Waiving Points Of Order Against Conference Report On H.R. 5682, Henry J. Hyde U.S.-India Peaceful Atomic Energy Cooperation Act of 2006

WAIVING POINTS OF ORDER AGAINST CONFERENCE REPORT ON H.R. 5682, HENRY J. HYDE U.S.-INDIA PEACEFUL ATOMIC ENERGY COOPERATION ACT OF 2006 -- (House of Representatives - December 08, 2006)

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Mr. MARKEY. Madam Speaker, I thank the gentleman very much for yielding me time.

This bill that we are considering is an historic mistake, a mistake which will come back to haunt the United States and the world. India has refused to sign the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. Iran is a signatory to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.

We are asking the U.N. to isolate Iran, to force it to comply with its signature on the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, not to use civilian nuclear materials in order to create a military nuclear weapon.

What are we doing here today? We are saying to India, you do not have to abide by the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty at all. You never signed it, we put it on the books because of India, we know that it created an arms race with Pakistan, and instead of enforcing our own law, our own law, we are now out here going to carve out an exception.

Now, what do the experts say? Well, the experts say that India produces approximately seven nuclear bombs per year, but they have a limited amount of nuclear material. What are we doing? We are going to provide the nuclear materials for their civilian nuclear program so that it will free up their domestic nuclear materials for their weapons program.

What do the experts say? The experts say that is going to increase India's capacity to make nuclear weapons to 40 to 50 nuclear bombs per year. Now, people here say, well, that is fine. Why worry about it? India is a country that we trust. Well, you know who does not trust India? I will tell you who does not trust India: Pakistan does not trust India. Pakistan, the home of al-Qaeda. Pakistan, the home of A.Q. Khan, the nuclear Pied Piper, the nuclear Johnny Appleseed, who spread nuclear weapons material across the world.

Here is what we have learned now: We have learned that Pakistan is constructing its own nuclear weapons manufacturing facility that will increase their capacity from 2 to 3 nuclear bombs per year to 40 to 50 nuclear bombs per year.

Now, the Bush administration, as we all know, has already made a mess of our nuclear nonproliferation policy in North Korea, a mess of our nuclear nonproliferation policy in Iraq, a mess of our nuclear nonproliferation policy in Iran. And the world is now looking at us. Pakistan is looking at us. Iran is looking at us. North Korea, Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, Egypt. How will we handle this challenge on the Asian subcontinent? The answer: We are just going to do away with the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, because that is what this vote will be on the House floor today.

We are just basically saying: It is all over. The rest of the world will not listen to us again. The consequences, the domino effect, the nuclear weapons domino effect begins here, ladies and gentlemen. It begins today. It begins with a policy that says that it is not enough for the United States to have high-tech commerce with India, to have outsourcing of our jobs to India, to have massive increases in diplomatic relations and dozens of other areas with India. No, as a gesture of our friendship with India, we are going to gut our own nuclear nonproliferation policy.

Now, back in the debates of 2004, there was really only one thing that George Bush and John Kerry agreed upon, and that was that the most important issue in the world was nuclear nonproliferation. And here we are on the last day of the Republican era in the United States Congress gutting the most important policy, the policy which has kept the reins imperfectly but significantly on the spread of nuclear weapons over the last generation.

And this is in a way almost the exclamation point on the end of this Republican era, on the Bush administration's efforts to control nuclear weapons. This era will be looked back at as the era where the Bush administration and the Republicans in this Congress said: Anything goes. Anything for trade with India. When asked, we will surrender our nuclear nonproliferation policy.

Pakistan is now in a massive escalation of its nuclear weapons program. Al-Qaeda is headquartered in Pakistan. A.Q. Khan lives in Pakistan in a palace, still not under arrest, still not in prison, his people who helped to spread these nuclear weapons still walking the streets of Pakistan. What kind of administration do we have that instead of saying, we are going to put together a conference that deals with that issue which will threaten us here in the United States, because these materials will escalate massively in the Asian subcontinent.

This is in many ways comical. I mean, it really is comical. We are going to debate the end of the nuclear nonproliferation regime in the United States for an hour on the last day of Congress. It is comical. I am scraping here to get an extra minute out of this paltry amount of time to debate what the consequences are of what we are doing. And so, yeah, this is a going-away present to the Bush administration. There has been such a mismanagement of the nuclear nonproliferation policy over these last 6 years that this probably does represent, in a crazy kind of a way, you know, the final statement.

But I will tell you, we are going to come back and we will rue this day, because the Pakistanis and the Iranians, they are not going to sit on their hands and allow this to happen. They are going to look at us and they are going to say: These Americans, they preach temperance from a bar stool. They are going to say that this is an era of historic hypocrisy, where the United States expects the rest of the world to listen to us when we tell them that they should not pursue nuclear weapons, while we selectively grant exceptions to countries that never signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty in the first place.

It is a nonsustainable policy. It will come back to haunt us, not today, not tomorrow, but there will be a day in 5 years or 10 years when everyone here today will be able to point back to this moment and say that is the day the historic mistake was made

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Madam Speaker, I rise in strong opposition to this conference report.

For over three decades it has been the policy of the United States to restrict nuclear trade with India. Why? Because in 1974 India violated its pledges to the United States and Canada to use American and Canadian nuclear technologies only for peaceful purposes.

Instead, India used our technology to develop and explode a nuclear bomb.

Despite that history, despite the refusal of India to sign the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty or to honor its contractual obligations to the United States, this Administration has now undertaken to ignore the past and to ask Congress to approve legislation that will, according to nonproliferation experts from across the political spectrum, enhance India's nuclear bomb-making capacity from 7 bombs a year to over 40 bombs a year.

This is exactly the reverse of what we should be doing if we are serious about reducing the spread of nuclear weapons in the world. In fact, it was India's blatant misuse of peaceful American nuclear technologies for a weapons program that prompted the Congress to radically strengthen our nonproliferation laws. And when we were done with that, we went to our allies and established new international guidelines to prevent any other country from doing what India had done: misusing imported nuclear technologies for a secret weapons program. And now, in an act fraught with hypocrisy, irony, and hubris, the Congress will approve a sweeping exception from our nonproliferation laws for the very country that prompted us to strengthen those laws.

I fully support strengthening American ties with India on trade, high-tech, military cooperation, and so many other issues, but why do we need to gut our nonproliferation laws at the same time? The simple fact is that we DON'T have to gut our nonproliferation laws in order to improve our relationship with India, but the President took us into the nuclear Twilight Zone, instead.

During the Conference, the Bush Administration, reportedly at New Delhi's urging, tried to strip out the few good nonproliferation provisions that the Congress inserted into what is a deeply flawed piece of legislation.

Last week, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice wrote a letter asking Congress to remove a requirement that India help us prevent Iran from going nuclear. I don't know what the administration was thinking, telling the Congress that we can't ask for India's help on Iran's nuclear program.

I want to thank the gentleman from California (Mr. Lantos) for fighting to ensure that at least an ongoing assessment of India's cooperation with U.S. and international efforts to curb Iran's nuclear ambitions be performed, both at the time that the formal nuclear cooperation agreement is submitted to Congress and every year thereafter. While the Gentleman and I may disagree on the underlying legislation, I appreciate his efforts, and those of Chairman Hyde, to try to address this issue and to try to mitigate some of the damage that this agreement may do to our nation's nuclear nonproliferation policies.

But the bottom line is that under the President's plan to fuel India's nuclear power reactors, we're going to free up their nuclear material for weapons. And just this summer, we learned that India's arch-rival Pakistan is building a huge new reactor to make nuclear bomb material.

There's a nuclear arms race on in South Asia, and the United States is about to become an accomplice to this arms race.

If we want the rest of the world to stop fueling the proliferation of new nuclear weapons, we had better stop throwing gasoline on the fire ourselves. The India Nuclear Deal is bad for U.S. security. It undermines U.S. nuclear nonproliferation efforts around the world, and it risks fueling an accelerated nuclear arms race in South Asia.

Madam Speaker, this is a watershed moment for the world. If the United States goes soft on nuclear weapons proliferation, the entire world will go soft. Countries which in good faith abstained from nuclear weapons development will have a green light to go ahead following the India-U.S. model. In my view, this is a prelude to catastrophe. I cannot imagine that the House will ever again confront a vote that is so central to our leadership, our standing, our moral authority on the issue of stopping the spread of nuclear weapons. I urge my colleagues to vote against this Conference Report.

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