[Congressional Record Volume 171, Number 123 (Thursday, July 17, 2025)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E687-E688]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
MARKING 80 YEARS AFTER TRINITY, THE DANGERS OF NUCLEAR WAR HAVE NEVER
BEEN HIGHER
______
HON. RO KHANNA
of california
in the house of representatives
Thursday, July 17, 2025
Mr. KHANNA. Mr. Speaker. I rise today to highlight the rising danger
posed by the unchecked expansion of global nuclear arsenals. As we mark
80 years since the Trinity test, we must confront the urgent need to
reverse course before miscalculation or escalation leads to
irreversible catastrophe. I include in the Record the following
article, 80 Years After Trinity, the Dangers of Nuclear War Have Never
Been Higher by Norman Solomon:
The dangers of nuclear war have never been higher, but
poitical pressure to prevent it is at low ebb. Eighty years
after the atomic age began with the Trinity bomb test in New
Mexico on July 16, 1945, words can't possibly be adequate to
describe the extent of global horrors that today's nuclear
arsenals are capable of inflicting. But mainstream US media
outlets and partisan politics are routinely oblivious to the
threat of oblivion
Despite the efforts of individuals and groups striving for
arms control, the national discourse ignores the likely
results of nuclear buildups--which continue to boost the
actual risks of annihilation. Pronouncements from the nuclear
establishment about a need to ``maintain deterrence'' and
``modernize'' usually go unquestioned as to the underlying
assumptions. Senators and representatives praise nuclear
systems with components produced in their state or district.
Even well-informed and dedicated advocates of halting the
arms race are often reduced to arguing for fiscal
responsibility. Within the narrow confines of regular
``national security'' debates, the wisest lobbying tactic
appears to be a focus on exorbitant costs of ``modernizing''
nuclear weapons. Yet cost-cutting arguments bypass how the
weapons push the world closer to doomsday.
Northrop Grumman--the contractor for the new Sentinel ICBM,
which is meant to replace the current Minuteman III
intercontinental ballistic missiles--has racked up such huge
cost overruns that the project at times seemed to be in
jeopardy of cancellation. Meanwhile, the political response
detoured around the unique dangers of ICBMs, which (as land-
based missiles vulnerable to attack) remain on hair-trigger,
``use them or lose them'' alert. Given the long record of
false alarms, such hypervigilance is a possible tripwire for
an accidental apocalypse.
``Getting trapped in an argument about the cheapest way to
keep ICBMs operational in their silos is ultimately no-win,''
Daniel Ellsberg and I wrote for The Nation in autumn 2021. We
added: ``Better sooner than later, members of Congress will
need to face up to the horrendous realities about
intercontinental ballistic missiles. They won't do that
unless peace, arms-control, and disarmament groups go far
beyond the current limits of congressional discourse--and
start emphasizing, on Capitol Hill and at the grassroots, the
crucial truth about ICBMs and the imperative of eliminating
them all.''
More than 700 scientists signed a letter last summer going
beyond the focus on cost to urge the complete elimination of
America's ICBMs. The letter, organized by the Union of
Concerned Scientists, explained that ``the US could eliminate
the land-based leg of the triad tomorrow and the US public
would only be safer for it.''
Progressives working to defund new weapons systems
recognize that massive military spending is, in the words of
Martin Luther King Jr., a ``demonic, destructive suction
tube''--depleting enormous resources that should be devoted
to meeting human needs instead of destroying lives and
threatening human survival. But for typical Congress members
of either party, disputes about how to get the most bang for
the buck are affirming the arms race rather than impeding it.
Certain firms might lose specific contracts if some
Strangelovian projects are sufficiently exposed as
boondoggles, but the nuclear-arms industry and overall
military business remain on a steep upward trajectory.
Congresspeople are accustomed to juggling billions of
``defense'' dollars. What they aren't accustomed to
acknowledging--and what constituent pressure should demand
they face--is that the latest weapons systems further
endanger human life on Earth.
The history of the last eight decades tells us that
Americans will go along with astronomical spending for
nuclear weaponry if they believe it makes them safer. Unless
we effectively make the case that the opposite
[[Page E688]]
is true, the nuclear arms race will continue to play out in
media and politics as a pricey necessity
In recent years, numerous activists and groups have given
priority to calling for abolition of nuclear weapons. It's a
position that occupies the highest moral ground, famously
seized by the Nobel laureate scientist George Wald in a
widely reprinted 1969 anti-war speech at MIT. ``Nuclear
weapons offer us nothing but a balance of terror, and a
balance of terror is still terror,'' he said. ``We have to
get rid of those atomic weapons, here and everywhere. We
cannot live with them.''
During the past several years, accelerating work by
activists for abolition has drawn inspiration from the Treaty
on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, now signed by 94
countries, and visionary organizations like the International
Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons.
Unfortunately, campaigning for abolition of nuclear weapons
does not have any evident capacity to hinder the US
government's leading role in propelling the momentum of the
arms race. No matter how heartfelt and imbued with wisdom,
pleas for abolition do not present a threat to the
unrestrained and voracious power of the military-industrial
complex.
A truly horrific reality in 2025, and for the realistically
foreseeable future, is that nuclear weapons will remain on
this planet, brandished against the entire human species. The
word ``realistically'' may cause some to bristle. But a lack
of such distasteful realism can divert resources, time, and
energies away from where they're most needed.
Desperate needs include far greater activism, public
messaging, and political organizing to avert the worst. The
top of the agenda should include: renewal of US-Russia New
START treaty set to expire next February: reinstatement of
three vital nuclear-arms pacts canceled by the US government,
the Anti-Ballistic Missile, Intermediate-Range Nuclear
Forces, and Open Skies treaties; and initiation of step-by-
step disarmament measures that can sometimes involve wise
unilateral actions by the US government, as in the case of
ICBMs.
``We are closer to nuclear catastrophe today than at any
point since the Cold War,'' Representative Jim McGovern said
this spring when reintroducing a House resolution ``urging
the United States to lead the world back from the brink of
nuclear war and halt and reverse the nuclear arms race.''
With 21 cosponsors, the resolution ``calls on the president''
to take major steps toward sanity, none of which Joe Biden
chose to take and none of which Donald Trump shows any
indication of taking.
Looking at the names on the nonbinding resolution, a reason
for discouragement is that only 10 percent of House Democrats
and not a single Republican signed on. A less obvious problem
is that the signers are not speaking out for vigorous
American diplomacy to end the Ukraine war, which may be a
prerequisite for restarting any semblance of dialogue on
nuclear dangers between Washington and Moscow.
For more than three years, ever since the Russian invasion
of Ukraine, congressional Democrats have rarely advocated the
kind of diplomatic efforts that might stop the war's carnage.
Such efforts could supply a scaffold for rebuilding the arms-
control architecture.
But the default role for even progressive Democrats on the
Hill has been to support no-strings arming of the Ukrainian
military (``let's you and them fight'') while depicting the
Kremlin as incapab]e of serious negotiations. Yet the
McGovern resolution says that the United States should lead a
worldwide effort to prevent nuclear war by ``in particular,
pursuing and concluding new nuclear arms control and
disarmament arrangements with the Russian Federation to
prevent a buildup of nuclear forces beyond current levels.''
So while some congressional Democrats are emphatic that the
United States should directly negotiate with Russia to
prevent nuclear war, those same lawmakers are not willing to
push for US negotiations with Russia to end the Ukraine war.
In reality, thawing the deep freeze of the new Cold War is
essential to halt and reverse the race toward annihilation.
Voicing hope that nuclear-arms negotiations can be successful
in tandem with belligerence toward Russia may seem politic,
but it is not realistic.
While hawkish legislators make no pretense of interest in
any step toward detente, it's important that at least a
minority of Democrats at the Capitol are urging diplomatic
talks aimed at preventing nuclear war. Yet it's hard to
imagine those Democrats sounding anything like President
Lyndon B. Johnson at the close of his summit with Russian
Premier Alexei Kosygin in mid-1967 in Glassboro, New Jersey,
when LBJ said, ``We have made further progress in an effort
to improve our understanding of each other?s thinking on a
number of questions.''
Today, the Democrats who talk about the need to avoid
nuclear war do not seem especially interested in ``an effort
to improve our understanding'' of the Russian leadership's
thinking. The rote storyline--that Vladimir Putin is evil,
end of story--blends in smoothly with US news media and the
punditocracy. What it also does is give more fuel to the
momentum toward nuclear holocaust.
Many who justifiably derided President George W. Bush after
9/11 for his Manichaean view of the world are now largely
replicating it. Implicit in the current worldview is that--
after decades of war in Afghanistan and Iraq, causing deaths
into the millions, and now while continuing to serve as the
crucial accomplice for ongoing genocide in Gaza--the US
government is clearly virtuous, in complete contrast with the
Russian government because of its own unconscionable
aggression in Ukraine,
The prevailing reflex, to act as though US-Russia relations
could roll along on two tracks--escalating geopolitical
conflicts while restoring and concluding major nuclear-arms
treaties--is the political equivalent of magical thinking, if
not simply craven expediency.
Meanwhile, for the corporate beneficiaries of a trillion-
dollar Pentagon budget and an out-ofcontrol nuclear weapons
program, the more hostility toward Russia and China the
better. And the country that first brought atomic weapons
into the world is continuing to lead the way toward
thermonuclear destruction.
For those of us who have lived in the era of nuclear bombs
for many decades, still being alive can seem close to
miraculous. Luck and collective efforts for sanity must have
been factors. Now, the generations with most of their lives
potentially ahead are in a world that could instantly make
that impossible. The heightened militarism of American
politics is threatening to seal their fate.
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