National Defense Authorization Bill

Floor Speech

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Mr. MARKEY. Mr. President, tomorrow President Obama will make a historic visit to Hiroshima, the site of the first atomic bombing. He will become the first sitting President of the United States to do so, and I commend him for this long overdue Presidential recognition.

Having traveled to Hiroshima in 1985 to witness the commemoration of the 40th anniversary of that atomic bombing, I know from personal experience that any visit there serves as a powerful reminder of America's responsibility to reduce the risk of nuclear war. That risk remains as real today as it was nearly 71 years ago when we dropped that bomb that killed 140,000 people in 1 day.

In the last few decades, important progress has been made to reduce the threat of nuclear war. The United States and Russia have reduced the size of their nuclear arsenals. The beginning of an additional change is going to happen in 2018 when both the United States and Russia will have no more than 1,550 deployed strategic warheads after implementation of the New START treaty.

But that progress has come at a cost. In exchange for the support of Senate Republicans for passage of the New START treaty in 2010, President Obama promised to fund major upgrades to America's nuclear arsenal.

Since then, the extent of these upgrades and their costs have swelled. Today it is estimated that President Obama's nuclear ``modernization'' plan will end up costing U.S. taxpayers nearly $1 trillion over the next 30 years.

However this modernization plan is little more than a plan to expand America's capabilities, its nuclear capabilities. It would create new nuclear weapons, including a dangerous nuclear air launch cruise missile that will cost tens of billions of dollars over the next two decades.

Nuclear cruise missiles are a particular concern because they are difficult to distinguish from nonnuclear cruise missiles. As a consequence, if the United States used a conventional cruise missile in a conflict with Russia or China, it could lead to devastating miscalculation on the other side and, as a result, to accidental nuclear war.

Worse still, the Defense Department has justified this new nuclear cruise missile by asserting that it is needed for purposes beyond deterrence. The Pentagon explains that the new nuclear cruise missile could be used to respond ``proportionately to a limited nuclear attack,'' meaning that this nuclear weapon becomes more usable in a standoff with Russia, China, or some other country.

When President Obama visited Prague in 2009, he pledged to reduce the role of nuclear weapons in our national security. If the President truly wants to make good on this promise, I think it is important for him to stop these nuclear expansion efforts. He should cancel the funding for the new nuclear cruise missile, which would make the prospect of fighting a nuclear war more imaginable.

In the meantime, Congress can and must act. Rather than plunging blindly ahead by spending money on this dangerous new weapon, we can call for a timeout while we evaluate its costs and its risks. That is why I have submitted an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act that would delay any spending on the nuclear cruise missile for 1 year so that we can have the full debate on this weapon; so that we can ensure that we understand the consequences of building this new weapon; so that we can understand how the Russians and the Chinese might respond to it; so that each Member of the Senate can understand that it, in fact, has nuclear war-fighting capabilities.

It is not just a defensive weapon; it has the ability to be used in a nuclear war-fighting scenario. How do I know this? It is because this Pentagon, this Department of Defense, says that it is usable and says that it could be used in a limited nuclear war. Do we really want to be authorizing in this Senate that kind of new weapon that makes fighting a nuclear war more imaginable?

I think Americans deserve an opportunity to consider whether tens of billions of dollars of their tax dollars should be spent on a redundant, destabilizing, new nuclear missile. They expect that we will ask the tough questions about the need for $1 trillion in new nuclear weapons spending, but they especially want us to ask questions about new weapons that the Pentagon is saying make it possible to contemplate a limited nuclear war. That is a debate which this body needs to have. That is a weapons system we should be discussing.

This new cruise missile with nuclear warheads is the tip of the new $1 trillion nuclear modernization program. We should debate that first. We can examine the rest of the modernization program, the new nuclear programs, but we should at least have that debate and that vote out here. We should give ourselves at least 1 year before we allow it to commence so that we can study it. Then next year we can have the vote on whether or not we want to commence. As yet, I don't think we have had the debate or have a full understanding of what the implications of this weapon are.

Plans to build more nuclear weapons would not only be expensive, but they could trigger a 21st century arms race with Russia and China, which are unlikely--very unlikely--to stand idly by as we expand our nuclear arsenal. The result would be a tragic return to the days of the Cold War, when both sides built up ever greater stockpiles of nuclear weapons. As we get closer and closer to the contemplation that both sides could actually consider fighting a nuclear war, our goal should be to push us further and further and further away from the concept that it is possible to fight a nuclear, limited war on this planet.

The National Defense Authorization Act also contains another misguided provision that would lay the groundwork for a spiraling nuclear weapons buildup. Currently, our policy, the U.S. policy, states that we will pursue a ``limited'' missile defense--limited. This approach is meant to protect our territory against missile attacks by countries such as Iran and North Korea without threatening Russia or China's nuclear deterrent.

As recognized by generations of responsible policymakers, constructing missile defenses aimed at Russia or China would be self- defeating and destabilizing. Dramatically expanding our missile defenses could cause Russia and China to fear that the United States seeks to protect itself from retaliation from Russia or China so that we can carry out a preventive nuclear attack on China or on Russia. That plays into the most militaristic people inside of those countries, who will then say that they too need to make additional investments and that cycle of offense and defense continues to escalate until you reach a point where we are back to where we all started--with those generals, with those arms contractors then dictating what our foreign policy is, what our defense policy is.

They were wrong in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, and they are wrong today. That is just the wrong way to go. We have to ensure that we are backing away, not increasing the likelihood that these weapons can be used. We don't want to be empowering those in our own country-- either at the Pentagon or the arms contractors--because they will have the same people in the Kremlin and their arms contractors who will be rubbing their hands and saying: Great. Let's build all of these new weapons, both offensive and defensive. They would love this. That is why we have to have the debate on the Senate floor.

This generation of Americans deserves to know what its government is planning in terms of nuclear war-fighting strategy. That is what a limited war is all about. That is what this new cruise missile with a nuclear bomb on it that is more accurate, more powerful, more likely to be used in a nuclear war is all about. That is why the Pentagon wants it; that is why the arms contractors want to make it. But it is just a return to the earlier era where every one of these new nuclear weapons systems that had blueprints and were on the table over at the Pentagon are over and the defense contractor has the green light to build it.

What happened every single time is the Soviet Union said: We are building the exact same counterpart system. Was that making the world more or less safe? Was that bringing us closer or further away from a nuclear war? Which was the correct direction for our country to be headed?

Well, thank God, we began to talk at Reykjavik--President Reagan and President Gorbachev. Thank God, we now have a New START Treaty. But as part of the New START Treaty, there was a Faustian deal, and that Faustian deal was that we are going to build a new generation of usable, war-fighting nuclear weapons in our own country. And that Faustian deal is one that would then be lived with by this next generation of Americans and citizens of this planet.

So we need to ensure we can have this debate. The fears that I think are going to be engendered into the minds of those in China and Russia would result in a new dangerous nuclear competition that would have our new defenses be responded to by their building new additional nuclear weapons and by putting them on high alert. You would have to be on high alert, if you were in Russia or China, if you thought we had a defensive system that could knock them down, and if our planning included attacking them.

We don't want either country to be on high alert for a nuclear war. We don't want that. That is where we were in the 1980s. That is where we were in the 1970s--both sides with their finger on the button. It is unnecessary, it is dangerous, it is a repetition of history, and it is something we should be debating out here. It just can't be something that is casually added without a full appreciation in our country for what the consequences are going to be long term.

So we have an incredible opportunity. It is timely. The President is visiting Hiroshima. It should weigh on the consciences of every one of us that we have a responsibility to make sure we are reducing and not increasing the likelihood of nuclear war occurring.

I have filed an amendment to strike the provision from the NDAA. I urge all of my colleagues to support it. I think that second amendment is also one that deserves a full debate on the Senate Floor. If we want other countries to reduce their nuclear arsenals and restrain their nuclear war plans, the United States must take the lead instead of wasting billions of dollars on dangerous new nuclear weapons that do nothing to keep our Nation safe.

President Obama should scale back his nuclear weapons buildup. Instead of provoking Russia and China with expanding missile defenses that will ultimately fail, we should work toward a new arms control agreement.

As President Obama said in Prague in 2009, let us honor our past by reaching for a better future. The lesson of the past and the lesson of Hiroshima is clear. Nuclear weapons must never be used again on this planet.

President Obama did an excellent job in reaching a nuclear arms control agreement with Iran. That was important, because if Iran was right now on its way to the development of a nuclear weapon, there is no question that Saudi Arabia and other countries in that region would also be pursuing a nuclear weapon. We would then have a world where people were not listening to each other, where people would be threatening each other with annihilation, with total destruction.

Here is where we are. We are either going to live together or we are going to die together. We are either going to know each other or we are going to exterminate each other. The final choice that we all have and the least we should be able to say--if that point in the future is reached and those missiles are starting to be launched that have nuclear warheads on board--is that we tried, that we really tried to avoid that day.

That is our challenge here on the Senate floor--to have this debate, to give ourselves the next year to have this question raised as to whether we want to engage in a Cold War-like escalation of new offensive and new defensive nuclear weapons to be constructed in our country, which for sure then would trigger the same response in Russia and China. By the way, for sure it is saying to Pakistan, India, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and to any other country that harbors its own secret military desire to have these weapons that they should not listen to the United States because we are preaching nuclear temperance from a bar stool. We are not, in fact, abiding by what we say that the rest of the world should do.

So we should be debating that right now. We should have this challenge presented to us and to have the words be spoken as to what the goals are for these weapons. If the Defense Department says to us this year that this leads to a capacity to use nuclear weapons in a limited nuclear war--and they were saying that to us in the last 6 months--do we really want to have these weapons then constructed in our country? Is that really what we want to have as our legacy?

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