Russia’s legislature says the New START nuclear arms treaty ratified last month by the U.S. Senate restricts the U.S. from building and operating missile defenses against nuclear attacks. President Obama says the opposite: that the treaty “places no limitations on the development or deployment of our missile defense programs.”
There may never have been such a huge dispute on such a fundamental
aspect of a high profile treaty between two major world powers. As reported by the Voice of Russia on Monday, Russia’s Duma, the lower house of parliament, “plans to confirm the link between the reduction of the strategic offensive arms and the restriction of antimissile defense systems’ deployment in the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START),” according to the lawmaking body’s foreign policy chief.
The Russian news agency quoted the chairman of the Duma Committee on
International Affairs, Konstantin Kosachev, who was apparently sneering that U.S. negotiators had been tricked. Kosachev claimed, “our American colleagues do not recognize the legal force of the treaty’s preamble. The preamble sets a link between strategic offensive arms and defensive arms.”
The text of New Start’s preamble recognizes an “interrelationship between strategic offensive arms and strategic defensive arms” which it declares “will become more important as strategic nuclear arms are reduced.” And while the introductory portion of the pact adds that “current strategic defensive arms do not undermine the viability and effectiveness of the strategic offensive arms of the Parties,” it gives no license for future defensive systems.
According to Kosachev, the U.S. belief “that the link between strategic offensive armed forces and antimissile defense systems is not juridically binding for the parties” because “this link was fixed only in the preamble of the document” is an attempt on the part of the United States “to find an option to build up its strategic potential”– and the foreign policy committee chairman warns, “the Russian lawmakers cannot agree with this.”
Interestingly, Voice of Russia also quotes Alexei Arbatov,scholar-in-residence at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s Moscow Center and a leader of Russia’s liberal democratic Yabloko party, accusing U.S. senators of false “unilateral interpretations” of the treaty.
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There may never have been such a huge dispute on such a fundamental
aspect of a high profile treaty between two major world powers. As reported by the Voice of Russia on Monday, Russia’s Duma, the lower house of parliament, “plans to confirm the link between the reduction of the strategic offensive arms and the restriction of antimissile defense systems’ deployment in the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START),” according to the lawmaking body’s foreign policy chief.
The Russian news agency quoted the chairman of the Duma Committee on
International Affairs, Konstantin Kosachev, who was apparently sneering that U.S. negotiators had been tricked. Kosachev claimed, “our American colleagues do not recognize the legal force of the treaty’s preamble. The preamble sets a link between strategic offensive arms and defensive arms.”
The text of New Start’s preamble recognizes an “interrelationship between strategic offensive arms and strategic defensive arms” which it declares “will become more important as strategic nuclear arms are reduced.” And while the introductory portion of the pact adds that “current strategic defensive arms do not undermine the viability and effectiveness of the strategic offensive arms of the Parties,” it gives no license for future defensive systems.
According to Kosachev, the U.S. belief “that the link between strategic offensive armed forces and antimissile defense systems is not juridically binding for the parties” because “this link was fixed only in the preamble of the document” is an attempt on the part of the United States “to find an option to build up its strategic potential”– and the foreign policy committee chairman warns, “the Russian lawmakers cannot agree with this.”
Interestingly, Voice of Russia also quotes Alexei Arbatov,scholar-in-residence at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s Moscow Center and a leader of Russia’s liberal democratic Yabloko party, accusing U.S. senators of false “unilateral interpretations” of the treaty.
Read more
2 comments:
Missle defense, atleast against Russia or China, is a sham. They have enough vehicles and warheads to overwhelm any system we have.
It's a sad day in America when the russian government has more credibility than our own liar in chief.
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