[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 145 (1999), Part 8]
[House]
[Page 11927]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]



             CHINA HAS AMERICAN NUCLEAR WEAPONS TECHNOLOGY

  (Mr. EHLERS asked and was given permission to address the House for 1 
minute and to revise and extend his remarks.)
  Mr. EHLERS. Mr. Speaker, I suspect I am one of the few individuals in 
this House who has worked at a nuclear weapons laboratory. I did this 
for one summer while I was a graduate student at Berkeley at the 
University of California. And I found it to be a very good experience 
to work at a nuclear weapons laboratory, even though my work was 
primarily on unclassified science.
  What impressed me is that the individuals that worked at that 
laboratory were extremely security conscious and they were very 
concerned about any leaks of information about nuclear weapons. We seem 
to have lost that. We have lost that culture ever since the Berlin Wall 
fell.
  But what is dismaying to me is the reaction of the White House to the 
discovery that the Chinese have managed to obtain information about our 
nuclear weapons. The spin doctors have gone to work full-time. The 
President's men seem to be more concerned with blaming the Bush and 
Reagan administration than with taking responsibility and trying to 
correct the problem as they should be doing.

                              {time}  1030

  It is the mark of strong individuals to take responsibility for the 
mistakes that they have made and to correct them, and I expect no less 
of the President and his aides. We do have leaks, we have to cure them, 
and it is absolutely essential that those individuals who are 
responsible take responsibility, correct the problem, and solve it.

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