The U.S. Vice President Joe Biden said Tuesday that the U.S. would be in danger if the new START nuclear disarmament treaty with Russia will not be ratified this year, after the pessimistic declaration of an influential Republican senator.
“The failure to adopting a new START treaty this year would jeopardize our national security,” said Vice President Biden in a statement, expressing the Obama administration will to continue working for the adoption of the treaty in the Senate “until the end of the year.”
Tuesday, the Republican minority leader in the U.S. Senate, Jon Kyl, estimated that the treaty will not be ratified until 2011.
In the United States, treaties must be ratified by two thirds of the Senate, 67 of the 100 elected.
The Republican Senators, who will have more seats starting from January (47 of 100, compared with 41 in present), following the November 2 election, said several times that they want guarantees regarding the modernization of U.S. nuclear arsenal and maintaining a credible missile defense.
The new START nuclear disarmament treaty was signed in April by U.S. President Barack Obama and his Russian counterpart, Dmitry Medvedev.
The document provides for a maximum of 1,550 warheads for each of the two countries and also a reduction of 30 percent over the level set in 2002.
