John Cornyn: “I oppose the ratification of the New START treaty for the reasons many of my colleagues have articulated and to which I…”

“I oppose the ratification of the New START treaty for the reasons many of my colleagues have articulated and to which I have previously spoken. The treaty requires unilateral reductions of the United States on strategic nuclear weapons. It fails to address tactical nuclear weapons--an area in which the Russian Federation has a 10-to-1 advantage. This is not an idle or incidental matter. GEN Nikolai Patrusheb, Secretary of the Russian National Security Council, a body in charge of military doctrine, has declared that Russia may not only use nuclear weapons preemptively in local conflicts such as Georgia or Chechnya but may deliver a nuclear blow against the aggressor in a critical situation, based on intelligence evaluations of his intentions. I submit also that the verification provisions of this treaty are weak, allowing only 18 inspections a year for an arsenal of more than 1,500 weapons. Obviously, the ability to get more than a sampling of Russian Federation compliance would be impossible given the relatively few number of inspections permitted under the treaty. As we have discussed off and on over the last few days, the preamble of the treaty itself is ambiguous and has been construed by the Russians themselves as limiting the ability of the United States to expand its own missile defense system.”