunity to do a lot more testing, a lot more modernization than we have, and I am very much concerned about that. I wish to elaborate on one thing. The fact that there is--that the other side--and I read all the quotes from the previous Commissions that took place in 2005 and 2010 to demonstrate very clearly that the Russians would sign a treaty and then they will cheat. They would not comply with the treaty. We saw it with the chemical weapons treaty and the biological weapons treaty and START I. So there is no reason to believe they are going to do this. So in terms of verification, we have to try to do something where we are convinced, knowing full well in advance that they are going to cheat. That brings up one issue that I haven't mentioned before in this treaty; that is, the length of time we have between notification and actually causing an inspection. Under the START I treaty it was 9 hours, and it has gone up to 24 hours in this treaty. In other words, if someone is going to cheat, if someone is going to hide something so we would not know where to look and we might not be able to find something, why give them three times as much time as we did under START I, when we know more today about the fact that they cheat than we knew before?”