[Congressional Record Volume 151, Number 76 (Thursday, June 9, 2005)]
[House]
[Pages H4327-H4328]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                           THE ROAD NOT TAKEN

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from California (Mr. Schiff) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. SCHIFF. Mr. Speaker, last month dozens of world leaders, 
including President Bush, gathered in Moscow to celebrate the 60th 
anniversary of V-E day. It was fitting and proper for the President and 
other heads of state to pay homage to the millions who died defeating 
Nazism and fascism and to commemorate the end of the Second World War.
  The year 1945 also marked the beginning of the nuclear age, and even 
those who had become inured to the destruction that years of fighting 
had wrought were stunned by the devastation caused by the atomic bombs 
dropped on Japan. Nuclear weapons have been the dominant feature of the 
international security landscape ever since, and preventing their 
proliferation has been a central goal of American Presidents from Harry 
Truman to George W. Bush.
  That is why I cannot understand the failure of the administration to 
take a leading role at the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty review 
conference that was held at the United Nations from May 2-27. There is 
near unanimity among policymakers and our Nation's political leadership 
that nuclear terrorism and the proliferation of nuclear weapons are the 
greatest threats to our national security. The President has said so 
himself. But the United States did not dispatch any senior officials to 
New York and downplayed the importance of the conference. This was 
shortsighted and dangerous, and the failure to achieve any concrete 
results at the NPT conference was a major national security setback for 
the United States as well as for the rest of the world.
  The Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which took effect in 1970, has 
for the most part been successful in limiting the spread of nuclear 
weapons beyond the original five members of the nuclear club, the 
Soviet Union, Britain, France, China and the United States. In 1960, 
John Kennedy wrote that he expected 20 nations would have nuclear 
weapons by the end of the 1960s. He considered this the gravest threat 
to world peace and set in motion the events and discussions that 
culminated in the NPT.
  During the 35 years that the treaty has been in effect, only three 
nations are known to have developed nuclear weapons, India, Pakistan 
and Israel, and they are not parties to the NPT. North Korea is 
believed to have a handful of nuclear weapons, and Iran is engaged in a 
diplomatic game of chicken with the West in its pursuit of nuclear 
weapons.
  Mr. Speaker, after three and a half decades, the NPT is showing its 
age, and the review conference was held at a critical time for the 
international community's efforts to halt the spread of nuclear 
weapons. In December of last year, a panel of experts convened by the 
U.N. issued a stark warning that we are approaching the point at which 
the erosion of the nonproliferation regime could become irreversible 
and result in a cascade of proliferation. One of the members of that 
panel was Brent Scowcroft, who served as national security adviser to 
President George H.W. Bush.
  The twin nuclear crises with North Korea and Iran have exposed flaws 
in the NPT's ``grand bargain,'' which was first articulated in 
President Eisenhower's ``Atoms for Peace'' proposal. In exchange for 
the commitment to forgo the acquisition of nuclear weapons and to agree 
to international safeguards and inspections, the NPT guarantees non-
nuclear weapon states who are parties to the treaty the peaceful 
development and use of nuclear energy. The problem with this bargain is 
that it allows nations like Iran or North Korea access to fissile 
material and technological know-how that is the necessary precursor for 
a nuclear weapons program. When the state feels confident it is ready 
to proceed with a weapons program, it simply opts out of the NPT.
  Had it chosen to do to so, the administration could have used the 
review conference in New York to make it more difficult for states to 
access nuclear material and technology under the NPT and then walk away 
from the treaty by providing tough penalties for those who would try.
  One proposal by a group of experts at Princeton and Stanford would 
bar parties withdrawing from the NPT to use fissile materials or 
production facilities acquired while they were parties to the treaty to 
make nuclear weapons. The German government also proposed preventing a 
party from withdrawing from the treaty if that state was in violation 
of that treaty.
  But reinvigorating the NPT requires more than cracking down on Iran 
and North Korea. It also demands leadership from the declared nuclear 
weapons states which as part of the NPT committed themselves to reduce 
their own stockpiles significantly in exchange for non-nuclear states 
renouncing nuclear ambitions. Unfortunately, the five nuclear weapons 
states have not done enough, and General Scowcroft and his colleagues 
chided them in their report for their lackluster efforts.
  Matters have not been helped by a State Department brochure handed 
out at the conference which listed arms control breakthroughs since the 
1980s and touted reductions in the U.S. arsenal. But the time line made 
no mention of the 1996 Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, a pact negotiated 
by the Clinton administration and ratified by 121 nations but rejected 
by this President. The brochure also ignored the 2000 NPT review 
conference at which the U.S. and other nuclear weapons states committed 
to practical steps to achieve nuclear safety, including entering into 
the test ban treaty and negotiation of a fissile material cutoff treaty 
to ban manufacture and production of additional bomb material.

[[Page H4328]]

  Mr. Speaker, in the aftermath of World War II, the United States 
constructed a diverse set of international institutions to guarantee 
peace and better ensure a future for America and the rest of the world. 
By going to Moscow, President Bush honored the sacrifice of millions of 
Americans and other allied personnel to secure our present. But it was 
the road not taken, the one to New York, that would have helped to 
secure the future.

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