Rebeccah Heinrichs on START
Rebeccah Heinrichs, an adjunct fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, wrote an article about START for The Hill’s Congress Blog. An excerpt:
“Despite Obama administration officials’ original claims to the contrary, the New START treaty does address missile defense — in the Preamble, no less. It states that there is a connection between offensive and defensive weapons and that our current system does not threaten Russia’s offensive weapons. The Russians want to keep it that way, and even submitted a unilateral statement to make perfectly clear that the treaty, ‘may be effective and viable only in conditions where there is no qualitative or quantitative build-up in the missile defense system capabilities of the United States of America.’
“The Russians have made it quite clear that they will withdraw from the treaty if the U.S. builds a robust missile defense system. And the Obama administration knows this and wants ratification regardless.
“As Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Policy James N. Miller, Jr. casually admitted in his testimony, since the U.S. has only thirty ground-based interceptors and Russia plans to field over 1,000 ballistic missiles, Washington could build much more substantial missile defenses without appreciably challenging Russian forces. Yet President Obama is effectively promising President Medvedev he will ensure that the U.S. remains exposed to Russia’s massive nuclear arsenal. This was exactly what President Reagan intended to move us away from when he announced his plan to deploy defenses that would render all nuclear missiles obsolete.”
In April, we interviewed Ms. Heinrichs as a missile defense expert for our “Ask the Experts” series.
Tags: Rebeccah Heinrichs, Russia, START