Risk of Conflict with Nuclear Weapons

Floor Speech

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Mr. FOSTER. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. McGovern) for holding this Special Hour to discuss the dangers of nuclear weapons.

Mr. Speaker, when I first entered Congress, I was the third Ph.D. physicist elected to this body. We had at the time Vern Ehlers, a nuclear physicist and a conservative, religious Republican representing western Michigan.

We had Rush Holt, a plasma fusion physicist, a progressive Democrat representing Princeton.

We had me, a sort of garden-variety Democrat who spent the last 25 years smashing protons and antiprotons together to make particles that have not been around since the big bang.

Although our politics were quite different, we were united by a special responsibility to join the discussion about nuclear weapons and ask what we could do to strengthen global nuclear security and maintain U.S. leadership in trying to prevent nuclear war.

One area where we were always in violent agreement was to stop wasting money on Star Wars, which was then rebranded as the SDI, the Strategic Defense Initiative, and has now been rebranded Golden Dome.

For more than 45 years, scientists have been patiently explaining to policymakers that this is never going to work. It is easy to overwhelm with a trivial response to it.

We have spent over $200 billion on it. We have never tested it once against the kind of countermeasures that we know any competent opponent would deploy. Even if we succeed at stopping ballistic missiles, there are, unfortunately, many other ways to deliver nuclear weapons that we can never stop.

This thing is deeply--I guess ``stupid'' is not too strong a word. We explain something to someone in a variety of terms again and again, and they don't want to hear it because they think it messages so well.

Wouldn't it be great if we had this magic Golden Dome, or whatever we want to call it, to stop nuclear weapons? Yeah, it would be great.

If it is an impossibility to do the fundamental physics of it, then we should stop talking about it, and we should certainly stop wasting money on it.

Another place where we were always in strong agreement was how we should be strengthening the nonproliferation efforts at our national laboratories.

Our national labs create an underlying foundation for all of our nuclear security efforts including the nonproliferation and national security priorities that we are talking about here today. In order to ensure that current and future arms control efforts are properly fulfilling their mission, we have to invest in our scientific workforce to maintain our leadership and verification efforts.

It is certainly not well-known among Members of Congress, but when the IAEA sends inspectors into Iran and into countries of concern, those have been largely trained by the national labs in the United States. When we gut the nonproliferation capacities of our national labs or simply allow them to retire, as has been happening, we risk putting aside one of the most powerful tools we have to actually enforce any deal that we may get.

The President is very fond of talking about this deal he is going to get on Iran nuclear. We listened to him talk about how he was going to get North Korea. I support efforts to try to do that.

If we ever succeed in getting one of these deals, for sure we are going to need to have experts we trust that can go in there and make sure nobody is cheating. Unfortunately, what we are seeing is the gutting of those budgets in that capacity. I guess it doesn't satisfy the MAGA worldview.

Over the years, I have focused my attention on a few specific areas to strengthen our nuclear security architecture. One of them is what is called nuclear--well, it has a number of names. If for some reason a nuclear weapon is detonated somewhere in the United States or anywhere around the world, the President will come under huge pressure to say: Who did that? Whose weapon was it?

There is a lot of very detailed knowledge that we have had in the past in our national labs to be able to go in there and do what is called nuclear forensics and find out whether that was a bomb from X, Y, or Z. That capacity has been under duress for a long time. It seems like it is every single time the appropriations budgets come up, we end up having to try to defend that.

That is something that is completely irrelevant until it is the most important question in the world. Who did that? Who let off this nuclear weapon? How do we make sure we don't retaliate against the wrong person or entity that did that?

There are a number of other things I have been working on. First and foremost is H. Res. 100. It is a resolution I introduced in the House with 19 other Members. It supports arms control and condemns Russia's purported suspension of its participation in the New START Treaty.

The current extension of the New START Treaty is set to expire in under a year, and anyone who remembers previous arms control negotiations will know that there is almost no time left to negotiate a subsequent treaty.

Additionally, any negotiations, whether with Russia, China, or any other country, will require partners who are willing to have discussions on arms control, which is something that is far easier said than done.

This is not something where the two great men leading great nations can come together and strike a deal. The details matter. We have to have technical experts that we trust to go deep down into the weeds to have an agreement so they can come back and say this is a solid agreement we can trust.

It is a time when traditional channels of dialogue on arms control and strategic stability have been closed or quiet, and we are going to rely more than ever on keeping alternative channels open and keeping the expertise in place. Then when the time comes for these agreements, we have people we trust who can carry them out.

Mr. Speaker, nongovernmental organizations, scientists, and research institutions have kept this dialogue open even during the worst parts of the Cold War, and we are going to need to rely on them to fulfill these roles again.

Another crucial institution that we must continue to support in these times is the IAEA, the International Atomic Energy Agency. We have already seen the incredibly hard work that Director General Grossi and his staff are putting in to responding to the Russian invasion of Ukraine with its many nuclear reactors and the myriad of other crises on their doorstep.

Mr. Speaker, that brings us to Iran. One of the proudest moments in my career was standing alongside Dr. Richard Garwin, who, as Representative McGovern mentioned, was often pointed to as the father of the hydrogen bomb and a strong advocate for nuclear nonproliferation. He stood by my side, along with Energy Secretary Dr. Ernest Moniz, as I announced my support for the Iran nuclear deal.

One of the tragedies of the recent past has been this President's abandonment of the Iran nuclear deal, which has gotten us into a heck of a pickle, as predicted by the people who actually understood what our true options were in that negotiation.

After the U.S. bombing of Iran, there has been an immense amount of debate about whether or not Iran's nuclear program was set back by a certain amount of time, whether it is years or whatever. The level of technical ignorance that has been displayed by this administration is, frankly, frightening. They have access to the best weapons designers in the world, and they are either not listening to them or not asking questions.

When you hear Secretary Rubio, for example, saying not to worry about their 60 percent enriched uranium inventory because they are going to have to convert it to metal and that will take years, anyone with knowledge of the history of the Manhattan Project knows that is not a major activity. Iran has done it for a long time. They know how to do it.

If you are only interested in converting from uranium hexafluoride to metal, a few tens of kilograms, which is what you need for your first set of weapons, this happens in a laboratory. It can happen in a congressional office. You don't need a big space for this.

The conversion of the uranium hexafluoride to what is called green salt, and the green salt to metal, is something that happens in a small industrial building. It can happen anywhere in any city in Iran, and it will be really hard to tell. We have not prevented them from doing what they have to do.

The enrichment level is another thing where we are seeing, frankly, technically ignorant statements made. We have three levels of uranium. Less than 20 percent is generally regarded as relatively safe and can be used in reactors without a lot of safeguards. When you get about 90 percent enriched uranium, that is the good stuff for really high- performance weapons.

What about in between? They have 60 percent uranium. Guess what? That is not weapons-grade, but it is weapons-usable. For example, the Hiroshima bomb was made with a mixture of 50 percent enriched uranium and higher enriched uranium.

The 60 percent enriched uranium that Iran has a significant inventory of is perfectly usable even for a simple Hiroshima-style gun-type device. Our leadership speaks in apparent ignorance of that fact, beating their chest and saying we set them back by decades, when that is not the case.

Just to give a sense of the scale, the 400 kilograms of uranium hexafluoride that the IAEA watched them enrich to 60 percent is stored conventionally in the United States in about 25 scuba tank-sized pressurized containers. Any five of those containers have enough uranium to make a Hiroshima-style nuclear weapon.

These things are not hard to smuggle. We will have a hard time convincing ourselves, in fact, that the Iranians haven't already done it.

Pretending like Iran does not have a credible threat and has no leverage is a dangerous and ignorant position for our government to be taking and one of the scariest things about the many threats that we face right now.

Those who don't know should go look at the Wikipedia article on the Hiroshima Little Boy bomb and the references in it. It is, unfortunately, very well-documented over the years because it is not the best weapon you can make, by far. You can make much more complex and efficient weapons, but the Iranians don't have to do that.

If they simply want to replicate what was done, they would get an old 155-millimeter howitzer, replace the explosive shell with some enriched--60 percent enriched will work just fine--uranium, shoot it into the right-shaped target, and they have something that is as effective as the Hiroshima weapon.

This is not a trivial risk. The only answer to this is negotiations, and we have to get very serious about that.

It is not something that the Iranians even have to test. We did not test the Hiroshima weapon. It was obviously going to work. The physics hasn't changed in the 80 years since then, so we are at a very uncertain position on that, and we shouldn't pretend otherwise.

We have also recently been hearing a lot of calls about the resumption of nuclear testing. This is particularly worrying because the move away from nuclear testing has been really one of the cornerstone successes of nonproliferation and nuclear security.

Just think of all the attention Donald Trump could get by giving the order that he wants to blow up a nuclear weapon just to make sure it works, or whatever it is. Yes, he would get a lot of attention that way.

Our country has a tremendous amount to lose if everyone begins nuclear testing again. The U.S., during the Cold War, conducted over 1,000 nuclear tests, far more than any other country, and we had much better instrumentation, knowing exactly what happened in those explosions.

The knowledge that we gained has allowed our Nation to maintain the safety, security, and effectiveness of our nuclear stockpile without any further testing. If we were to resume testing, the rest of the world would resume testing. I am sure they all have bomb designers that are just champing at the bit to get more data on exactly what happens if they explode one of their untested weapons.

If we do this, we would be giving away the most significant strategic advantage that our country has, which is this huge database of exactly what works and what does not work in detailed and very technologically aggressive designs for our nuclear weapons.

If we open that Pandora's box, every country that is nuclear-capable will say this is their opportunity to become coequal with the United States in knowledge of nuclear weapons. That will be yet another disaster for the proliferation regime.

The next few years are going to be crucial to making sure that the world we live in remains safe from the threat of nuclear weapons.

Mr. Speaker, I thank Representative McGovern for bringing us together to discuss this.

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