[Congressional Record Volume 145, Number 164 (Thursday, November 18, 1999)]
[Senate]
[Pages S14763-S14765]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




             A PRODUCTIVE SESSION AND ISSUES FACING AMERICA

  Mr. INHOFE. Mr. President, while presiding and listening to some of 
my distinguished colleagues talking about the lack of productivity of 
this session of the legislature, there are a few things that were very 
productive and that we can be very proud of when we go home and say we 
were able to get certain things done.
  Before doing that, though, and to ensure I get one point out before 
using up the time that is allotted, the distinguished Senator from 
Illinois named a number of issues that he thought were somewhat 
disgraceful--for example, the fact that we do not have more gun control 
legislation.
  Maybe because of my roots back in Oklahoma, I find it very difficult 
to understand this mentality, that somehow guns are the culprit as 
opposed to the people, and somehow that honest, law-abiding Americans 
should have to be disarmed, should have to give up their guns, while 
the criminal element would not be giving up their guns.
  Time and time again, every survey that has been done, every study 
that has taken place, has come to the conclusion that the problems that 
we have are of a criminal element. There are people out there who are 
not getting adequately punished, and they will continue to have 
firearms.
  I will just make one statement. It seems incredibly naive to me 
anyone could believe that if we pass a law that makes it illegal for 
all citizens to own guns, somehow the criminal element, who by their 
very definition and nature, are criminals, will comply with the law.
  Also, it seems very frustrating to me that we have a President of the 
United States who wants to have all kinds of legislation to take away 
guns from law-abiding citizens and at the same time turns 16 terrorists 
loose on the streets of America; that we have a President of the United 
States who will make speeches--as this President made some 133 times, 
including in two State of the Union Messages--that now, for the first 
time in contemporary history, the first time since the dawn of the 
nuclear age, there is not one--I repeat, not one--missile aimed at 
American children tonight. When he made that statement, he knew full 
well that in at least one country, China, there were a minimum of at 
least 13 American cities that were targeted at that very moment. So we 
are living in a very dangerous world.

  I listened to the concerns that we have on the nuclear test ban 
treaty. As chairman of the Readiness Subcommittee of the Senate Armed 
Services Committee, I would like to kind of lead into that to at least 
explain to thinking people that we did the right thing by not 
unilaterally disarming with the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which is 
not verifiable.
  First of all, I can say--and I do not think anyone can challenge this 
statement--we are now in the most threatened position that we have been 
in, in the history of America. By that, I mean for things that have 
happened in the last 7 years in three broad categories.
  First of all, we have a President of the United States who, through 
his veto messages, starting in 1993 in vetoing the defense 
authorization bills, and then succeeding bills since that

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time, has done so, so that we would have to cut down the size of our 
military, so that we now have ended up having a force strength of one-
half of what we had in 1991 and 1992 during the Persian Gulf war.
  It is not a matter of the President vetoing defense authorization 
bills and taking money out of our defense system to put into his 
favorite domestic social programs, but at the same time he has deployed 
our troops to places all over the Earth where we have no national 
security interests. So now we have troops in Bosnia.
  I remember in December of 1995, when we were on the floor trying to 
pass a resolution of disapproval, to stop the President from sending 
our rare military assets to places such as Bosnia. We lost it by three 
votes. The President said: Let me do this. If we defeat this 
resolution, and if we get to send troops into Bosnia, I promise they 
will be home for Christmas 1996. Here we are. We are getting close to 
Christmas 1999 and the troops are still not home. There is no end in 
sight.
  We have the same thing in Kosovo. We have had serious problems. I 
have gone over to Kosovo, I am sure, more than any other Member has, 
only to find out this is a war that has been going on for 600 years, a 
war where the two sides alternate in who is the good guy and who is the 
bad guy. Ethnic cleansing has taken place historically for 600 years on 
both sides; both on the Serbian side and the Albanian side.
  So it was a horrible awakening I had when I was over there, right 
after we went in there with cruise missiles, where we had refugees in 
different places such as Tirana, Albania. I can remember walking 
through the refugee camp. The people were well cared for. They were 
doing quite well. But then they looked at me and said: When are you and 
America going to do something about our problem?
  I said: What is your problem?
  They said: Well, we're refugees.
  I said: Why should we in the United States be as concerned about that 
as other countries?
  They said: Because it is because of you that we are refugees. It is 
because the ethnic cleansing was not accelerated until the time that 
the bombs started being dropped on that town.
  So we now have a weakened defense system because we have starved it 
into a degree of weakness. Yet we are living in a time when virtually 
every country has weapons of mass destruction.
  And now we find out that in conventional warfare we are not superior 
anymore. Wake up America. We are not superior anymore. We found out the 
other day that two of our Army divisions are ranked as C-4, which means 
they are not capable of combat. And what are these divisions? These 
divisions are the 10th Army Mountain Division in Bosnia and the 1st 
Infantry Division in Kosovo.
  It is not the fault of our troops. They are put in places and they no 
longer have combat training, so they are not capable of combat without 
coming out of there and training for at least 6 months.
  So if we are down to 10 Army divisions because of this President, and 
2 of them are rendered incapable of combat, that is 8 Army divisions. 
We had 19 during the Persian Gulf war. So that is what has happened to 
our military.
  Just the other day I was very proud of Gen. John Jumper, who had the 
courage to stand up and say publicly that we are no longer superior in 
air-to-air and air-to-ground combat. Our strategic fighters are not 
superior to those others on the market. He stated the SU-35, as made by 
the Russians, is on the market right now, the open market. It is for 
sale. Anyone can buy it--Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya, anybody else--and it 
is better than anything we have, including the F-15 and the F-16.
  We have to face up to this. It is a threat from the conventional side 
as well as from missiles.
  I will make one comment about the missiles. Again, we hang this on 
President Clinton. In that same veto message in 1993, President Clinton 
said: I'm vetoing this bill. And I'm vetoing it because it has money in 
it for a national missile defense system, which we do not need because 
there is no threat out there. Yet we knew from our intelligence that 
the threat would be there and imminent by fiscal year 1998. And sure 
enough, it was.
  So here we are with the combination of all these countries out there 
that have every kind of weapon of mass destruction: Biological, 
chemical, or nuclear. Yet we have countries such as China and Russia 
and now North Korea that have the capability of delivering those 
warheads to anywhere in America right now, when we are in Washington, 
DC. They could fire one from North Korea that would take 35 minutes to 
get here. There is not one thing in our arsenal to knock it down 
because this President vetoed our national missile defense effort.

  Now the American people have awakened to this, and we have enough 
Democrats who are supporting Republicans to rebuild our system and to 
try to get a national missile defense system deployed. Unfortunately, 
it couldn't happen for another 2 years, maybe 2\1/2\ to 3 years.
  That gets around to the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty about which my 
distinguished colleague from Illinois was talking. I think probably the 
best thing that could have happened to us for our national security was 
to defeat that. If we don't have a national missile defense system, 
then what do we have to deter other countries from launching missiles 
at the United States?
  What we have is a nuclear stockpile. We have nine weapons in the 
nuclear stockpile. Because of the President's moratorium, they haven't 
been tested for 7 years. We don't know whether or not they work. I 
suggest it might be better not even to have nuclear weapons than to 
have weapons but not know whether they work. That is exactly what we 
have right now. If we had passed the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, 
there would be no verification, there would be no way in the world we 
would have known whether or not our stockpile was working because they 
hadn't been tested.
  I can remember quote after quote after quote by the people who were 
so much involved in this from our energy labs. They all said--I had the 
quotes; I don't have them in front of me right now--that if we can't 
test these nuclear weapons, there is no way we can determine whether or 
not they work. It is a very unsafe thing for America. These were the 
directors of the labs responsible for this nuclear arsenal.
  So of the nine weapons we have, which I have listed here, we only 
have one we have adequately tested enough to know whether or not it 
would work. That is the W-84 warhead that we know would work.
  This would have been a real disaster for America. People kept saying 
President Eisenhower was for a comprehensive test ban treaty, that 
President Bush was, that President Reagan was. That isn't true at all. 
This flawed treaty was a zero-yield treaty. We would only have had the 
word of our adversaries that they would not test their nuclear 
arsenals.
  We keep our word in America; we don't test our arsenal. But we don't 
have any idea whether or not they are going to test theirs. In fact, 
during the course of the debate, both China and Russia said they would 
not comply with the zero yield. There is no way in the world we can 
detect that, that we would know what our adversaries were doing. That 
would, for all practical purposes, be unilateral disarmament.
  I am asked back in Oklahoma by people who have good street sense, why 
is it the liberals in Congress are so committed to disarming our 
country, to taking our money that we are supposed to have to defend 
America and putting it into these various discretionary social 
programs? I have to explain to them that the people in Washington, and 
some of the Senators in this Chamber, are not like the people of 
Oklahoma. I think President Clinton honestly believes that if we all 
stand in a circle and hold hands and we unilaterally disarm, everyone 
will love each other and it won't be necessary to have a defense 
system.

  That is what we are up against. In a very respectful way, I have to 
disagree with many of the things my distinguished colleague from 
Illinois stated.
  I think we have had a very successful session. We have ensured a 
sound Social Security retirement system. We have improved educational 
opportunities for our children. Along this line, the major disagreement 
we had was that the Democrats thought the decisions should be made here 
in Washington; Republicans want to use the

[[Page S14765]]

same amount of money but not make the decisions in Washington but send 
that money to the school districts. The school board in Tulsa, OK, is 
much better equipped to know what their education needs are in Oklahoma 
than we are in this August body of the Senate. The Democrats say the 
answer is not school buses, not computers, not the physical facilities 
that are available; it is 100,000 teachers. I think the more we can 
send these decisions back to the local level, the better the people of 
America will be served.
  I believe we have had a good session. I am not pleased with the way 
it is turning out right now. The old saying we have heard so many times 
in the past that there are two things you never want to watch while 
they are being made--one is sausage and the other is laws--becomes very 
true during the last few days of legislative sessions.
  I think we have done a very good job. I think we did the right thing 
in defeating the unverifiable test ban treaty. I think we have passed 
legislation of which America will be very proud. I am anxious to end 
all this fun we are having and go home and tell the people in Oklahoma 
about it.
  I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Bunning). The clerk will call the roll.
  The legislative assistant proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. INHOFE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for 
the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.

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