START It Up

The White House this afternoon officially submitted the follow-on Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty to the Senate for ratification.

In a letter accompanying the text of the treaty, President Obama writes:

The Treaty will enhance the national security of the United States. It mandates mutual reductions and limitations on the world's two largest nuclear arsenals. The Treaty will promote transparency and predictability in the strategic relationship between the United States and the Russian Federation and will enable each Party to verify that the other Party is complying with its obligations through a regime that includes on-site inspections, notifications, a comprehensive and continuing exchange of data regarding strategic offensive arms, and provisions for the use of national technical means of verification. The Treaty further includes detailed procedures for the conversion or elimination of Treaty-accountable items, and provides for the exchange of certain telemetric information on selected ballistic missile launches for increased transparency.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Michael Mullen and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will testify before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee at a hearing on the pact next week.

Administration officials can expect intense questioning on details of the pact from Republican lawmakers, Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) told attendees of a Capitol Hill breakfast this morning.

President Obama "wants a world without any nuclear weapons, zero, none," Sessions said. "I think that makes me nervous," he added, calling such a goal "unrealistic" and one that "raises questions in my mind of how this whole thing is going to play out."