Obama's demand that the Senate rush to ratify the treaty called New START

Time to START Standing Up for America

By Phyllis Schlafly
Friday, September 3, 2010

Among the dangers lurking in Congress’s fall session and Lame Duck Session will be Obama’s demand that the Senate rush to ratify the treaty called New START, which he signed with the Russians in Prague last April. This treaty is not only a bad idea; it’s downright dangerous to U.S. national security.

For the first time in the long record of U.S.-Russian treaties, New START links offensive and defensive weapons. Obama’s advocates of ratification say that doesn’t matter because the link is only in the preamble and that doesn’t bind us.

But this interpretation hasn’t been cleared with the Russians, who assert that the preamble puts a binding limit on the U.S. missile defense program. The Russian government issued a statement that the New START treaty “can operate and be viable only if the United States refrains from developing its missile defense capabilities quantitatively or qualitatively.â€