Political Quotes

“this morning, President Bush announced that he had given Russian President Putin formal notice that the United States--pursuant to article 15 of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty--was exercising its right to withdraw from that Treaty. That article provides that ``each Party shall . . . have the right to withdraw from this Treaty'' with six months notice. I support the President's action. The ABM Treaty has served the cause of peace well for many years, but the Treaty has completed its mission. It was negotiated and signed in an era when the United States and the Soviet Union were implacable enemies. I, as Secretary of the Navy, was in Moscow in May 1972, where President Nixon signed the ABM Treaty for the United States. Each nation sustained large nuclear forces aimed at the other. The Treaty was seen as a means of controlling the arms competition between our two nations and as a building block to other arms control agreements. It has served its purpose. But the cold war, as President Bush noted in his remarks today, is long over. The Soviet Union has fallen, and Russia is, in the words of President Bush, no longer an enemy. Our President is pursuing with Russia a new strategic relationship. As President Bush has said, ``We're moving to replace mutually assured destruction with mutual cooperation.'' President Putin has accepted this new challenge and we can expect the two Presidents to make further progress.…”