John Spratt: “there is a season for everything. There is a time to ratify START II, and that is now, immediately, as soon as we can…”

“there is a season for everything. There is a time to ratify START II, and that is now, immediately, as soon as we can get the Duma to do it. And then there is a time to ratify START III. It comes right on the heels of START II. And that should come immediately. It should come next after we have completed the work on START II. Once we do that we will have the warheads in each of our arsenals down to 2,000 to 3,000 strategic warheads each. At that point in time, it will be the season to take up the ABM Treaty and look at it, because in many ways it is a relic of the Cold War and it has outlived many of its purposes. But, for the time being, it is a symbol of stability. We pull the rug out from the ABM, the Standing Consultative Committee, we abruptly cut off funding, and that is a signal to the Russians that they better be careful and think twice about ratifying START II. And everything begins to become unraveled. There is nothing in these negotiations that gives rise to any immediate problems. We are trying to define the demarcation between strategic and theater weapons. In doing so, we have chosen to define the difference as being the planner in which the system, the interceptor, is tested. Is it tested against an incoming object that would be the speed of an RV coming from the exoatmosphere if launched by an ICBM, or is it traveling at the speed of a tactical or theater missile, a much lower speed?”