Excerpt from Treaty Between U. S. And the Russian Federation on Further Reduction and Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms (the Start II Treaty) Treaty Doc, 103-1 The committee met. pursuant to notice, at 10:30 a.m., in room SD - 419, Dirksen Senate Office Building, Hon. Claiborne Pell (chairman of the committee) presiding. Present: Senators Pell, Biden, Helms, Lugar, Mathews, and Simon. The Chairman. The committee will come to order. And it is our pleasure today to welcome Secretary Christopher in support of the START Treaty negotiated by the previous administration. I would hope we could keep the hearing focusing on START II and its importance and the reasons for moving ahead on it. We should all understand at the outset that even if START II satisfies our committee and the Senate, it faces many hurdles prior to entry into force. The major stumbling block is that Ukraine has not fulfilled its pledge in the May of 1992 Lisbon Protocol and not joined the Non-Proliferation Treaty as a non-nuclear weapons state. Kazakhstan, which has agreed to ratify START I, is ready to see what the Ukraine does before joining the NPT as a non-nuclear weapons state. Without START I, we cannot have START II. Now, here, I would like to point out perhaps in a personal way that Belarus has met its pledge with regard to both START I and the NPT. Belarus has done this despite internal disagreements, pressing priorities. And I have discussed some of the problems directly with the Russian Foreign Minister, Mr. Kozyrev. We would hope we would be mindful of Belarus' excellent support and be inclined to reciprocate as we meet some of that nation's urgent needs. I will return now to the ranking minority member and ask him for his statement. Senator Helms. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. And I, too, welcome the Secretary back home. I am glad he bought a round-trip ticket to every place you went. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.