[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1993, Book I)]
[May 17, 1993]
[Pages 674-677]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



[[Page 674]]


Remarks to the Community in Los Alamos, New Mexico
May 17, 1993

    The President. Thank you very much. Governor King, Senator Bingaman, 
Senator Domenici, Congressman Richardson, Congressman Schiff, Dr. 
Hecker, and the other directors of the other wonderful labs here 
present, Dr. Narath and Dr. Ruckolls; and my distinguished Secretary of 
Energy, Hazel O'Leary, who is celebrating her birthday with all of you 
here in Los Alamos today.
    I want to say a special word of thanks to the students from Los 
Alamos High School here behind us. I love the T-shirts, and I was so 
gratified to be invited to come to the high school commencement. I 
didn't make it, but this is almost as good, don't you think? I'm really 
glad to be here.
    I want to say, too, a special word of appreciation to all those who 
spoke here before me today for what they said. I thought Senator 
Domenici did a pretty good job of gliding over our differences and 
getting right in there. I want to tell you how grateful I am for the 
national leadership that Congressman Richardson has given not only to 
the Congress but to the efforts I made to become your President. And I 
can't say enough about the work that Senator Bingaman has done on the 
issue I came here to talk about today, which is giving us a good high-
wage, high-growth future through the wise and sensible investment in 
technology. You should be very proud of these people, all of whom 
represent you in the United States Congress. I want to say a special 
word of thanks to Congressman Schiff. Since he's not here in his home 
district, he actually gave up the opportunity to speak, which may make 
him the most popular person here today. You can't tell.
    Bruce King told you the truth. We were Governors in the seventies, 
the eighties, and the nineties. Made an old man of me, but he still 
looks pretty good. [Laughter] He was the first Governor to endorse my 
campaign, and New Mexico was the next to the last stop I made on 
election day when I stayed up all night long.
    I want to say I've come back here today in the light of day, and a 
beautiful day it is, to celebrate with the Los Alamos Lab the 50th 
anniversary of a genuine, remarkable American success story. For the 
first half century of Los Alamos' service, it was the leading edge of 
our Nation's security. And now as we go into the next half century, Los 
Alamos will be, as Senator Bingaman said, the leading edge of our 
prosperity, developing and nurturing the technology that will put all 
these young Americans who are here in this great crowd today at the 
front of a new race, the race to compete and to cooperate in a world 
that is getting smaller, richer, more diverse, but very, very rigorous 
in its challenges.
    New Mexico should be very proud to be the home of Los Alamos and 
Sandia. America, indeed the entire democratic world, owes an enormous 
debt of gratitude to Los Alamos, to Sandia, and to the Lawrence 
Livermore Laboratory in California. When we needed the military muscle 
to end a global war, the answer was the Manhattan Project. When we 
needed the muscle to win the cold war, the long and costly effort to 
contain and then to triumph over communism, the ideas that made that 
possible came out of these laboratories. That struggle gave us a focus 
not just in how we spend our defense dollars but how we invested in 
everything from our children's education to the Interstate Highway 
System. These labs were at the core of that effort, providing our 
nuclear deterrent. From the Berlin crisis in 1948 to the Berlin 
celebration in 1989 when the Wall came down, the work of this laboratory 
helped to ensure America's might, America's security, and in the end, a 
total triumph for democracy and freedom and free-market economics in the 
cold war. You should all be very proud of that. That's a good 50 years 
of work if I ever heard it.
    Now we are in the post-cold-war effort. Most of the young people 
here present will live more of their lives in the 21st century than they 
have in the 20th. And we need a new focus for our efforts. Our job today 
is to preserve the American dream and America's leadership in the world 
that America has done so much to make. We have to prove that we can 
compete and win in this highly complex and rigorous world. We have to do 
it so that all the young people here will not be the first generation of 
Americans to grow up to do worse than their parents. We have to do it so 
that we can continue to be a beacon of hope, so that we can prove

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that freedom and free enterprise and democracy work.
    We have to begin by putting our own house in order, by bringing down 
our enormous deficit, dealing with our health care crisis which has 
produced a system that costs way too much and covers too few and leaves 
too many in the insecurity of daily living, knowing that any moment they 
might lose the insurance they have. We have to follow policies that 
enable us to educate and train our people for a lifetime and then 
promote economic growth so that they will have jobs that they're 
educated for. These are the things we have to do in this time to be 
worthy, worthy successors to the American legacy we have inherited.
    I've asked the Congress to reduce the deficit by $500 billion over 
the next 5 years, with a combination of spending cuts and tax increases, 
none of which are popular, especially, in particular. Everybody's for 
deficit reduction in general. It's the details that swallow us alive. I 
have asked that all this money be put into a trust fund by law so that 
nothing can be done with it but to reduce the debt, so that the children 
of our country eventually will be able to get out from under the burden 
their parents and grandparents have left for them. I have committed to 
all the Members of Congress and to the American people without regard to 
party that this is just a down payment, that reducing the deficit 
doesn't begin to bring the debt down until you get it down to zero. And 
we have to keep working until we do that. We owe that to the young 
people here.
    But we also owe you something more. We have to think about the 
challenges that are here before us. And when they require us to invest 
in education and technology and new jobs, we have to do that as well, 
for we have to remember that the thing which enables us to bring our 
debt down is the economic strength which reduces working people and 
incomes from people who then can pay taxes, who can then deal with less 
Government supports, who don't need the Government spending as much 
money if they all have jobs and incomes in a strong free enterprise 
system. That is our obligation to you and to your future.
    So the question I came here to discuss today for all of you, and 
hopefully it will reverberate throughout the United States to people who 
have never been to New Mexico and may not have even known of the 
existence of Los Alamos, is what is the opportunity we have right here 
to revolutionize the economy, not just for those thousands of you who 
are here but for every American family, for every American young person? 
Can you affect the future of America as you have the past? I think the 
answer is a resounding ``yes.'' If we are going to march confidently 
into the 21st century, we will have to do it on the minds and with the 
creativity and with the investment represented here in this laboratory 
and in others like it around the country and with the spirit of 
partnership between Government and the private sector that pervades so 
many of the efforts now underway here.
    At Los Alamos alone, there are 100 partnerships with industry. 
Technology has led to the creation of 30 new companies. Before coming 
here today I took a look at some of the projects underway at a plant 
facility that handles--listen to this--plasma ion implantation. Now, 
that sounds like something a plastic surgeon would do, but it has 
nothing to do with the human body. Instead, it involves a steel vacuum 
chamber containing high-energy ion which can be pumped into metal 
surfaces or plastic surfaces and used to harden them so that they will 
last longer and do better work. This could revolutionize America's 
ability to manufacture automobiles and other machines to keep going and 
to have higher productivity longer and lower costs, so we can once again 
begin to grow high-wage manufacturing jobs. And if it happens, it will 
happen because of the ideas that started here in the kind of 
partnerships we need for America's tomorrows. And this technology was a 
direct outgrowth of the research done on the strategic defense 
initiative, the so-called star wars initiative, which means that no 
matter whatever happens there and whatever happens to the final shape of 
that project, something good came out of it because people were looking 
to break down frontiers in the human minds and to explore unexplored 
territory.
    This defense technology is now being used as part of a 4-year 
partnership with General Motors. Another project involves GM in helping 
to build a clean car. Think of it: What if we could build a car that 
operated on energy sources provided here in this country, that reduced 
our dependence on foreign oil, reduced air pollution, increased energy 
efficiency, and helped us to become a partner in the effort to save the 
global environment, at the same

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time exploding American jobs and economic opportunities? If that 
happens, it will be because of what began here. I saw biomedical 
technology, analyzing and sorting single biological cells using lasers, 
with valuable applications for AIDS and leukemia diagnosis, a technology 
that has already led to an $800-million-a-year business for three new 
companies. There are projects underway for efficient oil recovery, 
environmental cleanup, the analysis of air pollution. With these 
partnerships and others like them, we can find the technology-based 
answers for the jobs of tomorrow.
    In this economic chain reaction, the result will be high-paying jobs 
here in New Mexico. I saw one project today which is projected to 
produce 2,000 jobs in New Mexico within the next 3 or 4 years. But there 
will be jobs all across this Nation, in wide-ranging fields, ever more 
critical to our future. Supercomputers developed to design nuclear 
weapons are now being used to improve the fuel efficiency of engines, to 
help the oil industry find more oil in less time here in the United 
States at lower cost. They're used to educate youngsters in ways we 
could never have dreamed of just a few years ago. I met some of those 
bright students earlier today. They were actually developing programs 
for energy conservation, using the world's largest supercomputer, having 
won a contest in the use of computers sponsored statewide in New Mexico 
and held here at Los Alamos. You could be very proud that you have 
students like that who can use a facility like this.
    We are counting on our Nation's labs to make real contributions in 
these and other areas of needs that arise out of our energy and national 
security missions. In these tasks, the laboratories will be helping not 
only Americans but our fellow citizens around the world. If we can find 
ways to make the American people healthier and lower health care costs, 
it will benefit us enormously economically, it will provide personal 
security to millions of American families. But we will not keep those 
things as secrets here in our own borders. They will spread around the 
world and make the world a better and safer and healthier place.
    Let me also say that there is still a national defense mission for 
these labs. We have to continue to maintain the safety and reliability 
of our nuclear deterrent until all the nuclear weapons in the world are 
gone. We have to make sure that we can focus on new technologies to 
counter proliferation of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons by 
other irresponsible countries around the world. There are still too many 
nations who have not learned the lesson of the cold war and how much 
money was diverted by the United States and the Soviet Union from other 
important efforts. There are still too many nations who seem determined 
to define the quality of their lives based on whether they can develop a 
nuclear weapon or biological or chemical weapons that can have no other 
purpose than to destroy other human beings. It is a mistake, and we 
should try to contain it and to stop it.
    And so my fellow Americans, there is a peacetime commercial mission 
for these labs. And there is a national defense mission for these labs. 
And the line between those two missions is coming down fast. And there 
is a partnership with the private sector which will spread and grow and 
strengthen America's support for and understanding of what is done here. 
These labs are our great national minds' treasure, the world's finest 
scientists and engineers, more Ph.D.'s per capita here in Los Alamos 
than any other place on the planet. It's pretty humbling when you're a 
President and you walk into a room and you realize you're lowering the 
average IQ of the room just by going in the door. [Laughter] You have 
the world's most powerful computers and lasers and accelerators, some of 
the world's best materials facilities, the most sophisticated 
diagnostics. You are our crown jewels in technology and science.
    Under the technology policy I have proposed, this lab at Los 
Angeles--Los Alamos----
    Audience members. Boo-o-o!
    The President. I'm going there tomorrow, and if I say Los Alamos, 
will you cheer when I'm in Los Angeles? I owe you one. This lab will 
work with the Departments of Energy and Defense and Commerce to sustain 
constant innovation. We're going to have to reorganize a lot of things 
to get that done. We can't just have the money coming in for specific 
projects from--some from defense and some from the Energy Department. 
We'll have all kinds of dislocations. And we had some great 
conversations today about how we can make a flexible and always 
available pool of funds there for the kinds of projects that need to be 
done. And our administration has pledged to do that.
    So I say to you again, we must change the whole notion we have of 
the Federal Govern-


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ment. We're going to have to cut a lot of spending. We're going to have 
to change a lot of things we have taken for granted. But we will still 
have to find a way to invest in our future. Our competitors are 
investing in their futures. There is a race to tomorrow, which is partly 
cooperation, but make no mistake about it, largely competition. And if 
we want all of these young people to have the chance to go as far as 
their efforts and their God-given abilities will take them, we have to 
do both: We've got to bring this deficit down and sharply invest in 
things like these laboratories so we can grow the economy for tomorrow.
    The reductions in the defense budget, made possible by the end of 
the cold war, have presented some great challenges to the laboratories, 
to the defense plants, to the wonderful men and women who have served 
our Nation in uniform. We owe all of them the opportunity to convert to 
success in the commercial private enterprise world of America. We have 
earmarked, this year alone, over $1.7 billion for defense conversion, 
and I propose to invest about $20 billion in it over the next 5 years. 
It is a good beginning. It is a good beginning.
    I ask you today, as I close, to consider the alternative. If we 
refuse to bring our deficit down and we still continue to squeeze these 
areas critical to our investment future, the alternative will be a 
rising deficit, a declining rate of investment, more unemployment and 
more stagnant incomes, longer work weeks for less funds, and continued 
insecurity for America's working families. We must change our priorities 
no matter how difficult it is. That is the challenge of this day, and we 
must meet it. As has already been said, President Kennedy stood in this 
very spot just over 30 years ago and saluted the great patriots of Los 
Alamos. He said in part, and I quote, ``We want to express our thanks to 
you. It is not merely what was done in the days of the Second War but 
what has been done since then, not only in developing weapons of 
destruction which, by irony of fate, helped maintain peace and freedom, 
but also in medicine and in space, and all the other related fields 
which can mean so much to mankind if we can maintain the peace and 
protect our freedom.''
    Well today, maintaining the peace and protecting the freedom seem 
more secure than they did when President Kennedy uttered those words. 
And so, today I come here to thank Los Alamos, not merely for what was 
done in the cold war and what has been done since but for what you can 
and will do to secure a stronger, brighter future for all the American 
people. If we do our job, then perhaps 30 years from now another 
American President will be able to come to this very site, and some of 
you who are now children will be here with your children. And you can 
say, again, thank you, thank you to the labs, thank you to the men and 
women who used their minds to advance the cause of learning. Thank you 
for the contributions you have made to the progress of the American 
dream. May it never stop.
    God bless you, and thank you very much.

Note: The President spoke at 1:05 p.m. at Los Alamos High School.