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“THE ROAD NOT TAKEN” mentioning the U.S. Dept of State was published in the House of Representatives section on pages H4327-H4328 on June 9, 2005.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
THE ROAD NOT TAKEN
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the gentleman from California (Mr. Schiff) is recognized for 5 minutes.
Mr. SCHIFF. Mr. Speaker, last month dozens of world leaders, including President Bush, gathered in Moscow to celebrate the 60th anniversary of V-E day. It was fitting and proper for the President and other heads of state to pay homage to the millions who died defeating Nazism and fascism and to commemorate the end of the Second World War.
The year 1945 also marked the beginning of the nuclear age, and even those who had become inured to the destruction that years of fighting had wrought were stunned by the devastation caused by the atomic bombs dropped on Japan. Nuclear weapons have been the dominant feature of the international security landscape ever since, and preventing their proliferation has been a central goal of American Presidents from Harry Truman to George W. Bush.
That is why I cannot understand the failure of the administration to take a leading role at the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty review conference that was held at the United Nations from May 2-27. There is near unanimity among policymakers and our Nation's political leadership that nuclear terrorism and the proliferation of nuclear weapons are the greatest threats to our national security. The President has said so himself. But the United States did not dispatch any senior officials to New York and downplayed the importance of the conference. This was shortsighted and dangerous, and the failure to achieve any concrete results at the NPT conference was a major national security setback for the United States as well as for the rest of the world.
The Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which took effect in 1970, has for the most part been successful in limiting the spread of nuclear weapons beyond the original five members of the nuclear club, the Soviet Union, Britain, France, China and the United States. In 1960, John Kennedy wrote that he expected 20 nations would have nuclear weapons by the end of the 1960s. He considered this the gravest threat to world peace and set in motion the events and discussions that culminated in the NPT.
During the 35 years that the treaty has been in effect, only three nations are known to have developed nuclear weapons, India, Pakistan and Israel, and they are not parties to the NPT. North Korea is believed to have a handful of nuclear weapons, and Iran is engaged in a diplomatic game of chicken with the West in its pursuit of nuclear weapons.
Mr. Speaker, after three and a half decades, the NPT is showing its age, and the review conference was held at a critical time for the international community's efforts to halt the spread of nuclear weapons. In December of last year, a panel of experts convened by the U.N. issued a stark warning that we are approaching the point at which the erosion of the nonproliferation regime could become irreversible and result in a cascade of proliferation. One of the members of that panel was Brent Scowcroft, who served as national security adviser to President George H.W. Bush.
The twin nuclear crises with North Korea and Iran have exposed flaws in the NPT's ``grand bargain,'' which was first articulated in President Eisenhower's ``Atoms for Peace'' proposal. In exchange for the commitment to forgo the acquisition of nuclear weapons and to agree to international safeguards and inspections, the NPT guarantees non-
nuclear weapon states who are parties to the treaty the peaceful development and use of nuclear energy. The problem with this bargain is that it allows nations like Iran or North Korea access to fissile material and technological know-how that is the necessary precursor for a nuclear weapons program. When the state feels confident it is ready to proceed with a weapons program, it simply opts out of the NPT.
Had it chosen to do to so, the administration could have used the review conference in New York to make it more difficult for states to access nuclear material and technology under the NPT and then walk away from the treaty by providing tough penalties for those who would try.
One proposal by a group of experts at Princeton and Stanford would bar parties withdrawing from the NPT to use fissile materials or production facilities acquired while they were parties to the treaty to make nuclear weapons. The German government also proposed preventing a party from withdrawing from the treaty if that state was in violation of that treaty.
But reinvigorating the NPT requires more than cracking down on Iran and North Korea. It also demands leadership from the declared nuclear weapons states which as part of the NPT committed themselves to reduce their own stockpiles significantly in exchange for non-nuclear states renouncing nuclear ambitions. Unfortunately, the five nuclear weapons states have not done enough, and General Scowcroft and his colleagues chided them in their report for their lackluster efforts.
Matters have not been helped by a State Department brochure handed out at the conference which listed arms control breakthroughs since the 1980s and touted reductions in the U.S. arsenal. But the time line made no mention of the 1996 Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, a pact negotiated by the Clinton administration and ratified by 121 nations but rejected by this President. The brochure also ignored the 2000 NPT review conference at which the U.S. and other nuclear weapons states committed to practical steps to achieve nuclear safety, including entering into the test ban treaty and negotiation of a fissile material cutoff treaty to ban manufacture and production of additional bomb material.
Mr. Speaker, in the aftermath of World War II, the United States constructed a diverse set of international institutions to guarantee peace and better ensure a future for America and the rest of the world. By going to Moscow, President Bush honored the sacrifice of millions of Americans and other allied personnel to secure our present. But it was the road not taken, the one to New York, that would have helped to secure the future.
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