John Kerry

Mr. KERRY

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, I am trying to get a procedure in place. I ask my colleague from Oklahoma if it is possible, with my colleague from South Dakota, to enter into a time agreement. Obviously, we won't ask colleagues to come and vote tonight. Can we get a time agreement and set it aside for a vote at such time that the leadership decides is appropriate?

Mr. KERRY. If that is true, let's go.

Mr. KERRY

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, I thank the Senator from Wyoming for a grounding moment in the Senate. We are enormously appreciative of his words. I especially know what he was saying because my wife and I had the pleasure of welcoming a young grandchild about a month ago. As the Senator was standing there speaking, I couldn't help but think this is the son of Christopher Heinz, who was Jack Heinz's youngest, and the child is called Jack--Little Jack. So I think you gave us a good reminder, and I thank you.

Mr. KERRY

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that we divide the time appropriately among the 3 hours. I would use perhaps 10 minutes at this moment in time.

Mr. KERRY

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, I thank the Senator from Oklahoma. I will consume such time as I use for a moment. Let me say, first of all, again, I appreciate this amendment. There is not a lot of contention about the importance of addressing a lot of short-range tactical weapons, as we call them. The administration wants to do this as much as our friends on the other side of the aisle do, and I think the Senator from Idaho knows that. Let me correct one fact for a minute that both the Senator from Texas and the Senator from Idaho said. They said the Russians will not have to reduce their strategic warheads and that they are already below the number of 1,550. That is not accurate. I won't go into detail here. We can reinforce this tomorrow in a classified session. But the Russians do have to reduce warheads under this requirement--not as much as us. Our defense community has made the judgment that because of our triad, which will remain robust, and for other reasons, we have a very significant advantage. Again, I will discuss that tomorrow in the classified briefing. What I want to say to my colleague is that, again, I am 100 percent prepared to try to embrace this concept even further in the resolution of ratification. But we cannot do it in a way that requires this treaty to go back and be renegotiated. This is not a complicated amendment. There is a very simple reason why we should oppose this amendment as it is: because of the requirement that we go back. Because if we don't pass the START treaty, if we can't reach a bilateral agreement on the reduction of strategic weapons, there will be no discussion about tactical weapons. That is as plain as day. Every negotiator, everybody who has been part of this process, understands that. If we can't show our good faith to reduce and create a mutual verification system for strategic weapons, how are we going to sit in front of them and say, Oh, by the way, let's get you to reduce what is your advantage--it is an advantage, I acknowledge that--you go ahead and reduce it. They are going to laugh at us and we will have lost all of the verification we have today. It is not just me who says that. The fact is Secretary Gates has been very clear about this, and Secretary Clinton likewise. Secretary Gates said this. I know my colleagues all respect him enormously. We will never get to that step of reductions with the Russians on tactical nukes if this treaty on strategic nuclear weapons is not ratified. It is a pretty simple equation, folks. This isn't a one-way street where we can stand here and say, You have to do this and you have to do that and, by the way, we don't care what you think about what we are doing, we are going to do what we want. That is not the way it works. There has to be some reciprocity in the process of reduction and verification and inspection, and so forth. They have things they don't want us to see and we have stuff we don't want them to see. There is plenty in this agreement where we protect our facilities from them being able to intrude on them excessively, because our folks don't want them to. That is the nature of a contentious relationship which is the reason you have to argue out, negotiate out a treaty in the first place. If the Secretary of Defense is telling us--a Secretary of Defense, by the way, whom we all mutually respect enormously, but who was appointed to the job by President Bush--if he is telling us you have to pass this in order to get to the tactical nukes, I think we have to listen to that a little bit. Let me point out--I want the Record to reflect I agree with the Senator from Idaho. They have many more tactical nukes. They have had for a long time. The reason is they have different strategic needs. They are in a different part of the world. For a long time, the Warsaw Pact and NATO were head to head and squared off, and so they saw a world in which they saw the potential of a land invasion. So for a long time they had tanks and mines and other things that were nuclear capable. What happened is we unilaterally, I might add, decided under President Bush, I think it was, President George Herbert Walker Bush, we decided this is dangerous. It doesn't make sense. It doesn't make sense for us. So we unilaterally announced--after the fall of the Soviet Union, President Bush announced we were going to ratchet down our tactical nuclear forces, and everybody agreed with that. It made sense. So we did that and what happened is after that, President Boris Yeltsin in 1992 pledged that the production of warheads for ground- launched tactical missiles, artillery shells, and mines had stopped. They stopped it because we stopped it. And all of those warheads would be eliminated. He pledged that Russia would dispose of one-half of its tactical airborne and surface-to-air warheads as well as one-third of its tactical naval warheads. The Russian Defense Ministry said in 2007, the ground force tactical nuclear warheads had been eliminated. Air defense tactical warheads were reduced by 60 percent. Air Force tactical warheads were reduced by 50 percent. Naval tactical warheads were reduced by 30 percent. Guess what. That didn't happen with the treaty. It happened because we had what we call Presidential nuclear initiatives. Our President made the decision, President Bush: We don't need them, dangerous, reduce them, and the Russians followed. I heard an estimate earlier of 2,000 or something--this is according to the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. We estimate they have a large inventory of operational nonstrategic warheads--5,390 is the number of tactical warheads, air defense tactical, et cetera. So they do still have more, and it still is a very legitimate concern to us. That is why, I say to my colleagues, in the resolution of advice and consent we have the following declaration: (A) The Senate calls upon the President to pursue, following consultation with allies, an agreement with the Russian Federation that would address the disparity between the tactical nuclear weapons stockpiles of the Russian Federation and of the United States and would secure and reduce tactical nuclear weapons in a verifiable manner. That is in the resolution. You can vote for that. In addition, we say: (B) Recognizing the difficulty the United States has faced in ascertaining with confidence the number of tactical nuclear weapons maintained by the Russian Federation and the security of those weapons, the Senate urges the President to engage the Russian Federation with the objectives of (1) establishing cooperative measures to give each Party to the New START Treaty improved confidence regarding the accurate accounting and security of tactical nuclear weapons maintained by the other Party; and (2) providing United States or other international assistance to help the Russian Federation ensure the accurate accounting and security of its tactical nuclear weapons. I am prepared--if that language doesn't satisfy folks, let's go look further. I am happy to do that. But we are not going to do it in a way that precludes us from going to the very negotiations you want to have. It doesn't make sense, not to mention the fact that it puts the entire treaty back into negotiating play. Who knows how long it would be. The estimates I have from the negotiating team is it could take 2, 3 years. We have been a whole year now without inspections and knowing what they are doing. I will talk, tomorrow in the security briefing, about the impact that has on our intelligence, and the dissatisfaction in the intelligence community with a prolonged and continued delay in getting that. So I simply say to my colleagues, let's do what is smart. Secretary Clinton said: The New START Treaty was always intended to replace START. That was the decision made by the Bush administration. I emphasize again that President Obama was not the person who made the decision not to extend START I. The Russians didn't do it unilaterally. Neither of us wanted to do it, because under this START agreement, we actually put in a better system, and one, let me say, that General Chilton emphasizes reduces the constraints on missile defense. So here is what Secretary Clinton said: ``I would underscore the importance of ratifying the New START Treaty to have any chance of us beginning to have a serious negotiation over tactical nuclear weapons.'' Some Senators are saying: Why didn't they address them at the same time and say we have to get this and that done? Well, for a couple reasons. One, Russia's tactical weapons are primarily a threat to our allies in Europe. Knowing the differences of that equation, to have linked our own strategic interests to that negotiation at that time would have left us who knows how long without the capacity to get an agreement, No. 1. No. 2, last year when we began negotiations on New START, NATO was in the midst of working out its new strategic concept. Our allies were in the midst of assessing their security needs. It would have been impossible to have that discussion without them having made that assessment and resolved their own security needs and definitions. But now NATO has completed that strategic concept. We have heard from a lot of European governments about New START. What do they say and what do our allies say? We are not in this ball game alone. They are united in support for this treaty, in part because they see it as the necessary first step to be able to have the negotiations that bring the reductions in tactical nuclear weapons. Let me quote Radoslaw Sikorski, Poland's Foreign Minister: Without a New START Treaty in place, holes will soon appear in the nuclear umbrella that the U.S. provides to Poland and other allies under Article 5 of the Washington Treaty, the collective security guarantee for NATO members. Moreover, New START is a necessary stepping stone to future negotiations with Russia about its tactical nuclear weapons. So they believe you have to pass START to get to this discussion. This is the Lithuanian Foreign Minister: We see this treaty as a prologue, as an entrance to start talks about substrategic weaponry, which is much more endangerous, and it is quite difficult to detect. And we who are living in east Europe especially know this. The Secretary General of NATO said: We need transparency and reductions of short-range tactical weapons in Europe. This is a key concern for allies. But we cannot address this disparity until the New START Treaty is ratified. I don't know how many times you have to make this connection. General Chilton, who is in charge of our nuclear forces, said this to the Armed Services Committee: The most proximate threat to the United States, us, are the ICBM and SLBM weapons because they can and are able to target the U.S. homeland and deliver a devastating effect on this country. So we appropriately focused in those areas in this particular treaty for strategic reasons. Tactical nuclear weapons don't provide the proximate threat that the ICBMs and SLBMs do. The disparity in U.S. and Russian tactical arsenals, I repeat, we want to address. I am prepared to put something in here--if the Senator from Idaho thinks we can find the language, as we did with Senator DeMint, who has strong language in here about missile defense, let's put it in here. But it doesn't put us at a strategic disadvantage. Secretary Gates and Admiral Mullen stated, in response to our questions, for the record: Because of their limited range and the very different roles played by strategic nuclear forces, the vast majority of Russian tactical nuclear weapons cannot directly influence the strategic nuclear balance between the United States and Russia. Donald Rumsfeld said this to the Foreign Relations Committee a few years ago: . . . I don't know that we would ever want to have symmetry between the United States and Russia [in tactical nuclear weapons]. Their circumstance is different and their geography is different. General Chilton said: Under the assumptions of limited range and different roles, Russian tactical nuclear weapons do not directly influence the strategic balance between the U.S. and Russia. Though numerical asymmetry exists in the numbers of tactical nuclear weapons we estimate Russia possesses, when considered within the context of our total capability, and given force levels as structured in New START, this asymmetry is not assessed to substantially affect the strategic stability between the United States and Russia. There is more here. I will reserve the balance of time because other colleagues want to say something. First, let me say this about the process as we go forward. There is some talk that we are now reaching a point--we are on day five--we had Wednesday afternoon, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and now Sunday. That is 5 days. START I took 5 days. If we filed a cloture motion at some point in the evening, for instance, we would still have 2 days before we even vote on that. Then, presuming we were to achieve it, we have 30 hours after that, which can amount to almost 2 days in the Senate. That would mean 9 days, if we go that distance on this treaty, which is simpler than START I. We would have more days on this treaty--simpler than START I--than we had on all 3--the Moscow Treaty, START II, and START I treaties put together. I hope my colleagues will recognize that the majority leader has given time to this effort. We are giving time to it. We want amendments. No amendment, I think, would be struck. We would have time to vote on each amendment and deliberate each amendment. But I think it is important for us to consider the road ahead. I reserve the remainder of our time.

Mr. KERRY. Would the Senator be willing to yield for a question?

Mr. KERRY. We can share the time. It depends on how long you answer.

Mr. KERRY. Let me use a portion of it, and I will reserve a little bit at the end. First of all, both Bill Perry, former Defense Secretary Bill Perry, and Jim Schlesinger have been mentioned, as well as the Commission on which they served. Let me make certain that the record is clear about their position with respect to this treaty. Secretary Perry said the following: The focus of this treaty is on deployed warheads and it does not attempt to counter or control nondeployed warheads. This continues in the tradition of prior arms control treaties. I would hope to see nondeployed and tactical systems included in future negotiations, but the absence of these systems should not detract from the merits of this treaty and the further advance in arms control which it represents. Jim Schlesinger, from the same Commission, said: The ratification of this treaty is obligatory. I wish more of my colleagues on the other side of the aisle were here to hear Jim Schlesinger's comments, but he said ratification is obligatory and the reason it is obligatory is that you really can't get to the discussion you want to have with the Russians about tactical unless you show the good faith to have the strategic and verification reduction structure in place. Let me just say, supposing the language of the Senator from Idaho was adopted here, would it mean we are reducing tactical nuclear weapons? No. Would it get you any further down the road to be able to reduce them? The answer is, not only would it not do that, it would set back the effort to try to get those reductions because the Russians will not engage in that discussion if you can't ratify the treaty, and if they pass this amendment, this treaty, as Senator Levin said, is dead. It goes back to the Russian Government with a provision that is now linking those weapons in a way that they have not been willing to talk about, even engage in the discussion at this point in time. In fact, we would be setting ourselves backwards if that amendment were to be put into effect. What is ironic about it is, he is amending a component of the treaty that has no legal, binding impact whatsoever. So not only would they refuse to negotiate, but there is nothing legally binding in the language he would pass that would force them to negotiate. So it is a double setback, if you will. I would simply say to my friend on the other side--I talked to him privately about this, and I think he is openminded on it--we have language in the resolution right now with respect to nuclear weapons. We are not ignoring the issue. The language says: The Senate calls on the President following consultation with allies to get an agreement with the Russian Federation on tactical nuclear weapons. I am prepared in the resolution of ratification to entertain language as a declaration that would also make the Senate's statement clear about how we see those nuclear weapons in terms of their threat. I hope that would address the concerns of many of our colleagues on the other side of the aisle. But the bottom line here is that Senator Risch's language not only does not make any progress on the topic he is concerned about, it actually sets back the capacity to be able to make the progress he wants to make. If you want to limit Russia's tactical nuclear weapons, and I do, and he does, and I think all 100 Senators do, then you have to pass the New START. You have got to approve the New START. If you reject it, you are forcing a renegotiation, which never gets you not only to the tactical nuclear weapons but which leaves you completely questionable as to where you are going to go on the strategic nuclear weapons, which means the world is less safe; we have lost our leverage significantly with respect to Iran, North Korea; we have certainly muddied the relationship significantly with respect to Russia; we have ``unpushed'' the restart button; and we have opened who knows what kind of can of worms with respect to a whole lot of cooperative efforts that are important to us now, not the least of which, I might add, is the war in Afghanistan, where Russia is currently cooperating with us in providing a secondary supply route and assisting us in other ways with respect to Iran. So I say, let's not do something that we know unravels all of these particular components. Anytime you change that resolution of ratification, it is like pulling, you know, a piece of string on a sweater or on a yarn roll and everything starts to unravel as a consequence. One piece undoes another piece undoes another piece. That is not where we want to go. I hope, obviously, we will say no to this amendment and proceed. I reserve the remainder of my time.

Mr. KERRY. Unless the Senator says something completely outrageous, which he has managed not to do in the course of the last 3 hours, I have no intention of using the time. But I reserve it to preserve my rights. I would be happy to yield it back after the Senator speaks, depending on him.

Mr. KERRY. Has the time expired?

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, how much time do we still have?

Mr. KERRY. Sixteen? And the Senator from Idaho has--

Mr. KERRY. Ten. So somehow we are going past the hour of 3. MR. RISCH. Unless, of course, you want to yield.

Mr. KERRY. Do you want to yield some time back?

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, if the Senator will yield.

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, the Senator is absolutely correct. The key question is, Is there sufficient support to ratify the treaty? Once we get to that sort of question postcloture, when and if that is invoked, that is what the threshold would be for the passage of this treaty. It is not as if you have cloture and all of a sudden, boom, only 51 votes are necessary to pass it. Secondly, I would say to my colleague--and I want to emphasize this-- if the majority leader were to put the cloture motion in this evening, it doesn't ripen until Tuesday. So we would have the rest of today, all of tomorrow, and Tuesday to have amendments; to continue as we are now. Then, if it did pass, we would have another 30 hours, which, as we all know, takes the better part of 2 days. So we are looking at Thursday under that kind of schedule, and I know a lot of Senators are hoping not to be here on Thursday. So I think that is quite a lot of time within the context of this. But the Senator is correct. The answer to his question is yes.

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, without the help of the Parliamentarian, obviously we are entitled to do a lot by unanimous consent, and that is one of those things. We will not object, obviously. We want to try to help our colleagues be able to put those amendments in, so it would be without objection on our side.

Mr. KERRY. That is correct.

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, I thank the Senator from Tennessee. I will yield 5 minutes to the distinguished chairman of the Armed Services Committee, Senator Levin, to be followed by 7 minutes to the Senator from Oregon. I ask the Senator from Oregon, is that enough time? Is 7 minutes enough time? Thank you. I reserve the remainder of our time.

Mr. KERRY

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, I want to clarify this for my colleagues. There are a couple of items, and they will be done quickly in legislative session by unanimous consent. Then we will come right back to the procedure we had talked about previously. For the purpose of that consent, in legislative session, I yield to the Senator from Colorado.

Mr. KERRY

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, I thank the Senator from Oklahoma. I know he is not trying to prolong it. I was just trying to see if we can get a time certain now, but I am confident we will. I do not know if the Senator from South Dakota----

Mr. KERRY. I apologize. I don't know if the Senator from South Dakota is planning to be here? I ask if anybody knows whether he is. Let me speak to the amendment of the Senator from Oklahoma for a few minutes. I thank him for this amendment on verification. It is an amendment that will help us to flesh out this question of verification, which is important to anybody in the Senate. I guess three words that have become famous beyond what people might have thought when they were first uttered is the pronouncement of President Reagan, ``trust, but verify,'' which at the time was accompanied by his articulation of the Russian words for that. Obviously, any agreement we would enter into with the Russians, or with anybody, can never rely completely on somebody's word--either word--because neither side is going to be satisfied with somebody's word with whom they have the necessity of actually having to reach this kind of an agreement to reduce weapons that are pointed at each other for lots of different reasons over a long period of time. I assure the Senator from Oklahoma that every Senator on our side-- and most importantly the unbelievably experienced negotiators who put this treaty together, who made a lifetime of trying to understand these kinds of relationships and the ways in which to adequately verify--they would not be standing in front of the country and the world and the Congress saying to us this treaty provides better verification in many ways than we had previously. Tomorrow, in the classified session, we will have an opportunity to dig into a little bit of what exactly those ingredients are that fill that out--better. I am not going to go into them all now. But let me talk specifically about the amendment the Senator has proposed. He proposes an amendment to the treaty itself, which we all understand now after two votes, both of which have been to reject a change to the treaty itself because of the implications of changing it. Those do not change here with this particular amendment. But let me go beyond that so we, hopefully, could enlist the opposition to this amendment of some people who will see why it is unnecessary and, in fact, conceivably even counterproductive. The Senator wants to increase the number of type one inspections. I might add this concept of a type one inspection and a type two inspection is new to the New START treaty. It is new to the process. What the Senator would like to do is triple the number of inspections currently set forth in the treaty. The second reason, after the question of why you do not want, for this reason particularly, to amend the treaty, there might be a circumstance where a treaty were so egregious or it presented us with such a challenge that the Senate might decide to advise and consent, and we would all say we ought to send this back. But this does not rise to that level, in my judgment, and I think colleagues will share that opinion. Let me say why. We can achieve effective verification with the number of inspections that are set forth in the treaty. Admiral Mullen has said we can, the Strategic Command says we can, the national intelligence community says we can--the people responsible for verification. This treaty would never have been sent to the Senate if this treaty did not have adequate verification measures in it that would allow the intelligence community to sign off and say to Senators: Please vote for this treaty. But let's go underneath that and examine it a little bit. That is the judgment of our military, the State Department, our intelligence community. James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, told us we should approve this treaty the earlier, the sooner, the better. I think we need to heed his judgment and the judgment of our military. The Senator expresses the concern that there are fewer inspections here than the original START treaty had. In sort of on-its-face terms, that is a truth. That is a true statement if you simply compared the total number that existed in START I and you compare the number that are set forth in the New START. But that is not what we are comparing. The reason for that is, in 1992, when we approved START I, there were four countries that we were approving inspections for--Belarus, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, and Russia--because they all had nuclear facilities. There were about 70 sites that we inspected back then in 1992. But as we all know, thanks to the extraordinary efforts of cold warriors for years and years from the end of World War II until this historic moment of 1992, the fact is, we were inspecting those 70 sites with a very different relationship and a very different world. Today, the New START agreement only seeks 35 Russian sites to inspect because Kazakhstan, Belarus, and Ukraine no longer have any nuclear weapons. Those weapons were consolidated in Russia, and the sites in Russia were reduced. So you do not want an apples and oranges comparison here. The comparison of how many fixed number of inspections there were back in 1992 is simply not applicable to what you need in 2010, given the change of locations, the change of relationship, and the numbers of sites where there are nuclear weapons. The comparison is also problematic beyond that because, in fact, under the New START, the inspections we do have, because of the way they have been set up in the type one, type two and the way they have been laid out, they are actually about two inspections equivalent to one inspection under START I. Let me explain that. Under the original START treaty, an inspection of a missile to see whether it had too many warheads, that inspection of a missile was counted as a separate inspection from so-called update inspections of the base. In other words, there was an inspection of the base, which might take place because we had been told or learned that there was some change in delivery vehicles or other aspects of the base. So we could go to the base and have an update inspection, and that was counted as a separate inspection from the inspection of a missile that might have been located there. But under the new START, we are allowed to conduct up to ten type one inspections a year, and each inspection includes both the counting of the warheads mounted on one missile bomber and the conducting of the equivalent of the START I treaty separate update inspection. So you get two for one--two inspections for one. So you cannot compare these inspections in the way the Senator from Oklahoma has. Ten type one and eight type two inspections per year, under the New START agreement, is at least comparable to the 15 data update inspections and 10 reentry vehicle inspections we had under the old START. The 10 reentry vehicle inspections per year under New START are the same as under the old START. So the truth is, the inspection numbers under New START are comparable to those under the original START treaty. That is precisely why our military and intelligence officials told us this number would be sufficient to comply, to provide verification compliance with this treaty. As I said, we can discuss more of this in the closed session tomorrow. I wish to remind my colleagues, tripling the number of inspections per year, as the Senator's amendment would require, is not a freebie. It is not something we can just say to the Russians: we are going to triple your inspections. Guess what. They are going to demand the same number of inspections of us. Our military bases would have to be prepared to host three times as many inspections per year as they are currently preparing for. Frankly, that could certainly disrupt day-to-day operations of strategic forces. Anytime the Russians select one of our bases for inspections, we would have to lock down the movements of any treaty items at that base for 24 hours before and throughout the inspection, which is at least another day. That means dropping everything, stopping any movements of our delivery vehicles, halting any work on these systems, and you have to get ready to protect any unrelated classified information that you do not want the Russians to see. So I think it is one thing to ask our strategic nuclear forces to do that 10 times a year or less than once a month. It is another thing for them to be waiting for 30 inspections a year. We have two submarine bases, three bomber bases, and three ICBM bases that are going to be subject to type one inspections. If we follow through with those amendments, frankly, I think our base commanders, not to mention the Pentagon, would be less than satisfied. Right now, they are comfortable with what we have in this treaty. But far more important, they are comfortable we can verify, which is the key to the ratification of any treaty. Let me also remind my colleagues that the verification provisions in this treaty were developed with the concerns and the perspective of the U.S. Department of Defense totally in that mix. They helped guide what came out here. ADM Mike Mullen agreed. Let me quote him: ``The verification regimes that exist in the New START treaty is in ways better than the one that has existed in the past.'' Why would we want to challenge that? Why would we want to open now a whole new can of worms of renegotiation when we think what we have is better than what we had previously? Admiral Mullen also stated he is convinced the verification regime is as stringent as it is transparent and borne of more than 15 years of lessons learned under the original START treaty. General Chilton has said: Without New START, we would rapidly lose some of our insight into Russian strategic nuclear force developments and activities, and our force modernization planning and hedging strategy would be more complex and more costly. Let me also quote a letter Secretary Gates sent me this summer about whether Russia could cheat on this treaty in a manner that would be militarily significant. He said: The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Joint Chiefs Commander, the U.S. Strategic Command, and I, assess that Russia will not be able to achieve militarily significant cheating or breakout under New START due to both the New START verification regime, and the inherent survivability and flexibility of the planned U.S. strategic force structure. Our analysis of the NIE and the potential for Russian cheating or breakout confirms that the treaty's verification regime is effective, and that our national security is stronger with this treaty than without it. I mentioned before that Ronald Reagan was one great advocate for this kind of verification. So I wish to quote what Condoleezza Rice wrote the other week: The New START treaty helpfully reinstates on-site verification of Russian nuclear forces which lapsed with the expiration of the original START treaty last year. Meaningful verification was a significant achievement of Presidents Reagan and George H. W. Bush, and its reinstatement is crucial. Finally, I would like to point out that we addressed the importance of this verification question in condition 2 of the resolution of ratification. That condition requires that before New START can enter into force, and every year thereafter, the President has to certify to the Senate that our national technical means, in conjunction with the verification activities provided for in the New START treaty, are sufficient to ensure the effective monitoring of Russian compliance with provisions of the New START treaty and timely warning of any Russian preparation to breakout of the limits. So we are going to remain seized of this issue for every year the treaty is in force. So not only could we lose the treaty if this amendment were to pass, not only could we impose unwanted and unneeded requirements on our military bases and our military, not only would we not effectively increase the verification because of the advantages that were built into the New START treaty by our negotiators, which have been attested to by the very people who need to enforce it, not only that, but we could be without any verification at all for maybe 1 year, 2 years, longer, who knows whether we get any agreement or not. Clearly, that exposes our country in ways I do not think we want to, and it certainly is no guarantee of an increase in the inspections themselves. I yield the floor.

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, I will not engage in a long discussion. I don't know if the Senator from Indiana wants to say something. First of all, I am envious of that flight. I would love to have made that. Secondly, as the Senator knows--and I think I will reserve most of this for the classified session tomorrow--we have great ability to observe construction in Siberia or any part of Russia and to notice changes of various kinds, notwithstanding the vastness. Yes, there have been occasions when there have been some misunderstandings or differences of opinion about enforcement requirements. We have had some differences on those things. We can again discuss some of those in closed session. But the treaties have worked. The process set up by which we get into dispute resolution and sort of raise these issues has worked. When we notice something they are doing that we think is, in fact, not in compliance or likewise when they have with us, we have gotten together, and, because of the treaty, we have come into a discussion, and we have worked those things through. I think our intelligence community's conclusion is that they have never exceeded the limits, though there have been some misunderstandings about sort of the process of getting from one place to another with respect to one system or another. Let's have that discussion in a place where we can do it without a sense of restraint, but I think it is a good one to have. I look forward to continuing that with my colleague. I don't know if the Senator from Indiana has anything he wants to add. Mr. President, I understand the Senator from South Dakota will not be here, so unless there is another Senator seeking recognition or looking for an amendment to be acted on at this point, I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. KERRY

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, reserving the right to object, and I will not.