US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said on Sunday the new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) nuclear pact was a centerpiece of improved US ties with Russia and failure to ratify the accord could pose “real problems for the relationship.”
“I think that there are potentially serious consequences for failure to ratify the new START agreement,” Gates told reporters in Bolivia, where he was attending the Conference of Defense Ministers of the Americas.
On the key sticking point of spending to modernize US nuclear forces, Gates said he did not know what more the Republicans wanted because US President Barack Obama’s administration had agreed to the additions they requested.
“I don’t know what they’re looking for frankly because we have essentially, in terms of the adds that they thought were needed, we have made those adds,” he said.
Obama is headed toward a showdown with US Senate Republicans over the START treaty and has made it one of his key legislative objectives for the final weeks of the current US Congress, whose term expires in early January.
Democrats fear the treaty may face even greater hurdles when the new Congress takes office because their Senate majority will be considerably smaller after the losses they suffered in this month’s elections. Treaties require approval by two-thirds of the 100-member Senate.
Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev signed the new treaty in April, committing the two former Cold War foes to reducing deployed nuclear warheads by about 30 percent, to no more than 1,550, within seven years.
Gates said the Senate’s failure to ratify the agreement could have political consequences for the bilateral relationship, which has improved since Obama began trying to “reset” ties with Moscow after they soured during former US president George W. Bush’s administration.
Gates, a Republican who was Bush’s defense secretary and was asked to stay on by Obama, noted the Russians had cooperated with the US on developing the northern supply route for Afghanistan and the UN Security Council resolution imposing sanctions on Iran.
Over the weekend, Moscow agreed to begin working with NATO on missile defenses.
“So some positive things have been happening in this relationship. If the START treaty isn’t ratified, I think all of that is potentially at risk,” Gates said.
“I’m not trying to scaremonger. I just think you have to be realistic that the new START treaty is a centerpiece of the relationship and for that not to be ratified, I think, poses real potential problems for the relationship,” Gates said.
One of the main Republican demands for supporting the treaty is ensuring funds are available to modernize US nuclear weapons systems to make sure they work.
The Obama administration has agreed to commit US$80 billion over the next decade to upgrade US nuclear weapons. In negotiations with Republicans, the administration pledged to spend an additional US$4.1 billion over five years. Gates said failure to ratify START would jeopardize those funds.
“If there is no new START agreement, I think the additional funds that the administration has asked for for modernizing our nuclear enterprise are very much at risk,” he said.
RIGHTS FEARS: A protester said Beijing would use the embassy to catch and send Hong Kongers to China, while a lawmaker said Chinese agents had threatened Britons Hundreds of demonstrators on Saturday protested at a site earmarked for Beijing’s controversial new embassy in London over human rights and security concerns. The new embassy — if approved by the British government — would be the “biggest Chinese embassy in Europe,” one lawmaker said earlier. Protester Iona Boswell, a 40-year-old social worker, said there was “no need for a mega embassy here” and that she believed it would be used to facilitate the “harassment of dissidents.” China has for several years been trying to relocate its embassy, currently in the British capital’s upmarket Marylebone district, to the sprawling historic site in the
A deluge of disinformation about a virus called hMPV is stoking anti-China sentiment across Asia and spurring unfounded concerns of renewed lockdowns, despite experts dismissing comparisons with the COVID-19 pandemic five years ago. Agence France-Presse’s fact-checkers have debunked a slew of social media posts about the usually non-fatal respiratory disease human metapneumovirus after cases rose in China. Many of these posts claimed that people were dying and that a national emergency had been declared. Garnering tens of thousands of views, some posts recycled old footage from China’s draconian lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic, which originated in the country in late
French police on Monday arrested a man in his 20s on suspicion of murder after an 11-year-old girl was found dead in a wood south of Paris over the weekend in a killing that sparked shock and a massive search for clues. The girl, named as Louise, was found stabbed to death in the Essonne region south of Paris in the night of Friday to Saturday, police said. She had been missing since leaving school on Friday afternoon and was found just a few hundred meters from her school. A police source, who asked not to be named, said that she had been
BACK TO BATTLE: North Korean soldiers have returned to the front lines in Russia’s Kursk region after earlier reports that Moscow had withdrawn them following heavy losses Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Friday pored over a once-classified map of vast deposits of rare earths and other critical minerals as part of a push to appeal to US President Donald Trump’s penchant for a deal. The US president, whose administration is pressing for a rapid end to Ukraine’s war with Russia, on Monday said he wanted Ukraine to supply the US with rare earths and other minerals in return for financially supporting its war effort. “If we are talking about a deal, then let’s do a deal, we are only for it,” Zelenskiy said, emphasizing Ukraine’s need for security guarantees