Political Quotes

“Mr. President, it is my understanding in 45 minutes we are going to be having a couple votes, one on amendment No. 4833 and one on the Thune amendment No. 4841, having to do with delivery systems; mine having to do with verification. That would mean we would have 45 minutes to talk about this. We have already covered it pretty thoroughly. I think we need to have an understanding of what we are talking about in terms of verification. There are only 180 inspections that are authorized by the New START treaty, and that is over a 10-year period. So we are talking about 18 per year versus the 600 inspections over 15 years in START I. If you do your math, that would be 40 a year in START I, and down to 18 a year in New START. One of the arguments for that is that we have fewer sites to inspect, and for that reason we do not need to have as many inspections. I would disagree with that pretty strongly. One thing all the experts seem to have in common and agreeing to is that once you get down to fewer sites, the verification becomes more important. John Bolton, on the 3rd of May, said: ``while [verification is] important in any arms-control treaty, verification becomes even more important at lower warhead levels.'' I think they all agree. Brent Scowcroft said the same thing. He said: ``Current force levels provide a kind of buffer because they are high enough to be relatively insensitive to imperfect intelligence and modest force changes. . . .…”