[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 156 (2010), Part 8]
[Senate]
[Pages 10441-10443]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                              START TREATY

  Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, let me speak for a moment with respect to 
the New START treaty. Strategic arms reductions are very important. We 
do not think about them very much. We deal with big issues and small 
issues in the Senate. Sometimes the small issues get much more 
attention than the big issues. But one is coming for sure to the floor 
of the Senate that is a very big issue; that is, the Strategic Arms 
Reduction Treaty that was negotiated with the Russians. This is really 
a big issue and very important. I want to describe why and describe why 
I feel so strongly about it. I have spoken on the floor previously 
about this, but I want to do it again, describing a Time magazine 
article from March 11, 2002. The March 11, 2002, Time magazine article 
referred back to 2001, right after 9/11--It said this:

       For a few harrowing weeks last fall, a group of U.S. 
     officials believed that the

[[Page 10442]]

     worst nightmare of their lives--something even more horrific 
     than 9/11--was about to come true. In October, an 
     intelligence alert went out to a small number of government 
     agencies, including the Energy Department's top-secret 
     Nuclear Emergency Research Team, based in Nevada. The report 
     said that terrorists were thought to have obtained a 10-
     kiloton nuclear weapon from the Russian arsenal and planned 
     to smuggle it into New York City. ``It was brutal,'' a U.S. 
     official told Time. It was also highly classified and closely 
     guarded. Under the aegis of the Whitehouse's Counterterrorism 
     Security Group . . . the suspected nuke was kept secret so as 
     not to panic the people of New York. Senior FBI officials 
     were not in the loop.

  Some while later, Graham Allison, who is an expert on nuclear 
proliferation wrote about this incident in a book titled ``Nuclear 
Terrorism: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe.'' In his book, he 
points out:

       One month to the day after the attacks of 9/11, a CIA agent 
     codenamed Dragonfire reported that al-Qaida terrorists had 
     stolen a ten kiloton Russian nuclear bomb from the Russian 
     arsenal and may have smuggled it into New York City. Vice 
     President Cheney moved to a secret mountain facility along 
     with several hundred government employees. They were the core 
     of an alternative government that would operate if 
     Washington, DC were destroyed. President Bush dispatched 
     Nuclear Emergency Support Teams to New York to search for the 
     suspected nuclear weapon. To not cause panic, no one in New 
     York City was informed of the threat, not even Mayor 
     Giuliani. After a few weeks, the intelligence community 
     determined that Dragonfire's report was a false alarm.

  But as they did the postmortem on this, they understood that no one 
claimed it could have been impossible that a nuclear weapon could have 
been stolen from the Russian arsenal. No one claimed it would have been 
impossible--having stolen a Russian nuclear weapon--to smuggle it into 
New York City or a major American city. No one claimed it would have 
been impossible for a terrorist group--who wanted to kill several 
hundred thousand people with a nuclear weapon--to have been able to 
detonate that nuclear weapon.
  Now, as I indicated, I describe that as it was described in Time 
magazine in 2002, and as it was written about in the book by Graham 
Allison, a former Clinton administration official, in his book titled, 
``Nuclear Terrorism: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe.'' I describe 
that and the apoplectic seizure that existed in parts of the U.S. 
government when it was thought that 1 month after 9/11 al-Qaida had 
stolen a nuclear weapon and was prepared to detonate it in an American 
city. And on that day, we wouldn't have had 3,000-plus Americans 
murdered, we would have had hundreds of thousands of Americans losing 
their lives. Yet that was about one nuclear weapon--one, just one. The 
loss of one nuclear weapon.
  Now, it turns out it Dragonfire's report wasn't true. The FBI agent 
codenamed Dragonfire heard it, passed it along, but it turned out it 
was not accurate. But that was just one nuclear weapon. There are about 
25,000 nuclear weapons on this planet. This chart shows the Union of 
Concerned Scientists' estimate for 2010 estimate that Russia has 15,100 
nuclear weapons, the United States has 9,400, China about 240, France 
300, Britain 200, and Israel, India, Pakistan, and North Korea each 
have some. So 25,000 nuclear weapons, and I have described the terror 
of having just one end up in the hands of a terrorist group. If it ever 
happens--when it ever happens, God forbid--and hundreds of thousands of 
people are killed, life on this planet will be changed forever.
  Now, Mr. President, we have a lot of nuclear weapons on this planet 
of ours, and we understand the consequences of their use. These 
pictures from August of 1945 show the consequences of the dropping of 
two nuclear weapons--one in Hiroshima and one in Nagasaki. Those 
pictures are, all these years later, still very hard to look at. That 
is the consequence of two nuclear weapons.
  I was recently in Russia visiting a site that we fund in the Congress 
under the Nunn-Lugar program. I want to show some photographs about 
what we have been doing to try to back away from the nuclear threat, to 
try to see if we can reduce the number of nuclear weapons and the 
number of delivery vehicles to deliver those nuclear weapons.
  This is a photograph of the dismantlement of a Blackjack bomber. This 
Blackjack bomber was a Russian bomber--a Soviet Union bomber prior to 
Russia--that would carry a nuclear weapon that would potentially be 
dropped on the United States, then an adversary during the Cold War. 
You can see that we dismantled that Russian Blackjack bomber, and this 
is a piece of a wing strut.
  I ask unanimous consent to show a couple of samples.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  Mr. DORGAN. This is a piece of a wing strut of a Russian bomber. We 
didn't shoot it down. We cut the wing off. I happen to have a piece of 
it. This was happening because our colleagues, Senators Nunn and Lugar, 
put together a program by which we actually paid for the dismantlement 
of Russian bombers.
  I also have copper wiring from the ground-up copper of the electrical 
wires of a Russian submarine. We didn't sink that submarine. We paid 
money to have that submarine destroyed, as part of our agreement with 
Russia to reduce that country's nuclear weapons.
  This is a hinge from a silo in the Ukraine that previously housed a 
missile with warheads aimed at the United States. There is now planted 
on that ground sunflowers, not missiles, because we paid the cost of 
reducing delivery vehicles and reducing nuclear weapons in the 
stockpile of the former Soviet Union.
  This is a program that works--a program that is unbelievably 
important. And as I and some others viewed these programs in Russia, we 
understood again the importance of what we have been doing under the 
Nunn-Lugar program: The Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Belarus are now 
nuclear weapons free. That didn't used to be the case. There are no 
nuclear weapons in those three countries. Albania is chemical weapons 
free. We have deactivated, under the Nunn-Lugar program, 7,500 former 
Soviet nuclear warheads. And the numbers of weapons of mass destruction 
that have been eliminated, and their delivery vehicles, are 32 
ballistic missile submarines--gone, eliminated; 1,419 long-range 
nuclear missiles; 906 nuclear air-to-surface missiles, and 155 nuclear 
bombers. All of this has been done under a program that very few people 
know about--the Nunn-Lugar program. It works. It is a great program.
  But, as I have indicated, there are still thousands and thousands and 
thousands--it is estimated this year 25,000--of nuclear weapons on this 
planet. So what do we do about that? This administration engaged with 
the Russians for a new treaty because the old START treaty had expired. 
This new treaty--the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty--was 
negotiated over a lengthy period of time. It required a lot of 
patience, a great deal of effort, but this administration stuck with 
it. They negotiated, completed, and signed this treaty.
  The President of Russia and our President met in Prague, the Czech 
Republic, and signed this treaty. Now it needs to be ratified by the 
Senate.
  I want to talk just a bit about the need to do that. I think all of 
us understand the urgency. There are some who feel strongly that 
perhaps we should begin the testing of nuclear weapons. I don't support 
that. I don't think we should. I think we need to be world leaders on 
these issues. We have stopped nuclear testing. Others have stopped 
nuclear testing as well, and we ought to continue that posture.
  There are some who feel we should begin building new nuclear weapons. 
I don't believe we should. That doesn't make any sense. That is the 
wrong signal for us to send to the world.
  There are some who believe that we need to make additional 
investments in the area of life extension programs and investments in 
making certain that the nuclear weapons that do exist in the stockpile 
are weapons in which we have the required confidence that those weapons 
are available, if needed. The President has asked that funding to do 
that be made available.

[[Page 10443]]

  I chair the subcommittee that funds those programs, and I believe we 
will make available what the President requests. It is reasonable, it 
seems to me, to not only proceed--hopefully, on a bipartisan basis--to 
address something as important as the START treaty, but at the same 
time make sure that the programs that we have always had--the life 
extension programs and the programs that make sure that we have 
sufficient confidence in the weapons that exist--are funded 
appropriately. That is what the President has recommended in the budget 
that he has sent to the Congress.
  It just seems to me there is so much to commend to this Congress the 
need to ratify an arms control treaty here. Mr. Linton Brooks, the NNSA 
Administrator under George W. Bush, said this, talking about the newly 
negotiated treaty and the President's budget request:

       START, as I now understand it, is a good idea on its own 
     merits, but I think for those who think it's only a good idea 
     if you have a strong weapons program, I think this budget 
     ought to take care of that. Coupled with the out-year 
     projections, it takes care of the concerns about the complex 
     and it does very good things about the stockpile and it 
     should keep the labs healthy.

  I don't quote Henry Kissinger very often, but Henry Kissinger says it 
pretty well when he says:

       It should be noted I come from the hawkish side of this 
     debate, so I'm not here advocating these measures in the 
     abstract. I try to build them into my perception of the 
     national interest. I recommend ratification of this treaty.

  Henry Kissinger says he recommends ratification of this treaty. And, 
finally, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mullen:

       I, the Vice Chairman, and the Joint Chiefs, as well as our 
     combatant commanders around the world, stand solidly behind 
     this new treaty, having had the opportunity to provide our 
     counsel, to make our recommendations, and to help shape the 
     final agreements.

  It is not just us, but it is our children and their children that 
have a lot at stake with respect to reducing the number of nuclear 
weapons, reducing the delivery vehicles. It is the case that the amount 
of plutonium that will fit in a soda can, the amount of highly enriched 
uranium the size of a couple of grapefruits will produce a nuclear 
weapon that will have devastating consequences. So one of our 
obligations is to try to make sure nuclear material--the material with 
which those who wish to make nuclear weapons can make those weapons--
stays out of the hands of terrorists. That is one of our jobs. We are 
working very hard on that. We have programs that work on that 
constantly.
  Second is to stop the proliferation of nuclear weapons. I described 
the countries that we know have nuclear weapons. Now we have to stop 
the proliferation and stop other countries from getting nuclear 
weapons. That is our responsibility. We have to be a world leader to do 
that.
  As I said, if, God forbid, somehow in the future--5 years, 10 years, 
or 20 years from now--a nuclear weapon is exploded in a major city, and 
hundreds of thousands are killed, life on this planet is not going to 
be the same. That is why it seems to me that a very important start--
and this is just a start, not a finish--is to take this treaty that has 
been negotiated, bring it to the floor of the Senate, and have this 
discussion. I would expect there will be Republicans and Democrats who 
will come down on the same side of this issue--that it is a better 
world, a safer world when we meet our responsibility to lead on the 
issues of nonproliferation, when we meet our responsibilities to lead 
on the matter of reducing nuclear weapons and reducing delivery 
vehicles.
  That is what this New START treaty does. It does it in a very 
responsible way. So my hope will be that in the coming 2 months or so 
that we will have a robust discussion of the START treaty and have the 
celebration of having had the debate and had the vote and then 
exclaiming to the world that this was a success--that this treaty was a 
success. Yes, a first step but a success.
  Beyond this treaty, there will be other negotiations that will take 
us to other areas in reductions. I think, as a result, if we do what we 
should be expected to do, this can be a safer world.
  Mr. President, I yield the floor, and I suggest the absence of a 
quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent the order for the 
quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Burris). Without objection, it is so 
ordered.

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