Secretary of State Clinton held a press conference this morning arguing that the Senate must complete action on New START before adjourning for the year, in part because the United States currently has no “boots on the ground” in Russia in the form of US inspectors monitoring compliance with an operative arms control treaty.    

• There was no explanation as to why this is an acute problem now, but was not a problem for the first five months after the Administration allowed START to expire without a replacement and there were no inspections taking place while US negotiators continued to make concessions to Russia in order to secure a signed New START. 
• There was no sharing of evidence that Russia is currently violating the spirit of New START and that inspectors are urgently needed to guard against this.  If that were the case, that would provide insight into the one-sided “reset”—a reset where Russia continues to occupy Georgia, and the deterioration of human rights there continues, as Senator Voinovich explained on the Senate floor this morning.
• There was no reminder that a missing verification regime is wholly a problem of the Administration’s own creation.  As the expiration date of START approached, the Administration promised there would be some sort of “bridging agreement” between the expiration of START and the entry into force of its successor so that verification practices such as inspections, data exchanges, and notifications would continue.  Administration officials specifically said the “key thing” for the bridging agreement was “to preserve the verification” regime of START, and that it did not envision “any gaps” in the interim period.  That bridging agreement was never completed.
• There was no concession that the New START verification regime is much weaker in comparison to its predecessor, as former Secretary of State James Baker testified to Congress that the New START verification program “does not appear as rigorous or extensive as the one that verified the numerous and diverse treaty obligations and prohibitions under START I.”  The argument that the Senate must make up for the Administration’s own mistakes would actually matter if the New START verification regime were something to be celebrated and worth rushing into place—it is not.
• Knowing that, there was certainly no discussion of how verification must become more intrusive, not less, as nuclear arsenal numbers become more restrictive, like they do in New START.  Former Secretary of Defense Harold Brown explained why this is the case in testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on the original START on October 23, 1991, saying that “verification will become even more important as the numbers of strategic nuclear weapons on each side decreases, because uncertainties of a given size become a larger percentage of the total force as this occurs.”  S. Hrg. 102-406, p. 86 (Oct. 23, 1991).  That reasoning is as compelling today as it was in 1991, and is directly applicable to the nuclear reductions codified in New START. 

It was to be expected that Senators would hear upon their return to Washington that they must rush their constitutional duty to evaluate New START and ratify the treaty in a lame duck Congress, on the argument that important information about Russia’s strategic arms is missing because inspections in Russia have not been conducted since START I expired last December.  Verification takes on added significance at lower nuclear numbers, and the New START verification regime is not equal to the task.  The New START regime does not provide a solution to the so-called verification gap the Administration created, and should not compel the Senate to rush its duty to evaluate the treaty independently.

RPC Analyst Michael Stransky