There were no secret deals made with Moscow on missile defense or any other issue during negotiations on a new nuclear arms reduction treaty, the chief US negotiator on the pact said on Tuesday.
Assistant Secretary of State Rose Gottemoeller was trying to assuage critics who say they fear US President Barack Obama’s administration made explicit or implicit concessions to the Kremlin that could limit the future development of US missile defenses.
“Let me state unequivocally today on the record before this committee that there were no, I repeat no, backroom deals made in connection with the new START [Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty] treaty; not on missile defense nor on any other issue,” Gottemoeller told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
But Senator Jim DeMint, one of the treaty’s skeptics, said he would continue to press for the transcript of the negotiations with the Russians to be released before the Senate votes on whether to approve the treaty.
Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev signed the treaty in April, but Senate consent is required for the document to go into force.
The pact commits the two countries with 95 percent of the world’s nuclear weapons to significant cuts in their strategic arsenals, although still leaving them with more than enough firepower to annihilate each other.
Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John Kerry says he wants the panel to vote on the treaty before the August recess, so the full Senate can approve it later this year.
The treaty needs a super-majority of 67 votes for approval, so Obama, a Democrat, will need some Republican support.
The new START treaty does not contain limits on missile defense systems.
But DeMint and other Republicans say they are worried by a unilateral Russian warning that if US missile defense plans threaten its security, Moscow could take advantage of an exit clause and withdraw from the pact.
DeMint said the Russian warning — which he paraphrased as “we [the US] cannot develop anything that threatens their ability to destroy us” — suggested the Cold War doctrine of “Mutual Assured Destruction” (MAD) lived on in the new treaty.
The Pentagon’s representative at the START talks, Ed Warner, testified on Tuesday that the MAD doctrine did survive, but this was only because the US and Russia still cannot shield themselves against all of each other’s missiles.
The missile defense plans of the previous Bush administration, as well as the Obama administration, were aimed at defending the US against “limited attacks” by third countries like North Korea, Warner said.
But these systems were “nowhere near” being able to defend against the kind of volley that Russia could launch. So Washington and Moscow still depended on mutual deterrence, a situation which can be characterized as mutual assured destruction, Warner said.
“We’re not there because we like it. We’re there because it is just the way it is,” Warner said.
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion