Merry Christmas, Hillary Clinton, and THANK YOU for THIS!

Just before Christmas six years ago, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton rushed to the Capitol to see the Senate vote and ratify the New START treaty.  The treaty was the result of hard work and long cooperation between her and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and their teams. Here is her statement from that day.

Senate Approval of New START

Remarks

Hillary Rodham Clinton
Secretary of State

Washington, DC

December 22, 2010

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Today the Senate took a great step forward in enhancing our national security by providing its advice and consent to ratification of the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty between the United States and the Russian Federation. I congratulate the Senators of both parties who worked tirelessly to ensure that New START was approved, and I thank all the Senators who voted for this treaty for their commitment to our national security.

Once this Treaty enters into force, on-site inspections of Russia’s strategic nuclear weapons facilities can resume, providing us with an on-the-ground view of Russia’s nuclear forces. The information and insight from these inspections forms the core of our ability to “trust but verify” compliance with New START. A responsible partnership between the world’s two largest nuclear powers that limits our nuclear arsenals while maintaining strategic stability is imperative to promoting global security. With New START, the United States and Russia will have another important element supporting our “reset” relationship and expanding our bilateral cooperation on a wide range of issues.

President Obama and Vice President Biden have been unwavering in their dedication to this treaty to both strengthen our domestic security and reduce the international threat of nuclear weapons. This day would not have been possible without their leadership or the efforts of Secretary Gates and Admiral Mullen. I also thank President George H.W. Bush and all the former Secretaries of State who added their support to this Treaty and worked to see New START approved. I and all my colleagues at the State Department look forward to working with our Russian partners to conclude the approval of New START in Russia, bring the Treaty into force, and deliver the global and national security benefits of New START.

It was a wonderful Christmas present for all of us.  It is a treaty and is in place.
Thank you, Hillary, for this important agreement between the U.S. and Russia. We live in a safer world because of your work. Amicable relations between our countries rely on respect for treaties which both leaders have signed and both governments have ratified more than they do on congratulatory notes and mutual admiration between leaders.

The Senate ratification was the final step in a long process.
(Read more about what it took to arrive at this treaty here >>>>)
Mme. Secretary, we wish you and your family a Merry Christmas.  Thank you for all of your hard work and this legacy of success in protecting us. Thank you for the effort you put into your campaign. We are grateful and are always here for you and with you.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, keeps her fingers crossed as she comes to see the vote on the New START Treaty. on Capitol Hill in Washington, Wednesday, Dec. 22, 2010. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton greets people just off the Senate floor after the Senate ratified the START nuclear arms reduction treaty at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, December 22, 2010. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst (UNITED STATES - Tags: POLITICS MILITARY)

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton leaves after the vote on the New START Treaty, Wednesday, Dec. 22, 2010, on Capitol Hill in Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton walks past the exit to the Senate floor after the Senate ratified the START nuclear arms reduction treaty at the US Capitol in Washington, December 22, 2010. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst (UNITED STATES - Tags: POLITICS MILITARY)

Happy Holidays to everyone here at Still 4 Hill!  Thank you for all of your hard work this year, too!

Secretary Clinton's Press Availability at the United Nations

Press Availability at the United Nations

Hillary Rodham Clinton
Secretary of State
The United Nations
New York City
May 3, 2010

SECRETARY CLINTON: Good afternoon. Thank you for coming. I just finished speaking to the 2010 NPT Review Conference. This is the eighth time that parties to the treaty have come together like this over the last 40 years since the NPT came into force. Nearly 190 nations are represented here and almost every one of them has met its nonproliferation obligations and comes to New York with constructive ideas for strengthening the treaty. This conference will provide strong impetus for a reinvigorated nonproliferation regime and the United States is doing its part.

In the past several months, we have taken a number of important steps to strengthen the global nonproliferation regime and to make the world safer for us all. Under President Obama’s leadership, we signed a new START treaty with Russia that limits our deployed strategic nuclear weapons to levels not seen since the 1950s. We completed a Nuclear Posture Review that rules out the development of new nuclear weapons and states clearly that the United States will not use nuclear weapons against any non-nuclear-weapons state that is party to the NPT and in compliance with its nuclear nonproliferation obligations while maintaining a safe, effective, and credible deterrent for as long as nuclear weapons exist. We committed to ratifying the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and to starting multilateral negotiations on a verifiable fissile material cutoff treaty.

This afternoon, I made some additional announcements that we think will strengthen the three pillars of the NPT. I announced, beginning today, we will make public the number of nuclear weapons in our stockpile and the number dismantled since 1991. I announced $50 million in support for a new IAEA Peaceful Uses Initiative that will spread the benefits of peaceful nuclear energy. I announced we will seek U.S. Senate ratification for our participation in existing nuclear-weapons-free-zone agreements among the nations of Africa and the South Pacific, and I reaffirmed our longstanding policy to support efforts to realize a weapons of mass destruction-free zone in the Middle East in accordance with the 1995 Middle East Resolution.

Now, given the lack of a comprehensive regional peace and concerns about some countries’ compliance with NPT safeguards, the conditions for such a zone do not yet exist. But we are prepared to support practical measures for moving toward that objective.

Together, these measures represent our commitment to ensuring that the NPT is stronger when our work is done than it is today. And in both public appearances and private conversations, many others have made the same commitment.

But we’ve also heard some destructive rhetoric, rhetoric meant to divide and obstruct us. And we cannot let that rhetoric stand. Iran is the only country represented here found to be currently in violation of its obligations under the NPT. As the IAEA Board of Governors has stated clearly and publicly, the Iranian Government has repeatedly rejected the injunctions of the UN Security Council and refused to cooperate with the IAEA’s investigation of its activities. It appears that Iran’s president came here today with no intention of improving the NPT. He came to distract attention from his own government’s failure to live up to its international obligations, to evade accountability for defying the international community, and to undermine our shared commitment to strengthening the treaty.

But he will not succeed. Time and again, the Iranian Government has tried to make its own failures to abide by its duties into an issue between Iran and the United States. But this conference itself underscores that the issue at stake is much larger. It is about the responsibility of all nations, including Iran, to comply with their international obligations and to advance rather than undermine regional and global security. For all the bluster of its words, the Iranian Government cannot defend its own actions, and that is why it is facing increasing isolation and pressure from the international community.

Among other things, Iran’s president today claimed that Iran had accepted the IAEA’s proposal to refuel the Tehran research reactor. Iran has a history of making confusing, contradictory, and inaccurate statements designed to convey the impression that it has adopted a flexible attitude toward the proposal. But we have seen no indication that Iran is willing to accept the IAEA’s October proposal or any variant of that proposal that would achieve the confidence-building goals that were intended. If Iran has truly changed its position, it should provide a clear indication of that to the IAEA.

Additionally, we repeat our call, on humanitarian grounds, for Iran to release the three young hikers who have been detained without charge or trial for more than nine months.

In the meantime, it is up to the rest of the countries represented here to show that our shared commitment is greater than any effort to undermine it. We must use this conference to send potential violators a strong message that they will pay a high price for breaking the rules. Only if Iran hears that message clearly will it accept our standing offer to engage in good-faith negotiations, to live up to its obligations, and join with the rest of us here in making the world safer.

I’m hopeful we will make progress during this conference, but the real progress will come from a sustained, long-term commitment to strengthening the NPT this month and for many months ahead. If we fail, we face the prospect of a new wave of proliferation. But if we build on our common vision, recognizing there is much more that unites us than divides us, we have an opportunity to set a new course, a new course for global nonproliferation efforts. And it is a course that the United States has embraced, and we are eager to move forward with the international community.

Thank you very much.

QUESTION: Madam Secretary --

MR. CROWLEY: We have time for a few of your questions. We’ll start with Jill Dougherty of CNN.

QUESTION: Is there a microphone or we just – Secretary Clinton, thank you very much. It looks, though, as if you have a dilemma, because how are you going to balance the push for sanctions on Iran because of its nuclear program with this desire to induce Iran to sign on to the final document of this NPT, and especially knowing that five years from now, they will be the head of the Non-Aligned Group here at the NPT?

SECRETARY CLINTON: Well, Jill, I think that both of these efforts are actually part of the same commitment. We believe that strengthening the NPT requires nations to stand up and clearly be counted on behalf of stronger rules and regulations coming out of the IAEA, greater accountability and transparency, more tools going to the IAEA to be able to enforce the obligations of the NPT. And that is exactly what we are working to achieve with our partners in the Security Council with respect to Iran’s nuclear program.

As I said in the hall and as I said again here, Iran is the only nation that is attending this conference that has violated consistently the treaty obligations it signed up to follow, that has defied the international community, that has acted with impunity when held to account by the IAEA and the Security Council.

And we think there will be a very significant – a supermajority of countries that will want to move forward with a reaffirmation of the NPT, all three pillars. And if Iran wants to be further isolated, it will stand outside that consensus. But I hope that we can reach consensus. I hope that we can reach agreement in the Security Council on tough new sanctions, because I believe that is the only way to get the attention of Iran’s leadership and to move toward a thorough and careful assessment of its nuclear program, and to make clear that the international community will not stand idly by while countries violate their obligations.

QUESTION: Madam Secretary – excuse me – Madam Secretary, Mr. Ahmadinejad’s speech, at the beginning, he laid out reasons why he felt Iran was threatened or they felt threatened by the United States and its allies. Do you think Iran has any legitimate reasons to feel threatened by the United States? And if so, is that driving them further towards noncompliance?

SECRETARY CLINTON: I cannot possibly speak for Iran or for their president.

QUESTION: (Off-mike.)

SECRETARY CLINTON: Well, I don’t know what their perception is. The United States has been very clear. President Obama came into office with a very open hand toward Iran. He talked about it in his inaugural address. It was that important to him. He has reached out personally to the Iranian leadership. We have reached out in many different ways. We have held the meetings of the P-5+1 as a full participant in this work. We have come forward with Russia and France with the Tehran research reactor proposal. Time and time again, I think we have demonstrated our commitment to the two-track process – the track of engagement and of moving forward together and then the track of pressure. Well, we are on the pressure track, but it is within the United Nations that we are seeking that pressure.

So I can’t, in any way, assess what the president means or doesn’t mean or what he says for effect or what he says that he – out of sincerity. But I can tell you that he knows the address of the IAEA, he knows what it is expected of him; he can respond at any time and we would still welcome a good-faith, legitimate, genuine response. But we are, as you know, waiting.

QUESTION: Madam Secretary --

QUESTION: Sorry, excuse me, Madam Secretary. I’m wondering if you can enlighten us a little bit more about the decision to release the numbers and the figures in the nuclear arsenal. We understand that there were people inside the government who were not in favor of this. What was the calculus of the Administration in deciding that making them public was more important than the national security concerns that people who disagreed with your point of view had?

SECRETARY CLINTON: Well, actually, we think it is in our national security interest to be as transparent as we can be about the nuclear program of the United States. We think that builds confidence. We think it brings more people to an understanding of what President Obama and this Administration is trying to do, everything from the Prague speech to the new START treaty to the Nuclear Security Summit, to our position and the announcements that I made today here at the NPT Review Conference. And we don’t believe that revealing the number of nuclear weapons we have in our arsenals, which most experts know already, but sharing it with the public is in any way in opposition to our nuclear security.

And at the end of the day, as with many vigorous debates, there was a general agreement that that was certainly the case, so that you’ll hear later today from the Department of Defense and the Department of Energy releasing those numbers. Look, the United States and Russia, together we have more than 95 percent of all the nuclear weapons in the world. We have enough nuclear weapons to destroy the world many times over. We are attempting to rein that in. We are attempting to make progress toward a world without nuclear weapons in a clear-eyed, practical, realistic way consistent with our security, and we think releasing this information furthers that goal.

(Multiple questions being asked simultaneously.)

SECRETARY CLINTON: (Laughter.) Go ahead, go ahead, real quickly.

QUESTION: Okay. There are three countries which are friends to the United States which are not signatory to NPT – India, Pakistan, and Israel. What – and you have had a conversation with India, Pakistan, just now in Washington. What are the new proposals that you have in order to bring these countries into the fold, in order to be signatory to NPT, which is very essential for the goals that you are setting?

SECRETARY CLINTON: Well, we want to see every country be a signatory to the NPT. We want universal adherence. And we continue to urge all states, every single one of them outside the NPT, to join the treaty, accept the full-scope safeguards by the International Atomic Energy Agency, as required under the treaty.

We believe strongly in this. That’s why we are taking steps which have never been taken by any administration before. And we would like to see every nation become a signatory and we want to see every nation that is a signatory live up to their obligations. And it is important that the United States take the steps we are taking to build confidence, to demonstrate our commitment. But we continue to hope that we will see all nations eventually agree that being a signatory to the NPT is in their interest and the interests of global security and safety.

Thank you very much.

# # #

Photos: Secretary Clinton at United Nations NPT Conference Today

As we all know, Secretary Clinton lead the delegation to the opening of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference Today. I am certain the text and video will be available later, but for now there are these photos for those in need of a Hillary fix.

Smart START - Hillary Clinton Unveils Non-Proliferation Rationale @ McConnell Center Speaker Series!

No, sorry, I do not have the video yet as it is not yet up. I was not able to watch the livestream because I was teaching. But just before class, I DID see Senator McConnell speaking before the Secretary of State spoke, and was struck by the brilliance of this engagement. Whose idea this was, and how it came about I do not know (though I have my suspicions - hint - she's a brainy, beautiful, blond member of the cabinet, and people have a hard time saying"no" to her when she flirts, which she does masterfully), but it was a brilliant political coup, a shining example of "smart power."

Here is a snip from Reuters.

Clinton woos Republican in pitch for nuclear treaty

Arshad Mohammed

WASHINGTON

Fri Apr 9, 2010 5:18pm EDT

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made a pitch on Friday for the Senate to ratify a new treaty to slash the U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals with a personal visit to the Senate Republican leader's home state.

With Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell in the audience, Clinton told students in Kentucky the arms control pact signed in Prague on Thursday by the U.S. and Russian presidents deserved Democratic and Republican support.

While President Barack Obama's fellow Democrats have a majority in the Senate, he needs some Republican votes to win Senate consent to the agreement, which commits both nations to cut their deployed nuclear warheads by about 30 percent.

Under the U.S. Constitution, treaties must secure two-thirds approval to secure Senate ratification.

A successor to the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START), the accord is part of a broader U.S. push, including a next week's Washington summit on preventing nuclear terrorism, to reduce the threat from nuclear weapons and proliferation.

Read more here>>>

If wooing is what is necessary (and it IS, they need 61 votes in the Senate, i.e. some Republicans) they have sent out their biggest gun in the form of the petite, adorable, possibly irresistible Secretary of State who is expert at wooing, and in case the baby blues do not have the desired effect, knows this text more intimately and thoroughly than anyone else in the administration. Not only will she be able to speak about it in her usual machine-gun fast, linear, organized fashion, she will be able to field questions like the ace shortstop she is. Hillary Clinton introducing the administration argument for ratification of START - priceless! A brilliant idea, a masterly move!

Now you KNEW I wound not end this without a picture of the Wooer-in-Chief, didn't you?

(I am patiently awaiting the posting of the video and text of this event. I will post it ASAP.)

Secretary Clinton to Address Nuclear Non-Proliferation at University of Louisville Tomorrow

I posted something Saturday about this. Here is the State Department press release. I did see something on a news feed today about the time of this having been rescheduled. There is no charge, but you do need a ticket. The link above takes you to the post with a link to the article that explains how to get a ticket if you are lucky enough to be in the Louisville area.

Secretary Clinton to Deliver Remarks on Nuclear Nonproliferation at The University of Louisville as Part of the McConnell Center's Spring Lecture Series on Friday, April 9

Office of the Spokesman

Washington, DC

April 8, 2010

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Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton will deliver Remarks entitled “No Greater Danger: Protecting our Nation and Allies from Nuclear Terrorism and Nuclear Proliferation” at the University of Louisville as part of the McConnell Center’s Spring Lecture Series, in Louisville, Kentucky on Friday, April 9 at 3:30 p.m.

The remarks will be carried live on BNET and live-streamed on www.state.gov. The address will also be shown in the PA Conference Room (Room 2208) at the Department of State.

The McConnell Center at the University of Louisville was established in 1991 by Kentucky's senior Senator Mitch McConnell. The Center is dedicated to providing a non-partisan, well rounded education that encourages top undergraduates to become valued citizens and future leaders. Through a variety of lectures, seminars, panel discussions, and conferences, the McConnell Center seeks to bring influential political leaders, business executives, and accomplished scholars to the University of Louisville.

University of Louisville
Papa John’s Cardinal Stadium
Brown & Williamson Club
3^rd Floor

This treaty still needs Congressional approval. In the Senate it needs 61 votes. If the President is smart, he will send Hillary to the Hill to argue the case. No one knows this treaty better or argues on Capitol Hill better. It's her baby, and she knows it inside out - you can bet the farm on that.