Expiration of New Start

Floor Speech

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Ms. HOYLE of Oregon. Mr. Speaker, at a time when global tensions are rising, the last thing we need is more weapons. That is why it is so important that the New START treaty, set to expire in 21 days, is renewed by the administration quickly and in good faith.

The New START treaty reduced the number of nuclear warheads in the United States and Russia to the lowest level since 1950. This is not the time to start going in the other direction.

Nuclear risks continue to rise, and when we see countries like Russia testing their nuclear delivery systems, the danger grows for everyone, including many Oregonians.

In southern Oregon, the Federal Government rushed to mine uranium in the 1950s to fuel the Cold War. Two open-pit mines outside Lakeview in the Fremont National Forest supplied the material that went to the Hanford site to produce plutonium for nuclear weapons.

When that rush ended, we were stuck with that contamination. It took decades for the EPA to declare the mines as Superfund sites, leaving the land poisoned.

At the Albany Research Center, construction workers built, maintained, and later tried to clean up the nuclear weapons complex, often without being told what they were exposed to. Decades later, workers are still fighting to get screened for cancers and other life- threatening illnesses caused by their exposure to radiation. Taxpayers are still paying the price from the arms race.

The Federal Government has paid out more than $27 million to more than 430 Oregonians who were uranium workers exposed to fallout or downwind of testing. This is what happens when we forget what nuclear proliferation cost us.

Yet, the Department of Defense and the Department of Energy plan to spend more than $900 billion over the next decade to modernize our nuclear arsenal.

The cost of the Sentinel ICBM missile program alone has exploded, pushing the cost per missile to $161 million, an 81 percent increase from its original projections. The cost of nuclear acquisition programs will be 11.8 percent of the Department of Defense's planned acquisition costs over the next 10 years. Remember, this is an agency that cannot pass an audit. This is out of control.

We will always find the money for war, but not to take care of our workers or Tribal partners or to compensate the communities who paid the price for that last generation of weapons, so we must act in good faith to ensure an open-ended arms race does not happen.

Nuclear nonproliferation has not been and should not be a partisan issue. We don't need more weapons. We need more affordable healthcare, upgrades to our transportation infrastructure, expansion of U.S. manufacturing capacity, and to focus our taxpayer dollars on things that benefit the American people and that make our communities safer.

Mr. Speaker, I am happy to work with any of my colleagues to develop a commonsense approach to limiting our nuclear stockpiles and to keep this administration from taking us down a costly and destabilizing path, which is why I am proud to have cosponsored H.R. 100, which, again, just reiterates my position on nuclear proliferation. I thank Dr. Foster for all his work.

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