On the recordDecember 16, 2010
the Nation's attention is fixed firmly on this travesty of an omnibus trillion-dollar appropriations bill which we should be debating now because the current funding resolution for the government ends tomorrow. We should not be debating a significant arms control treaty at this late date and trying to dual-track what I said earlier are thousands of pages of documents that need appropriate time on the floor of the Senate. I want to speak, if I might, briefly today to the substance of the START agreement and my concerns about that agreement in its current form. First of all, I want to speak to the issue of missile defense. The New START treaty not only contains specific limitations on missile defense in article V but also reestablishes an unwise linkage in the preamble to the treaty between offense and defense that was broken when the ABM treaty came to an end. Moreover, Russia's unilateral statement that the treaty "can operate and be viable only if the United States of America refrains from developing its missile defense capabilities, quantitatively or qualitatively" is extremely troubling.
