Earlier this month, Paula DeSutter, former assistant secretary for Verification, Compliance, and Implementation at the State Department, wrote a piece for The Heritage Foundation, in which she discussed the weaker verification regime in the new START, in contrast to the original treaty. The former Soviet Union has violated agreements before, and START will be no different.
Today’s Washington Post cites a State Department report that contends Russia is indeed violating international chemical and biological weapons pacts. The U.S. Senate will decide whether to ratify START, and seven Republicans on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee request the report. An excerpt:
The new compliance report, obtained by the Washington Post, says that several issues raised in the 2005 version have been resolved, on subjects such as the movement of Russian road-mobile missiles and inspection of reentry vehicles. But the report may nonetheless fuel the debate over the new treaty, because it says a number of other compliance issues remained unresolved when the treaty expired last December. The unclassified version of the report does not identify them. To pass, the treaty will need at least eight Republican votes plus those of all 57 Democrats and the two independents. Most Republicans haven’t yet indicated which way they will go. In recent weeks, the battle over the treaty has intensified, with the Heritage Foundation launching a nationwide campaign against it, and former presidential candidate Mitt Romney branding it Obama’s ‘worst foreign policy mistake.
F.M. Kirby Research Fellow in National Security Policy at The Heritage Foundation Baker Spring will have further analysis later today.
Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) has scheduled a U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations vote on New START for August 3rd.
La Shawn Barber originally wrote this post.
