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SPEAKER: President has just returned from Vienna, where he signed a Strategic Arms Limitation Agreement, so-called SALT II, with President Brezhnev of the Soviet Union.

That agreement took seven years to negotiate. It involved the best minds in the military field, the best minds in the intelligence community, the best advice from the Congress, the best advice from the Western leaders of Western Europe and elsewhere, to shape a treaty which if ratified, we believe will both serve this nation's interest and restrain the otherwise runaway strategic arms race that would occur.

This debate that's going to follow over the ratification of this treaty, I believe is going to be one of the most controversial and complex wide scale debate that this nation has had in a long time. The founders of our constitution were very, very suspicious of bargains with foreign powers. And for that reason, they wrote into the constitution that treaties must be approved by the Senate by 2/3 of its membership, otherwise the treaty was invalid.

What they wanted to insist on, was that there would be no agreements with another country, in which the majority or the vast majority of Americans did not support. So in a matter of this kind, just as with the Panama Treaty, we will only ratify that treaty after there's been a national debate in which all Americans participate, and in which most Americans tell their senators and congressmen that they wish that treaty to be ratified.

I hope that you will engage in that debate. And I hope we can persuade you that this treaty is absolutely essential to our country and to our future.

The state of Minnesota has been kind to me. I've served in office now nearly 20 years, with your support. And if you ask me, after 20 years of public life what worries me most above all? About the life our kids and their children will live. I have no trouble telling you what it is, and that is the fear of a nuclear holocaust.

Every year makes that risk a greater one. Every time strategic weapons deployments increase. Every time a new weapon system is introduced. Every time another nation starts accumulating nuclear weapons grade material. Every time a new nation joins the so-called threshold club where they're close to having their own bomb.

The possibilities increase that the world will go to the brink and then be unable to restrain itself from the final madness that could destroy us all.

In this debate, there will be several questions I asked, some good and some bad. One we will hear repeatedly is this one-- American power has declined in the world and we're now number two. Why should we sign a treaty codifying our inferiority?

But to ask that question is to raise a profoundly inaccurate premise-- economically, politically, socially, militarily, and morally. The United States is the strongest nation on Earth and will remain so. Our defenses are answer prayers, and our will to resist is firm.

Let me give you a sense of the massive power that we possess. I'm not bragging. Each warhead on one of our Poseidon missiles is twice as powerful as the bombs dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima. One Poseidon submarine carries more than 140 of these weapons.

Each Poseidon can deliver more destructive force, each one, than all the bombs dropped in World War II. We have 31 of them we're building some more, bigger ones. And they carry only a portion of our 20,000 nuclear weapons.

Our arsenal is such today that we can drop 34 warheads, each of which is more powerful than the one dropped on Nagasaki. On each of the Russian Cities of 100,000 population or more. 34 on them, and one is more than enough. They've done the same thing.

In the absence of an agreement, what happens is, that neither nation will tolerate any suggestion that they're in an inferior position. We won't tolerate. It's intolerable for a major power to be threatened in that way and we won't permit it.

So we continue to build. We continue to improve accuracy. We MIRV our missiles. We MX them. We build Trident IIs. We build new theater, nuclear force levels. We have F-111s. We develop constantly newer, longer range, more powerful, more accurate everything to defend our country, and the country must be defended. But they do the same thing.

I remember in the '60s when we had the debate about MIRVing, where you put a lot of warheads on one missile. And someone said, if we MIRV, won't they? And some said, I doubt it. I don't think they got the money. I don't think they're smart enough.

Well, they've MIRVed now. And they've got the big SS-18s, massive missiles, carry 20 or 30 warheads. We've got them agree to carry only 10 each. That's enough to destroy us.

We're going to build, a new missile, an MX, that will carry 10 warheads each, highly accurate. And 10 years later, our whole land-based intercontinental missile system, one leg of the so-called Triad, is now threatened by the fact that the Russians followed suit and built more of their missiles.

Now we can continue this, constantly increasing defense budgets in the strategic area, taking money away where we need say from NATO and so on for defense purposes. Constantly putting our best manpower for evermore and more eerie strategic nuclear weapons, which will have to do in the absence of agreement.

Or we can sit down with the Soviet Union and say, gentlemen, we disagree on practically everything. Your system is different than ours. You don't have a free society. We don't like the way you run your country. But can't we just say that a continuation of an ever rising and more dangerous and escalating arms race is insanity and stop it. Can't we do that?

And that's what we try to do in SALT II. It's not a perfect agreement. But it serves our national interest by causing the Russians to reduce the level of their launchers by 250. That's enough to destroy America. They're reducing their levels by 250.

They are agreeing not to camouflage or encrypt signals necessary for our intelligence, appraisal of their defense structure which is crucial to our security. And we've agreed not to deploy, but one more missile system during the period of the treaty.

And the arrangement is made in a way that we can do those things we need to restore the survivability of the land-based intercontinental missile. One of the problems with this debate is it gets fiendishly complex, but the fundamental principles are there.

And if we don't ratify this treaty, not only will that arms race go on, we estimate cost of $30 billion more than it would otherwise. But this nation will lose something else that's very precious. It's been my privilege to represent this country around a good deal of the world.

And I'm proud to represent this nation. We're a free society, we're just society, we've got the right values, we believe in human rights, we have no aggressive designs on anyone, and the resources and strength of this country are being spent to stabilize the world, to bring peace and to bring justice to peoples around the world. That's a pretty good nation to represent.

But our moral authority is everything. We need a strong defense, and we've got it. We need a strong economy, and we've got it. We need a just and a free society, and we've got it. But we also have to act in a way that encourages and strengthens people around the world, to be attracted to America and to be attracted to its leadership.

Nations no longer push very well. They tend to do what they want to do, just as we do. And they will follow only if they think their leaders are worthy of the leadership role they're seeking to pursue. And nothing will destroy our capacity to lead more, to restrain these nations from resorting to their own nuclear weaponry, and from armaments buildups that bankrupt them.

Nothing will destroy our leadership more than to fail to ratify this treaty. If the two leading holders of nuclear weaponry in the world lack the willpower and the capacity to restrain themselves, how can they then turn and ask others to show restraint and common sense? I don't believe it can work.

And for all of these reasons, our security to prevent that Holocaust, to prevent the waste of money, and to strengthen and expand the capacity of our beloved nation to work for peace and stability, I hope you will agree with us that treaty should be ratified. Thank you very much.

[APPLAUSE]