[Congressional Record Volume 145, Number 114 (Thursday, August 5, 1999)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Page E1775]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




               THE NUCLEAR WEAPONS DE-ALERTING RESOLUTION

                                 ______
                                 

                         HON. EDWARD J. MARKEY

                            of massachusetts

                    in the house of representatives

                        Thursday, August 5, 1999

  Mr. MARKEY. Mr. Speaker, 54 years ago tomorrow a single bomb in a 
single city changed our world. The atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima 
leveled the city, engulfed the rubble in a fireball, and killed 100,000 
people. Three days later another 70,000 people died at Nagasaki, and 
people are still dying today from leukemia and other remnants of those 
explosions.
  The victims of Hiroshima cast shadows from the explosion's blinding 
light that were permanently etched not only in the remaining buildings 
but also in our souls. Since August 6th, 1945 we have lived in fear 
that such nuclear destruction would happen again, perhaps in the United 
States. Today, the accidental launch of a single missile with multiple 
warheads could kill 600,000 people in Boston, or 3,000,000 people in 
New York, or 700,000 people in San Francisco or right here in 
Washington, DC. If that missile sparked a nuclear exchange, the result 
would be worldwide devastation.
  For 40 years of Cold War we played a game of nuclear chicken with the 
Soviet Union, racing to make ever more nuclear bombs, praying that the 
other side would turn aside. During the Cuban missile crisis and many 
other times we came perilously close to going over the cliff. Then in 
1991 the Cold War and the Soviet Union ended. Yet today we not only 
keep hundreds of nuclear missiles with nowhere to point them, we keep 
many of them ready to fire at a moment's notice.
  This threat from this ''launch-on-warning`` policy is real. On 
January 25, 1995, when Russia radar detected a launch off the coast of 
Norway, Boris Yeltsin was notified and the ''nuclear briefcase`` 
activated. It took eight minutes--just a few minutes before the 
deadline to respond to the apparent attack--before the Russian military 
determined there was no threat from what turned out to be a U.S. 
scientific rocket. The U.S. is not immune: on November 9, 1979 displays 
at four U.S. command centers all showed an incoming full-scale Soviet 
missile attack. After Air Force planes were launched it was discovered 
that the signals were from a simulation tape.
  And the danger of an accidental nuclear war is growing. The Russian 
command and control system is decaying. Power has repeatedly been shut 
off in Russian nuclear weapons facilities because they couldn't afford 
to pay their electricity bills. Communications at their nuclear weapons 
centers have been disrupted because thieves stole the cables for their 
copper. And at New Year's the ''Y2K`` bug in computers that are not 
programmed to recognize the year 2000 could cause monitoring screens to 
go blank or even cause false signals.
  There is no reason to run the terrible risk of an accidental nuclear 
war. It is hard today to imagine a ''bolt out of the blue`` sudden 
nuclear attack. And even if the U.S. was devastated by an attack, the 
thousands of nuclear warheads we have on submarines would survive 
unscathed. Keeping weapons on high alert is an intemperate response to 
an implausible event.
  Mr. Speaker, it is time to take a large step away from the brink of 
nuclear war, to take our nuclear weapons off of hair-trigger alert. 
Today I an introducing a resolution that expresses the sense of 
Congress that we should do four things:
  We should immediately remove some nuclear weapons from high alert.
  We should study methods to further slow the firing of all nuclear 
weapons.
  We should use these unilateral measures to jump-start an eventual 
agreement with Russia and other nuclear powers to take all weapons off 
of alert.
  And we should quickly establish a joint U.S.-Russian early warning 
center before the Year 2000 turnover.
  These are not new or radical ideas. President George Bush in 1991 
ordered an immediate standdown of nuclear bombers and took many 
missiles off of alert. President Gorbachev reciprocated a week later by 
deactivating bombers, submarines, and land-based missiles. Leading 
security experts including former Senator Sam Nunn, former Strategic 
Air Command chief Gen. Lee Butler, and a National Academy of Sciences 
panel have endorsed further measures to take weapons off of high alert. 
Two-third of Americans in a 1998 poll support taking all nuclear forces 
off alert, and this week I received a petition signed by 270 of my 
constituents from Lexington, MA calling on the President to de-alert 
nuclear missiles.
  I urge my colleagues to join together to cosponsor this resolution. 
The best way we can commemorate the anniversary of the nuclear 
explosion at Hiroshima is to make sure we will never blunder into an 
accidental nuclear holocaust.

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