Obama administration hopes to ratify new START treaty by yearend - Clinton
She said they continued cooperation with the Senate Democrats and Republicans for holding the vote this year. No doubt, this will meet the interests of the United States, Clinton said.
She also said she was touched and a little bit surprised with the large number of delegates to the NATO Lisbon summit who supported the new START treaty, including German Federal Chancellor Angela Merkel, chiefs of state and premiers of the Baltic region, Central and Eastern Europe.
They know that this treaty is important for developing cooperation between the United States and Russia, Clinton said.
She noted that the United States had been incapable of inspecting Russian nuclear sites since the end of the validity of the previous treaty and it was essential to resume the inspections soon.
Judging by a recent poll, the majority of Democratic Party supporters, six out of ten devotees of the Republican Party and even a half of conservative Tea Party followers think that the treaty should be ratified.
The ratification requires no less than 67 votes. So far, the correlation is 59 to 41 (including two independent lawmakers who usually side with the Democrats), and the new Senate, which starts working in January 2011, will have fewer Democrats, 53.
If ratification hearings take place in the new Senate, no one will be able to predict when the new treaty may enter into force.
Presidents Medvedev and Obama met in Prague, the Czech Republic, on April 8, 2010, for signing a Russia-U.S. treaty on further reduction of and limitations on strategic offensive armaments. This treaty succeeds to the START I Treaty of 1991, which expired on December 4, 2009. It also replaces the Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty (SORT) signed on May 24, 2002.
The START I Treaty played a significant role in the provision of international peace, strategic stability and security and created a new atmosphere of trust, openness and predictability in the reduction of strategic offensive armaments. The fulfillment of the START I Treaty was taken into consideration in the elaboration of the new agreement, but certain aspects needed to be updated.
The historic role of START I would have been incomplete without significant efforts of Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine, which fully complied with the commitments they undertook under the Lisbon Protocol of 1992. Their conscious choice of the coordinated pullout of nuclear weapons from national territories and the membership in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) as non-nuclear states strengthened national security and had a favorable effect on strategic stability in general.
The new treaty was elaborated in keeping with directives of President Dmitry Medvedev and Russian-U.S. statements and documents approved at the London meeting on April 1, 2009, and the Moscow summit on July 6, 2009.
The negotiations started in July 2009, and ten rounds were held in Geneva in less than eight months.
The previous arms reduction treaty cut the number of strategic delivery vehicles, including land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles, submarine-based intercontinental ballistic missiles and strategic bombers, to 1,600, and the number of warheads to 6,000.
Medvedev and Obama said in Moscow on July 6, 2009, that it was necessary to elaborate a new agreement on the reduction of strategic offensive armaments.
The Kremlin and the White House posted a joint statement of the presidents and a bilateral statement on the ended validity of START I. The leaders confirmed their adherence to further cooperation in the reduction of strategic offensive armaments after the expiry of the START I Treaty. They also pledged their adherence to security guarantees defined by the Budapest memoranda; Kazinform cites ITAR-TASS.
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