[Congressional Record Volume 145, Number 43 (Thursday, March 18, 1999)]
[House]
[Page H1457]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                          DEFENDING OUR NATION

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from California (Mr. Royce) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. ROYCE. Mr. Speaker, today on this House floor we passed House 
Resolution 4 which states that the U.S. must deploy and not just 
develop a national missile defense system, and we must deploy now and 
not leisurely aim to deploy at some point in the future, and the reason 
for that is because our country is so vulnerable. The resolution that 
we debated here today hopefully will spur the development because, as 
we noted here today, we are now defenseless against a single missile 
coming into the United States. Defending our Nation against attack is 
so fundamental a responsibility of ours and the stakes that we are 
talking about are so high that I think it is important that we 
understand how our country with its great military has gotten into our 
predicament of being defenseless.
  The American people need to know. The answer is that since President 
Reagan introduced the idea of missile defense over 15 years ago, every 
reason in the world has been found to delay. For one, we have heard 
that the threat itself, we have heard the threat being discounted. In 
1995 the administration predicted that no ballistic missile threat 
would emerge for 15 years. This past August the administration again 
assured Congress that the intelligence community could provide the 
necessary warning of a rogue state's development and deployment of a 
ballistic missile threat to the United States. Then that same month, 
that same month North Korea test fired its Taepo Dong missile. The 
sophistication of this missile unfortunately caught the intelligence 
community by surprise. North Korea, impoverished, an unstable North 
Korea, a regime about which the director of Central Intelligence 
recently said that he could hardly overstate his concern about it and 
which in nearly all respects, according to him, has become more 
volatile and unpredictable, may soon be able to strike Alaska and 
Hawaii, not to mention our allies and U.S. troops in Korea.

                              {time}  1815

  Ominously, North Korea is continuing its work on missile development, 
and this is the very threat that was supposed to be 15 years away.
  Even before this rosy assessment, last July Iran tested a medium 
range ballistic missile. Iran is receiving aid from Russia.
  Not surprisingly the bipartisan Rumsfeld Commission recently 
concluded that the threat posed by nations seeking to acquire ballistic 
missiles and weapons of mass destruction, and I quote from the report, 
is broader, more mature and evolving more rapidly than has been 
reported in estimates and reports by the intelligence community, 
unquote.
  The fact is that we live in a world where even the most impoverished 
nations can develop ballistic missiles and warheads, especially with 
Russia's aid, and then there is an expanding and ever-more 
sophisticated Chinese missile force.
  This, in no way, is said to disparage our intelligence efforts. 
Instead, we just need to appreciate that these threats are difficult to 
detect and that we need to react. Pearl Harbor caught us by complete 
surprise. We have no excuse with today's missile threat.
  The second excuse that we have heard for delay is the ABM Treaty. 
Faced with the very real threats that we have heard about, I am at a 
complete loss as to why our country would let an outdated treaty keep 
us from developing a national missile defense system.
  Essentially, the administration has allowed Russia to veto our 
missile defense efforts. This is the same country, Russia, that is 
continuing to proliferate missiles by working with Iran.
  Fortunately, Secretary of Defense Cohen has suggested in January that 
we would not be wedded to the ABM Treaty. He said that this treaty 
would not preclude our deployment of a defensive system, but this is 
only a step toward the deployment we need.
  Others in the administration persist in calling the ABM Treaty the 
cornerstone of strategic stability. The ABM Treaty has an escape 
clause, and I believe we need to get beyond a treaty that keeps us from 
defending our territory in the face of a very real threat, a treaty, I 
might add, that the Soviets secretly violated. Renegotiating this 
treaty in a way that still precludes us from deploying the best missile 
defense system we can, allowing for a dumbed-down system, which is what 
the administration is suggesting, is simply not acceptable.
  The fact is that the Russians have nothing to fear from us. The 
United States doesn't start wars. To forgo defending our territory 
because we're afraid of what the Russians may say about our defensive 
actions is indefensible.
  Third, we hear that a national missile defense system is too costly. 
Yes, we have made an investment in missile defense since Ronald Reagan 
launched his initiative, though a small fraction (some $40 billion) of 
what American industry invest in research each year. But let's be 
honest here, defense is not free. And there have been some failures. 
But since when does success come without failure. Entering the 
twentieth century, the United States is the wealthiest, most 
technologically advanced country in the history of the world. There is 
no reason beyond the ideology of arms control, complacency or worse not 
to deploy a national missile defense now.

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