Publisher's Synopsis
Evaluating the New START Treaty and debating its merits was a major undertaking here, and I am very grateful to Secretary Gottemoeller and to others who contributed to what I thought was a very extensive and productive effort to evaluate that treaty and to lay the groundwork to put a record together. We scrutinized it through months of open and classified hearings, hundreds of questions for the record, more than a week of debate in the full Senate. And ultimately, the committee supported it 14 to 4, and we passed it in the full Senate with 71 votes. I am proud that we sent a signal to the world that we remain committed to trying to reduce the threat of nuclear proliferation. Now it has been almost a year and a half since the Senate agreed to the New START and just over a year since it entered into force. So it is appropriate at this juncture to review how well the treaty is performing.
