Ratify New START
By Lt. Gen. Norman Seip
The Post and Courier, 11/23/2010
For almost 20 years, the U.S. has had inspectors on the ground in Russia to conduct inspections and surveillance of the Russian nuclear arsenal.
Now we don’t. Since December of last year, the treaty that enabled us to keep tabs on Russian warheads expired, and our inspectors came home.
The Senate will have a lot on its plate when it resumes action but its top priority should be to follow the advice of U.S. military leadership, ratify the New START Treaty and put U.S. inspectors back on the ground in Russia.
As a former Air Force commander, I managed over 30,000 active duty personnel and had to make decisive decisions to protect our nation’s security. This treaty should be ratified for a simple reason – it makes America safe.
The New START Treaty replaces a measure negotiated under the Reagan administration and signed by President George H. W. Bush, which for the first time put into practice President Reagan’s directive that we should ‘trust, but verify.’
In addition to providing a state of the art verification regime that builds on two decades of experience monitoring Russian weapons, the New START Treaty makes modest reductions to both Russian and U.S. arsenals and provides vital transparency and stability the relationship between the countries whose arsenals account for 95 percent of the world’s nuclear weapons.
It is because the New START Treaty makes America safer that it has the overwhelming support of U.S. military leadership and national security experts from both political parties.
Over the course of six months of hearings, senators heard testimony in support of the treaty from the Secretary of Defense, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Director of the Missile Defense Agency charged with overseeing U.S. missiles and missile defense. They heard supporting testimony from officials from the last seven administrations, including George Shultz, Henry Kissinger, James Baker and Brent Scowcroft, among many others.
In addition, seven former U.S. Strategic Command commanders wrote to senators, urging them to promptly ratify the treaty. A recently published open letter in support of the treaty included the names of Colin Powell, Frank Carlucci, Madeleine Albright, Chuck Hagel and John Danforth among its signatories.
Some critics claim that the treaty limits U.S. missile defense capabilities. This isn’t the case. Robert Gates and Lt. Gen. Patrick O’Reilly, Director of the Missile Defense Agency testified New START ‘actually reduces constraints on the development of the missile defense program.’
After months of vetting the treaty in more than 20 hearings with hundreds of questions answered, all substantive issues have been addressed.
When the Senate reconvenes it will have been almost an entire year since U.S. on-site inspections of Russian nuclear weapons and infrastructure were suspended. Our uncertainty grows and our security shrinks as each additional day passes. In testimony, STRATCOM Commander Gen. Kevin Chilton noted, ‘If we don’t get the treaty, [the Russians] are not constrained in their development of force structure and … we have no insight into what they’re doing. So it’s the worst of both possible worlds.’
Now it’s time for the Senate to act.
A total of 67 votes are necessary to pass the treaty making the votes of all senators critical for ratification. This treaty is a straightforward, nonpartisan issue of security with overwhelming support from the nation’s military. Senators — it’s time to ratify New START.
Lt. Gen. Norman Seip, a former Commander of 12th Air Force, served as Chief of Standardization and Evaluation at Shaw Air Force Base near Sumter.
