[Congressional Record Volume 143, Number 96 (Wednesday, July 9, 1997)]
[Senate]
[Pages S7091-S7092]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
NATIONAL DEFENSE AUTHORIZATION ACT FOR FISCAL YEAR 1998
The Senate continued with the consideration of the bill.
Mr. REID addressed the Chair.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Nevada.
Mr. REID. Would the Chair inform the Senator from Nevada what the
parliamentary status on the floor is at this time?
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The pending business is the defense bill, S.
936, and the pending question is on Dodd amendment No. 763.
Mr. REID. I ask unanimous consent that the Dodd amendment be set
aside for purposes of my offering an amendment.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
Amendment No. 772
(Purpose: to authorize the Secretary of Defense to make available
$2,000,000 for the development and deployment of counter-landmine
technologies)
Mr. REID. Mr. President, I ask the clerk to call up amendment No.
772.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will report.
The assistant legislative clerk read as follows:
The Senator from Nevada [Mr. Reid] proposes an amendment
numbered 772.
Mr. REID. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that further reading
of the amendment be dispensed with.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there objection? Without objection, it is
so ordered.
The amendment is as follows:
On page 30, between lines 19 and 20, insert the following:
( ) Availability of Funds for Counter-Landmine
Technologies.--Of the amounts available in section 201(4) for
demining activity, the Secretary of Defense may utilize
$2,000,000 for the following activities:
(1) The development of technologies for detecting,
locating, and removing abandoned landmines.
(2) The operation of a test and evaluation facility at the
Nevada Test Site, Nevada, for the testing of the performance
of such technologies.
Mr. BUMPERS. Will the Senator yield for a question?
Mr. REID. Yes.
Mr. BUMPERS. Could the Senator say about how long he anticipates
speaking on his amendment?
Mr. REID. About 10 to 12 minutes.
Mr. BUMPERS. I thank the Senator.
Mr. REID. Several years ago, I and a number of my colleagues took a
trip. One of the places we went to was Angola. It was a beautiful
country. It is a country that has been devastated by war. We did not
see the wild animals roaming the plains as they did at one time. We did
not see the oil fields pumping as well as they should have. What we did
see were hundreds of people who had been injured by landmines. Their
legs were gone, their arms were gone. We, of course, did not see the
people who were killed on a daily basis in Angola from landmines.
If Angola were the only place in the world that had been devastated
by landmines, perhaps we should not take the time of this body by
looking at it. But Angola is important, and where the antipersonnel
landmines have ravaged the countryside, we in this body must be
concerned.
I rise today, having introduced an amendment to accelerate the
removal of millions of abandoned antipersonnel landmines. This is just
one more important step in the long and difficult job of stopping
forever the killing and maiming of innocent men, women and children, by
these useless relics of warfare and terrorism.
Mr. President, I am appreciative of the work that has been done by
Senator Pat Leahy on bringing to our attention the devastating problem
of abandoned landmines. He has fought long and hard and spoken out on
this issue, and I appreciate that. He has a long-time commitment to
terminating this threat to innocent noncombatants. The whole world, and
especially the developing world, owes Senator Leahy thanks for his
leadership in forever banning these instruments of war.
These landmines have limited military utility, with primary value
found in the terror and timidity they incite in the enemy infantry.
Modern military battles, though, are not won by the infantry. Victory
may very well be sealed by the infantry, but the battle is won by the
air, by the artillery and by the armored mechanized forces.
My amendment responds to a terribly tragic situation in which an
unnecessary weapon remains long after battle, and wreaks its terror and
its death and destruction on innocent civilians.
Mr. President, I am going to recite some statistics that are
unbelievable, for lack of a better description.
It is estimated that there are more than 100 million of these
landmines buried and abandoned in 64 different countries. That is one
landmine for every 50 people on this Earth. I have talked about Angola.
The Angolan war lasted for much more than a decade. The country of
Angola has 10 million people in it, but buried in the dirt in Angola
are more than 20 million landmines, 2 landmines for every person in
Angola.
They are buried, they are unexploded, they are unrecovered, and they
are waiting for women and children, principally, to step on them. Why
women and children? Because the women are often the ones to work the
fields and the children are the ones that often unknowingly stray into
the abandoned minefields.
In Angola, 120 people die every month from landmines. Four people a
day in Angola are killed. This does not take into consideration the
scores, the hundreds of people that I saw in Angola missing legs and
arms.
Every month in Cambodia, 300 Cambodians are casualties--10 casualties
each and every day.
Afghanistan, Mozambique, Croatia, Bosnia, Vietnam--in all these
countries, and more, the toll mounts.
We were in Bosnia a year or so ago. While we were there a call came
over the commander's radio, a call reporting a landmine casualty. It
was a Russian who had had a leg blown off by a landmine. These are
occurrences that happen all the time.
In the world, we have about 70 casualties a day, 500 each week,
30,000 a year. These casualties are unnecessary, and without action on
our part--we cannot leave it to anyone else--they
[[Page S7092]]
are going to continue to be unavoidable.
Most of those killed and injured have not done anything but try to
farm, walk to school, walk to the market, walk to a hospital, take a
shortcut home. Some of the children are just playing in the fields
around their homes. But, on this day, playing around their homes, their
farms or their schools, a landmine goes off, killing or maiming the
child.
Think of it, Mr. President, every day not knowing whether any
particular step you take is going to wind up in death or losing a limb
or limbs. People should not have to live that way.
We, as the most powerful Nation in the world, have an obligation, I
believe, with the great scientific minds we have in this country, to
figure out a way to better detect those mines and to remove them.
Estimates from a year ago projected that about 100,000 landmines were
being removed each year while about 2.5 million mines were being placed
in the Earth each year. So what does this mean? Humanity, zero;
landmines, 2.4 million every year. That is no contest.
Like most problems, the abandoned landmine problem is rooted in
economics. How much does it cost to remove a landmine? Lots of money,
up to $1,000 a landmine. How much does it cost to place a landmine in
the ground? A couple bucks. That is all.
The recovery costs go up dramatically when the mine field maps are
lost or purposely destroyed or become so old as to engender no
confidence in the minds of the recovery crews.
If we do not outlaw antipersonnel landmines, the economics guarantees
proliferation of this barbaric practice. The economics of mine warfare
guarantee more death and maiming and destruction unless these devices
are forever outlawed and stockpiles around the world are quickly
destroyed.
But the world community might not outlaw antipersonnel landmines
because they are so cheap and easy to use. I say that antipersonnel
landmines have no place in a civilized world. We must stop the
distribution of these implements of terror that spread permanent
disability, disfigurement, and death wherever they have been used.
There is pending in the Senate a bill to permanently ban the use of
antipersonnel landmines. I support that legislation, as do 58 other
Senators. This is the legislation that has been led by Senator Leahy.
But even if the Senate supports this ban, others in the world
community may not. The best and most effective way of banning landmines
is to make them useless by making their discovery cheap and easy and by
developing faster and cheaper ways of clearing landmines. This would be
both a humanitarian advance and a lifesaving action for our troops on
combat missions.
To do this successfully we must better develop capabilities to locate
buried landmines, and then we need to develop new and more effective
ways to clear them.
A few months ago, Mr. President, I made a tour of the lab at
Livermore in California, one of our national laboratories. I said to
them, how much money are we spending to find a way to remove these
landmines? They said about $100,000 a year.
We can do better than that.
The magnitude of this task is significant. If one man could locate
and recover one landmine every hour, that would be eight devices per 8-
hour day per man in the field. Today's technology, of course, does not
allow us to do it anywhere near as quickly as that. But even at that
rate, which we cannot achieve today, it would take 1,000 men working 7
days a week, 24 hours a day, 34 years to remove the landmines that are
now buried. But remember, we are putting in about 2.4 million extra
ones each year.
There are a lot of ideas out there of what we can do. We need to
focus on developing and deploying landmine remediation systems while
continuing the research that promises better capability in the future.
An area of the Nevada test site has been equipped and used by our
national laboratories for testing new ways of landmine detection and
location. For example, at the Nevada test site, which was used for
underground nuclear explosions and aboveground nuclear explosions, we
can test these in many different ways. Systems were tested that
permitted remote locations of buried landmines under favorable
conditions. But much improvement is needed because conditions are
almost never favorable.
We will shortly begin testing a new concept that promises a better
performance, and has the added value of detecting nonmetallic
landmines, because the people who develop these weapons of destruction
have gone a step further. They are no longer metal, they are plastic.
This new concept allows detection and discrimination of buried objects
at much greater depths. But we need to do something to develop the
technique.
As progress is made in landmine detection and location, we need to
develop and test better ways of landmine recovery and destruction. We
can do that. That is what this amendment is all about. There is plenty
of talent, scientifically, to do it. We just need the support for
infrastructure, personnel, equipment, and field work to do something
about it.
I say, again, antipersonnel landmines have no place in the future of
civilized nations. We need to get on with developing better capability
to remove these devices that are already deployed. Cheaper and faster
landmine clearing will protect both innocent civilians and our combat
troops and it will remove much of the incentive to spread more of these
terrible instruments of terror, injury, death, and destruction.
The amendment I have submitted today will permit our national
laboratories to use their superb talents for accelerated development of
landmine detection and clearing technologies. The report language for
the National Defense Authorization Act includes direction to the
Department of Defense to establish more effective collaboration with
the weapons laboratories of the Department of Energy.
This amendment is consistent with that direction. It will apply an
existing national resource to this important mission and it will
facilitate the development and testing of a new technology that
promises mine detection performance well beyond that of any existing
capability. This amendment will make antipersonnel landmines useless by
cheap and easy detection, localization, and removal.
Mr. President, I urge my colleagues to support this amendment.
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. BUMPERS. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order
for the quorum call be rescinded.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
Mr. BUMPERS. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent I be permitted to
proceed for 5 minutes as in morning business.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
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