Energy and Water Development and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2019
Floor Speech
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Mr. GARAMENDI. Mr. Chair, I rise in support of the amendment.
I also want to compliment my colleagues on the other side of this argument: the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee; I see our friend from Colorado and others here. All of us have the same goal, and that is to assure that the United States, and indeed the world, is safe from a nuclear war. We use deterrence as the way of accomplishing that.
Every President since Ronald Reagan has strived to achieve a safer world by reducing the number of nuclear weapons. However, in recent years, beginning with President Obama and being carried on today, we are now involved in a new nuclear arms race.
Not only are we going to build new nuclear weapons--bombs, if you will--such as this 762, presumed to be low-yield, which is still extraordinarily devastating, we are also creating new delivery systems, new land-based missiles in the Upper Midwest, new submarines and new rockets and new stealth bombers--all of that costing more than $1 trillion.
At the same time, we are developing new sensing devices and new ways in which we might protect those sensing devices and communications.
All of this is creating an extremely dangerous world for our future, not a safer world. We are going in the absolutely wrong direction of increasing the likelihood of a mistake.
I don't think anybody on any side would ever want to initiate, but this particular bomb presents the opportunity for an escalation, a tit for tat. Russia escalates to deescalate, we escalate to deescalate, and they escalate, and we escalate, and pretty soon it is all gone.
I would just ask all of us to step back and ponder for a moment why it was that Reagan and George H.W. Bush and Clinton and George W. Bush and Obama all went the other direction, to reduce the number of nuclear weapons.
But here we are in the midst of a new nuclear arms race--$1.7 trillion. And all of us know that there are numerous needs that we have.
So I would ask us just to pause for a second and to accept this amendment.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Source