Cloture Motion
Floor Speech
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Mr. MARKEY. today, the Senate vote on confirmation of the Lindenbaum nomination and the cloture motions on the Padin, Sweeney, and Morrison nominations; and that if cloture is invoked on any of those nominations, all postcloture time be considered expired and the Senate vote on confirmation of the nominations at a time to be determined by the majority leader or his designee, following consultation with the Republican leader.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Mr. MARKEY. Mr. President, what is the current threat of nuclear annihilation?
The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists' Doomsday Clock measures how close humanity and the planet is to destruction. The answer is: 100 seconds. That is tied for the closest we have ever been to planetary ruin since the clock started in 1947.
Recent nuclear events are likely to turn the dial even further. The size, diversity, and lethality of North Korea's weapons continue to grow, as does its threat to our allies in the region. North Korea's Kim Jong Un has fired more than a dozen missiles this year. Preparations are being made for another nuclear test.
Iran is just weeks away from acquiring a nuclear weapon, the tragic consequence of Donald Trump blowing up the Iran nuclear deal that President Biden is now trying to stitch back together.
In Xinjiang, the same province where China has constructed forced labor camps, more than 100 domes, likely housing missile silos, dot the landscape. The Pentagon says these sites are part of the evidence behind China's quest to double its nuclear forces in the next 5 years.
Belarus's authoritarian leader Lukashenka has made a deal with the devil, Vladimir Putin, to stay in power. Part of the price for Putin's lifeline was a demand that Lukashenka amend the Belarus Constitution to allow for the placement of Russian nuclear weapons on its territory, further taunting Ukraine and all of Europe with existential ruin.
European leaders are readying the distribution of iodine tablets in the event of mushroom cloud drifts overhead. The continent's residents are building fallout shelters right now.
It should come as no surprise then that in a recent poll, 70 percent of Americans said they fear that Putin will use nuclear weapons in the war in Ukraine. These global fears are well-founded. We fought over the course of decades to make nuclear weapons taboo, but they are making a big comeback. In January, the five nuclear weapons States of the Nonproliferation Treaty affirmed that ``a nuclear war can never be won and must never be fought.'' But actions speak louder than words, and the actions of Russia in Ukraine, the hundreds of missile silos taking form in China, and the $51 billion the United States is set to spend on nuclear weapons this year alone tell us that nuclear weapons are still very much in vogue.
The Doomsday Clock was created at the start of the nuclear age, and in the past 75 years, the minute hand has fluctuated. It has inched closer to midnight with the Soviet Union's first nuclear weapons test, India's ``Smiling Buddha'' test, and more recently, President Trump's threats of ``fire and fury'' against Kim Jong Un.
When the destructive power of nuclear weapons has been curbed, the clock has receded from midnight. Kennedy and Khrushchev answered the Cuban Missile Crisis by banning atmospheric and undersea nuclear tests; Bush and Gorbachev retired thousands of nuclear weapons made obsolete by the fall of the Iron Curtain; and Obama locked down nuclear material around the globe, keeping it out of the hands of terrorists.
I fear that we are seeing echoes of the darkest days of the Cold War--a time marked by fear and distrust of an adversary's true intentions; a time when the gold-plated defense establishment plowed ahead with new capabilities without any consideration of how proliferation begets proliferation; a time when the myth of a ``bomber and missile gap'' with the former Soviet Union spurred an arms race that brought us to the brink.
Thankfully, President Biden has taken some steps to crank the minute hand back from midnight. While Trump was intent on dissolving the New START treaty with Russia, President Biden saved it in his first days in office. The treaty's value, especially in the context of Russia's war in Ukraine, cannot be overstated. The treaty puts our eyes on Russia's strategic forces so we can be confident in distinguishing between Putin's nuclear bluster and actions that should legitimately raise the alarm.
But the New START treaty is not enough. Putin's provocations about nuclear escalation, coupled with his brandishing of battlefield nuclear weapons, highlight our need to negotiate new systems into a future treaty or agreement with Russia. Putin's invasion of Ukraine threw a wrench into progress in the U.S.-Russia strategic dialogue, but when the moment arrives, we need to restart these discussions, and we need to be bold.
The use of nuclear weapons as coercive tools means it is essential that we do not welcome any new members to the nuclear weapons club. President Trump failed us by creating a minefield of obstacles against cleanly reentering the Iran nuclear deal, but President Biden knows that the alternative to reentry is far worse: We will see more enrichment, more proxy attacks, and risk a direct war with Iran versus the United States.
We must also hold our partners to the same verification standard as we hold Iran. Saudi Arabia must come clean about its illicit nuclear and missile cooperation with China. We should insist that Saudi Arabia adopt the Additional Protocol to its International Atomic Energy Agency Comprehensive Safeguards Agreement so that we can be sure that any future nuclear program turns out peaceful megawatts, not megatons; so that it is an electricity program and not a nuclear weapons program.
Kim Jong Un's recent missile launches show that we ignore the North Korean leader at our own risk. In consultation with our allies, we need to break the endless cycle we have seen: a provocation from the North, followed by sanctions, then another provocation, sparking a fresh round of sanctions. Our policy is stuck in an endless loop of nuclear Groundhog Day. It is time to concede that a leader like Kim Jong Un, who is willing to divert resources away from his starving people in order to strengthen his weapons of mass destruction program, cannot be coerced to disarm by piling on sanctions alone. While the denuclearization of North Korea is a worthy long-term goal, we have to humble ourselves to pursue the art of the possible--incremental steps that reduce the threat of war on the Korean Peninsula.
In facing all of these challenges, we cannot continue to preach temperance from a barstool. As the leader of the only country to have used nuclear weapons in a conflict, we can't afford to take a back seat when it comes to reducing nuclear risks. The President must use his position to send the message that responsible nuclear weapons powers don't roll out new weapons systems in military parades; they sit down in good-faith negotiations to reduce the sizes and uses of their nuclear deterrents--and that must include China.
Russia's invasion of Ukraine has set back the nonproliferation regime, but it also creates an opportunity for President Biden to challenge China's Xi to join him in reassuring a rattled world that firing on nuclear reactors is off limits, that threatening countries with existential weapons is unacceptable, and to show the world that the inevitability of a ``Sputnik moment'' with China does not have to come to pass. Our two countries may disagree on a lot, but we can embrace the organizing principle that the only way to win an arms race is not to run in one.
For instance, we are concerned about China's development of maneuverable hypersonic systems and its plans to expand its ICBM force, but Pentagon leaders admit that Beijing's concerns about advances in U.S. missile defenses are partly the impetus for that buildup. We are concerned that China may be drifting away from its no-first-use doctrine, but both the United States and Russia explicitly allow for the use of nuclear weapons in response to a nonnuclear attack. We fear that China may use new civilian nuclear reactors to churn out massive amounts of separated plutonium for bombs, but other countries in the region also have the capacity to divert fissile material from a peaceful to a nonpeaceful program.
If President Biden can get Xi to the negotiating table, we have a chance to shape an alternative future to the inevitable doom that the Pentagon has previewed--one that does not see the United States and China joining Russia in pursuit of new innovative, more lethal ways to kill one another; one that instead negotiates near-term confidence- building measures to reduce nuclear risks with China and that can ultimately lead to the conclusion of formal arms control agreements between our countries. The United States cannot do it alone, but we can break the cycle of nuclear escalation and secure a future wherein the fate of millions no longer hangs on the whims and judgments of fallible leaders or the military- industrial complex.
We need President Biden to outline that bold action plan that draws inspiration from our better angels, not from the unhinged policies of nuclear weapons overkill that Stanley Kubrick lampooned in ``Dr. Strangelove.''
In my book ``Nuclear Peril: The Politics of Proliferation,'' written in 1983, I wrote:
Nuclear proliferation is a problem too long ignored. Now, before it is too late, the public must draw the line. The stakes are too high.
The public clearly understands that the stakes for our planet have never been higher, but it is not too late, not yet. Once the clock hits midnight, though, our time is up. It is time for action, not rhetoric. This issue is one that can no longer be ignored.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Source