The Hill News

Vice President Joe Biden said Tuesday he is committed to getting the Senate to approve a key nuclear arms reduction treaty with Russia before the year's end despite a major GOP roadblock.

Biden said that the START treaty has broad bipartisan support and that failing to ratify it, an act that has been delayed for months, "would endanger our national security."

{mosads}"Given new START’s bipartisan support and enormous importance to our national security, the time to act is now and we will continue to seek its approval by the Senate before the end of the year," Biden said in a statement.

The vice president statement indicates that Democrats will continue to press Republicans to back the agreement. The ratification of the treaty suffered a major setback Tuesday when Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.), a leading critic of START, said he informed Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) that it should not be brought up this year. 

The Obama administration has hoped for the Senate to approve the treaty, which the Senate Foreign Relations Committee passed in October, during the lame-duck so that it could get to the president's desk before the end of the year. 

The ranking member of that panel, Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.), backs its ratification, but he needs seven oth! er Republicans to support it before the Senate can send it to President Obama.

The new START treaty, signed by Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and Obama this spring, seeks to reduces missiles, warheads and launchers in the U.S. and Russia.

But Kyl and other Republicans have said that it does not do enough to ensure that U.S. nuclear facilities are modernized.
 
Republicans, led by Kyl, have criticized the treaty based on fears that it endangers the U.S. by not taking strong enough steps to “modernize” the country’s existing arsenal of missiles. 

Biden said that Obama has "made an extraordinary commitment to ensure the modernization of our nuclear infrastructure," which includes $80 billion in funding over the next ten years.

"Without ratification of this Treaty, we will have no Americans on the ground to inspect Russia’s nuclear activities, no verification regime to track Russia’s strategic nuclear arsenal, less cooperation between the two nations that account for 90 percent of the world’s nuclear weapons, and no verified nuclear reductions," Biden said. "The New START treaty is a fundamental part of our relationship with Russia, which has been critical to our ability to supply our troops in Afghanistan and to impose and enforce strong sanctions on the Iranian government."