The Congressional Record is a unique source of public documentation. It started in 1873, documenting nearly all the major and minor policies being discussed and debated.
“START TREATY” mentioning the U.S. Dept. of Energy was published in the Senate section on pages S4841-S4843 on June 10, 2010.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
START TREATY
Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, let me speak for a moment with respect to the New START treaty. Strategic arms reductions are very important. We do not think about them very much. We deal with big issues and small issues in the Senate. Sometimes the small issues get much more attention than the big issues. But one is coming for sure to the floor of the Senate that is a very big issue; that is, the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty that was negotiated with the Russians. This is really a big issue and very important. I want to describe why and describe why I feel so strongly about it. I have spoken on the floor previously about this, but I want to do it again, describing a Time magazine article from March 11, 2002. The March 11, 2002, Time magazine article referred back to 2001, right after 9/11--It said this:
For a few harrowing weeks last fall, a group of U.S. officials believed that the worst nightmare of their lives--something even more horrific than 9/11--was about to come true. In October, an intelligence alert went out to a small number of government agencies, including the Energy Department's top-secret Nuclear Emergency Research Team, based in Nevada. The report said that terrorists were thought to have obtained a 10-kiloton nuclear weapon from the Russian arsenal and planned to smuggle it into New York City. ``It was brutal,'' a U.S. official told Time. It was also highly classified and closely guarded. Under the aegis of the Whitehouse's Counterterrorism Security Group . . . the suspected nuke was kept secret so as not to panic the people of New York. Senior FBI officials were not in the loop.
Some while later, Graham Allison, who is an expert on nuclear proliferation wrote about this incident in a book titled ``Nuclear Terrorism: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe.'' In his book, he points out:
One month to the day after the attacks of 9/11, a CIA agent codenamed Dragonfire reported that al-Qaida terrorists had stolen a ten kiloton Russian nuclear bomb from the Russian arsenal and may have smuggled it into New York City. Vice President Cheney moved to a secret mountain facility along with several hundred government employees. They were the core of an alternative government that would operate if Washington, DC were destroyed. President Bush dispatched Nuclear Emergency Support Teams to New York to search for the suspected nuclear weapon. To not cause panic, no one in New York City was informed of the threat, not even Mayor Giuliani. After a few weeks, the intelligence community determined that Dragonfire's report was a false alarm.
But as they did the postmortem on this, they understood that no one claimed it could have been impossible that a nuclear weapon could have been stolen from the Russian arsenal. No one claimed it would have been impossible--having stolen a Russian nuclear weapon--to smuggle it into New York City or a major American city. No one claimed it would have been impossible for a terrorist group--who wanted to kill several hundred thousand people with a nuclear weapon--to have been able to detonate that nuclear weapon.
Now, as I indicated, I describe that as it was described in Time magazine in 2002, and as it was written about in the book by Graham Allison, a former Clinton administration official, in his book titled,
``Nuclear Terrorism: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe.'' I describe that and the apoplectic seizure that existed in parts of the U.S. government when it was thought that 1 month after 9/11 al-Qaida had stolen a nuclear weapon and was prepared to detonate it in an American city. And on that day, we wouldn't have had 3,000-plus Americans murdered, we would have had hundreds of thousands of Americans losing their lives. Yet that was about one nuclear weapon--one, just one. The loss of one nuclear weapon.
Now, it turns out it Dragonfire's report wasn't true. The FBI agent codenamed Dragonfire heard it, passed it along, but it turned out it was not accurate. But that was just one nuclear weapon. There are about 25,000 nuclear weapons on this planet. This chart shows the Union of Concerned Scientists' estimate for 2010 estimate that Russia has 15,100 nuclear weapons, the United States has 9,400, China about 240, France 300, Britain 200, and Israel, India, Pakistan, and North Korea each have some. So 25,000 nuclear weapons, and I have described the terror of having just one end up in the hands of a terrorist group. If it ever happens--when it ever happens, God forbid--and hundreds of thousands of people are killed, life on this planet will be changed forever.
Now, Mr. President, we have a lot of nuclear weapons on this planet of ours, and we understand the consequences of their use. These pictures from August of 1945 show the consequences of the dropping of two nuclear weapons--one in Hiroshima and one in Nagasaki. Those pictures are, all these years later, still very hard to look at. That is the consequence of two nuclear weapons.
I was recently in Russia visiting a site that we fund in the Congress under the Nunn-Lugar program. I want to show some photographs about what we have been doing to try to back away from the nuclear threat, to try to see if we can reduce the number of nuclear weapons and the number of delivery vehicles to deliver those nuclear weapons.
This is a photograph of the dismantlement of a Blackjack bomber. This Blackjack bomber was a Russian bomber--a Soviet Union bomber prior to Russia--that would carry a nuclear weapon that would potentially be dropped on the United States, then an adversary during the Cold War. You can see that we dismantled that Russian Blackjack bomber, and this is a piece of a wing strut.
I ask unanimous consent to show a couple of samples.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
Mr. DORGAN. This is a piece of a wing strut of a Russian bomber. We didn't shoot it down. We cut the wing off. I happen to have a piece of it. This was happening because our colleagues, Senators Nunn and Lugar, put together a program by which we actually paid for the dismantlement of Russian bombers.
I also have copper wiring from the ground-up copper of the electrical wires of a Russian submarine. We didn't sink that submarine. We paid money to have that submarine destroyed, as part of our agreement with Russia to reduce that country's nuclear weapons.
This is a hinge from a silo in the Ukraine that previously housed a missile with warheads aimed at the United States. There is now planted on that ground sunflowers, not missiles, because we paid the cost of reducing delivery vehicles and reducing nuclear weapons in the stockpile of the former Soviet Union.
This is a program that works--a program that is unbelievably important. And as I and some others viewed these programs in Russia, we understood again the importance of what we have been doing under the Nunn-Lugar program: The Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Belarus are now nuclear weapons free. That didn't used to be the case. There are no nuclear weapons in those three countries. Albania is chemical weapons free. We have deactivated, under the Nunn-Lugar program, 7,500 former Soviet nuclear warheads. And the numbers of weapons of mass destruction that have been eliminated, and their delivery vehicles, are 32 ballistic missile submarines--gone, eliminated; 1,419 long-range nuclear missiles; 906 nuclear air-to-surface missiles, and 155 nuclear bombers. All of this has been done under a program that very few people know about--the Nunn-Lugar program. It works. It is a great program.
But, as I have indicated, there are still thousands and thousands and thousands--it is estimated this year 25,000--of nuclear weapons on this planet. So what do we do about that? This administration engaged with the Russians for a new treaty because the old START treaty had expired. This new treaty--the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty--was negotiated over a lengthy period of time. It required a lot of patience, a great deal of effort, but this administration stuck with it. They negotiated, completed, and signed this treaty.
The President of Russia and our President met in Prague, the Czech Republic, and signed this treaty. Now it needs to be ratified by the Senate.
I want to talk just a bit about the need to do that. I think all of us understand the urgency. There are some who feel strongly that perhaps we should begin the testing of nuclear weapons. I don't support that. I don't think we should. I think we need to be world leaders on these issues. We have stopped nuclear testing. Others have stopped nuclear testing as well, and we ought to continue that posture.
There are some who feel we should begin building new nuclear weapons. I don't believe we should. That doesn't make any sense. That is the wrong signal for us to send to the world.
There are some who believe that we need to make additional investments in the area of life extension programs and investments in making certain that the nuclear weapons that do exist in the stockpile are weapons in which we have the required confidence that those weapons are available, if needed. The President has asked that funding to do that be made available.
I chair the subcommittee that funds those programs, and I believe we will make available what the President requests. It is reasonable, it seems to me, to not only proceed--hopefully, on a bipartisan basis--to address something as important as the START treaty, but at the same time make sure that the programs that we have always had--the life extension programs and the programs that make sure that we have sufficient confidence in the weapons that exist--are funded appropriately. That is what the President has recommended in the budget that he has sent to the Congress.
It just seems to me there is so much to commend to this Congress the need to ratify an arms control treaty here. Mr. Linton Brooks, the NNSA Administrator under George W. Bush, said this, talking about the newly negotiated treaty and the President's budget request:
START, as I now understand it, is a good idea on its own merits, but I think for those who think it's only a good idea if you have a strong weapons program, I think this budget ought to take care of that. Coupled with the out-year projections, it takes care of the concerns about the complex and it does very good things about the stockpile and it should keep the labs healthy.
I don't quote Henry Kissinger very often, but Henry Kissinger says it pretty well when he says:
It should be noted I come from the hawkish side of this debate, so I'm not here advocating these measures in the abstract. I try to build them into my perception of the national interest. I recommend ratification of this treaty.
Henry Kissinger says he recommends ratification of this treaty. And, finally, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mullen:
I, the Vice Chairman, and the Joint Chiefs, as well as our combatant commanders around the world, stand solidly behind this new treaty, having had the opportunity to provide our counsel, to make our recommendations, and to help shape the final agreements.
It is not just us, but it is our children and their children that have a lot at stake with respect to reducing the number of nuclear weapons, reducing the delivery vehicles. It is the case that the amount of plutonium that will fit in a soda can, the amount of highly enriched uranium the size of a couple of grapefruits will produce a nuclear weapon that will have devastating consequences. So one of our obligations is to try to make sure nuclear material--the material with which those who wish to make nuclear weapons can make those weapons--
stays out of the hands of terrorists. That is one of our jobs. We are working very hard on that. We have programs that work on that constantly.
Second is to stop the proliferation of nuclear weapons. I described the countries that we know have nuclear weapons. Now we have to stop the proliferation and stop other countries from getting nuclear weapons. That is our responsibility. We have to be a world leader to do that.
As I said, if, God forbid, somehow in the future--5 years, 10 years, or 20 years from now--a nuclear weapon is exploded in a major city, and hundreds of thousands are killed, life on this planet is not going to be the same. That is why it seems to me that a very important start--
and this is just a start, not a finish--is to take this treaty that has been negotiated, bring it to the floor of the Senate, and have this discussion. I would expect there will be Republicans and Democrats who will come down on the same side of this issue--that it is a better world, a safer world when we meet our responsibility to lead on the issues of nonproliferation, when we meet our responsibilities to lead on the matter of reducing nuclear weapons and reducing delivery vehicles.
That is what this New START treaty does. It does it in a very responsible way. So my hope will be that in the coming 2 months or so that we will have a robust discussion of the START treaty and have the celebration of having had the debate and had the vote and then exclaiming to the world that this was a success--that this treaty was a success. Yes, a first step but a success.
Beyond this treaty, there will be other negotiations that will take us to other areas in reductions. I think, as a result, if we do what we should be expected to do, this can be a safer world.
Mr. President, I yield the floor, and I suggest the absence of a quorum.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
The assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent the order for the quorum call be rescinded.
The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Burris). Without objection, it is so ordered.
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