Making Emergency Supplemental Appropriations for Fiscal Year 2010

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. FRANKEN. I rise today to speak about the New START treaty that President Obama and President Medvedev signed in Prague on April 8. In fulfilling the Senate's constitutional responsibility to offer our advice and consent on the treaty, we must give it our diligent and timely consideration.

I have previously spoken about the fundamental justification for the New START treaty. It serves our national security interests. What I want to address in this and succeeding statements are some of the more significant specifics of the treaty and the arguments we are likely to hear about them. Today, I am going to focus on the strength of the treaty's monitoring and verification regime, which is established in the treaty itself, given more detail in the Protocol, and even more detail in the annexes.

The verification regime in the New START treaty is extensive, elaborate, and appropriate to the treaty's central limits and today's world. Secretary Gates has testified that when we hear from the intelligence community, they will tell us they are confident they can monitor it. The verification regime speaks strongly for ratification, and sooner rather than later.

Ronald Reagan once said, ``Trust but verify.'' The verification regime established by the treaty is the means for ensuring that Russia is complying with the limits on strategic nuclear arms in the treaty: 800 deployed or nondeployed intercontinental ballistic missile launchers, submarine-launched ballistic missile launchers, and heavy bombers equipped for nuclear weapons.

Within that limit, each side can have 700 deployed ICBM missiles, SLBMs, which are, again, the submarine-launched ballistic missiles, and heavy bombers. We can each have 1,550 total warheads on the deployed delivery vehicles.

The original START treaty, which expired in December, was widely valued for its verification regime. It effectively ensured that military significant violations of the treaty would be detected in a timely way, and therefore be deterred.

It also gave us real insight into the Russians' strategic forces and helped to establish a relationship of greater trust, transparency, cooperation, and confidence between our two nations.

The verification regime established by the New START treaty is modeled on the original one, but it is updated because the central limits of the treaty are different and because we are in different times. Our relationship with Russia is different. We are less suspicious of Russian intentions and much less uncertain about Russian capabilities.

But the bottom line is the same: the verification regime under the new treaty will ensure compliance and sustain a more stable, transparent, and cooperative relationship with the world's other great nuclear power.

A very strong foundation for monitoring and verification of the treaty limits is established by the provision on the use of and non-interference with National Technical Means of Verification, such as satellites and remote sensing equipment. The provision in the New START is virtually identical to that of the original START Treaty. Without the new treaty, we lose a major obstacle to Russian interference with National Technical Means of Verification; without this check, they might attempt to conceal their forces.

The New START treaty also provides for extensive exchanges of data on the numbers, locations, and technical features of weapons systems and facilities--including telemetry on up to five ICBM and SLBM launches per year. The U.S. and Russia will have to share large amounts of information on treaty-limited items, which has to be updated regularly. In addition, the Russians will be obligated to provide us notifications on the movements and production of their long-range missiles and launchers.

For the first time, Russia and the U.S. will also record and share unique identifiers on all ICBMs, SLBMs, and heavy bombers covered by the treaty--not just mobile missiles, as in the original START treaty. These unique identifiers--in effect, serial numbers--will go a long way toward enabling us to track both deployed and nondeployed Russian missiles. They also serve as a deterrent against treaty violation.

All the information we will receive forms the basis for further verification through on-site, short-notice inspections at Russian operating bases, storage facilities, test ranges, and conversion and elimination facilities. The treaty provides for 18 inspections per year.

If the inspections don't match the information that has been shared, that is a violation of the treaty. For instance, if we were to find a deployed missile that had been identified by the Russians as nondeployed, that would be a violation. Thus, the inspections can serve as a deterrent against cheating, as well as providing yet another, continuously updated source of information on Russian forces.

Finally, the Bilateral Consultative Commission set up by the treaty is a forum for the two nations to raise and address issues of compliance as well as implementation.

There can be little question that without these extensive verification measures, we will be less safe. To be sure, thanks to the verification regime of the original START treaty, we have extensive knowledge of Russian nuclear forces, and that will not disappear. We know far more than we did in 1991. But that knowledge will degrade much faster and more completely without the successor treaty's verification regime. Without the new treaty's verification regime in place, a major source of strategic stability, transparency and communication with Russia would be lost.

Some critics, however, have suggested that there are monitoring gaps in the verification regime that call the New START treaty into question. Two
issues in particular have been raised: the limitation on telemetry, and the loss of portal and perimeter monitoring at the Votkinsk missile assembly facility in Russia. I want to say a little about each of these. Both criticisms are, in my mind, misguided, though for different reasons.

The criticism of the treaty's provisions on telemetry appears to neglect relevant differences between the New START treaty and the old START treaty. Telemetry is the information generated and transmitted during missile test flights. In the original START treaty, each side was prohibited from encrypting or otherwise denying access to its telemetry. The telemetric data helped us understand, for verification purposes, the capabilities of the missiles tested. The article-by-article analysis of the original START treaty singled out missiles' throw-weight and the number of reentry vehicles as central items telemetry helped verify.

The New START treaty allows for a more limited exchange of telemetry, on no more than five ICBM and SLBM launches each year. Critics have seized on this reduction. The limited telemetric exchanges under the new treaty are an important source of ongoing transparency and confidence-building between our two countries.

However, the simple fact is, as Secretary Gates and Admiral Mullen have both testified, we don't need telemetry to monitor compliance with this treaty. Unlike the original START, the new treaty has no limits on missile throw-weight. Hence, we don't need to verify compliance with such limits. We also don't need telemetry to help attribute a number of warheads to a missile type. The new treaty doesn't use such an attribution rule the way the old treaty did. Instead, we actually count the number of warheads on a missile. This is both more precise and eliminates a problem we had run into with the old treaty's rule, which forced us to overcount the number of warheads that are actually on our missiles.

The other alleged monitoring gap has to do with the loss of the perimeter-portal continuous monitoring system--or PPCMS--at Russia's Votkinsk missile production facility. That loss is unfortunate, but probably inevitable after our previous administration expressed to the Russians its intention to bring the monitoring at Votkinsk to an end.

However, thanks to our existing knowledge of Russian missiles and launchers, the verification measures in the treaty, and our National Technical Means, the treaty makes up for the loss of the Votkinsk portal monitoring. In particular, the new treaty requires the Russians to notify us 48 hours in advance of any missile leaving the Votkinsk facility, which allows us to cue our National Technical Means.

They also must notify us when the missile arrives for deployment or storage. In this way, we can in fact achieve birth-to-death insight into their missiles. The unique identifiers and inspection system will also deter cheating. Finally, the Russians are producing few enough missiles, and their existing ones are few enough in number, that it is hard to envision a realistic breakout scenario.

The loss of the Votkinsk portal monitoring is thus unfortunate, but compensated for by other provisions of the treaty. And if Members are concerned about the loss of Votkinsk, think about how much worse it would be if we didn't ratify the New START treaty--that is, the loss of all monitoring and verification measures and the treaty's central limits themselves.

To sum up, our negotiators got a very good deal on verification, and I commend them. There simply are not monitoring gaps opened up by the treaty. On the contrary, the verification regime established by the treaty is a significant reason to support it. It serves to ensure compliance with the central limits in the treaty. It also will pay off by boosting transparency and confidence in our relationship with Russia and sustaining our insight into Russian forces.

What would open up a significant monitoring gap over time would be the failure to bring this treaty into force. For the same reason, we should move without delay in our consideration of the treaty. The old treaty expired last December. The longer we go before we establish the new verification regime, the more our insight into Russian forces will degrade. We need to diligently consider all the materials the administration has furnished us. We also need to do it without unnecessary delay. There is no question we are better off with the verification regime under the new treaty than without it.

I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source