WASHINGTON — Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton today urged Senate approval of a new U.S.-Russia nuclear arms treaty, telling lawmakers the pact will not constrain U.S. missile defenses.
She was challenged, however, by Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who expressed worry that the Obama administration has left Russia free to abandon the treaty if it objects to U.S. missile defense improvements.
Clinton noted the Russian government’s statement that it reserves the right to withdraw from the new START treaty if it feels threatened by an expansion of American defenses against ballistic missiles.
“But that is not an agreed upon view, that is not in the treaty,” Clinton told the Senate Armed Services Committee. “It’s the equivalent of a press release and we are not in any way bound by it.”
Testifying alongside Clinton, Defense Secretary Robert Gates echoed her view.
“The Russians can say what they want. If it’s not in the treaty, it’s not binding on the United States,” Gates said.
McCain seemed unconvinced.
“It’s at best an ambiguous situation,” McCain said.
Returning to the issue, Gates said it should be no surprise that the Russians would state their objections to U.S. missile defenses.
“There is no meeting of the minds on missile defense,” Gates said. “The Russians hate it. They’ve hated it since the late 1960s. They will always hate it, mostly because we’ll build it and they won’t.”
The new START treaty was signed by President Barack Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev in April.
The pact would put a ceiling of 1,550 on the number of each country’s deployed nuclear warheads, down from the current limit of 2,200. The pact replaces the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, or START, which expired in December. To be ratified, the treaty needs 67 votes in the Senate. The Russian parliament hasn’t yet acted on it.
An important feature of the new deal is that it includes a legal mechanism for verifying that each side complies — an element that was absent from a 2002 deal, known as the Moscow Treaty, that accelerated the weapons reductions laid out in the 1991 treaty.
The treaty includes no limits on short-range nuclear weapons, of which the Russians have a larger stockpile. Gates told the committee that the U.S. favors negotiating limits on short-range weapons but foresees a long path to that goal.
McCain, the top Republican on the committee, pressed the missile defense point in a lengthy exchange with Clinton.
“Russian leadership have all made this statement that this treaty is contingent on the United States not changing, or qualitatively or quantitatively building up, missile defense systems,” he said. “That is bound to be worrisome to anyone.”
Clinton said the U.S. has issued its own statement about missile defenses, “making clear that the United States intends, and in fact is continuing, to improve and deploy effective missile defense systems.”
McCain also questioned Clinton and Gates on why the treaty includes a provision that would prohibit either country from converting silos used to launch offensive ballistic missiles into launch sites for defensive missiles. He indicated that this could be interpreted as a constraint on U.S. missile defense plans.
Clinton said it is not a constraint because the U.S. has no plans for such conversions. Gates went a step further, saying that to permit such conversions would be destabilizing because it would raise questions and perhaps confusion about whether specific silos contained offensive or defensive weapons.
Russia has long opposed U.S. missile defenses, which are far more advanced than Russia’s, in part because it fears that the American defenses could eventually undermine the deterrent effect of Russian nuclear forces.
Gates stressed the administration’s assertion that its missile defenses — current and future — are designed to protect the U.S. and its allies from small numbers of missiles launched by Iran or North Korea.
Elaborating on why he believes the new START treaty should be ratified and implemented, Gates said it provides a measure of transparency and predictability about U.S. and Russian nuclear forces at a time when the Russians are modernizing theirs, even as they reduce the size of their non-nuclear forces.
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