Risk of Conflict with Nuclear Weapons

Floor Speech

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Ms. TOKUDA. Mr. Speaker, I rise to join my colleagues and reinforce their warning and urgent call to action.

Mr. Speaker, today, we stand at a crossroads. The world is once again drifting toward a future where nuclear weapons are not just tools of deterrence but urgent threats hanging over every human life.

Mr. Speaker, we cannot afford to look away, not when the lessons of the past are still very visible amongst us. Look to the people of the Marshall Islands. Many of them are living in my district, part of our Hawaii ohana, whose lands became sacrifice zones in the name of power. Entire communities were displaced, and generations were scarred by radiation. The Bikini Atoll, once a paradise, became a proving ground for devastation.

These are not just theoretical consequences, lines on paper, assumptions, and equations. They were real, and they are very real still.

The United States and its allies conducted 318 nuclear tests in the Pacific islands. The people who lived on the islands lost their ancestral homes, now uninhabitable, and the people who were exposed to fallout were immediately sickened with ongoing, long-term impacts for human health, including increased rates of birth defects, genetic disorders, and secondary cancers.

The nuclear age taught us that while bombs may drop in seconds, their impact crosses centuries and generations, and now, instead of learning from history and learning from the mistakes of our past, we are poised to repeat it with greater risk, fewer safeguards, and far more at stake.

Today, the United States, Russia, and China inched closer to an unrestrained three-way arms race as we collectively spend well over $1 trillion on updated and new nuclear warheads and means of delivery. Just one of these programs, as was mentioned, the Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile, will cost $141 billion according to the Department of Defense.

Keep in mind, Mr. Speaker, that is not even the bottom line. Their cost estimates keep growing and growing. A new arms race is a race with no finish line. Let us be clear: There are no winners, only losers in this race.

It doesn't have to be this way.

We must urgently renew and expand nuclear arms control treaties with both Russia and with China. The path to security lies not in new warheads or Golden Domes but in dialogue, transparency, and mutual restraint. We must invest as much into diplomacy and prevention as we do into silos and interceptors.

Let us be clear. All it takes is one bomb, one miscalculation, and one moment of madness, and everything--everything--will end.

The clock is ticking, but the future is still ours to shape. Let us choose wisdom over fear, peace over peril, and life over annihilation.

Mahalo to my colleague, Congressman McGovern, for organizing this Special Order hour.

I ask on August 6 and August 9, let us take a moment to pause and remember we do have a choice.

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