Chemical Demilitarization

Floor Speech

CHEMICAL DEMILITARIZATION -- (Senate - February 04, 2008)

Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, today Congress received the fiscal year 2009 budget request from President Bush. It is a budget that does not raise taxes and provides a framework for eliminating the deficit within 5 years. Both objectives are consistent with and critical to our long-term economic goals.

It is now up to Congress to fully and fairly consider this budget proposal and each appropriations bill.

I do not need to remind our colleagues we are also hard at work to pass an economic growth package. While considering the budget, we must not undo the economic growth policies contained in that package by increasing the size of Government, when we should be increasing the size of the economy.

Turning to one particular item in the budget that is of great importance to me and my home State of Kentucky, I wish to speak briefly about the budget request for the disposal of chemical weapons at the Blue Grass Army Depot in Richmond, KY.

For years, I have led the fight in Congress to safely and efficiently dispose of the deadly chemical weapons at the Blue Grass Army Depot, and for years the Department of Defense bureaucracy has dragged its feet on this issue and refused to comply with Congress's direction that disposal of such weapons be given serious attention and the resources to get it done.

As a result, complete disposal of these deadly weapons has been pushed further and further into the future, even though the people of Richmond and Madison County, KY, have been living for too long already with over 500 tons of chemical weapons in their midst. This includes VX nerve agents, one of the deadliest nerve agents ever created.

You can understand the people of Madison County and, frankly, I have had enough. So I am pleased to report that after making my wishes clear to Defense Secretary Gates, I have convinced the Department to increase the fiscal year 2009 budget request amount to a level that will help enable the Blue Grass Army Depot to more safely and quickly dispose of these weapons.

I personally thank Secretary Gates for his involvement in this success. I have worked with and been frustrated by Defense Secretaries under both Republican and Democratic administrations. But Secretary Gates gets it and he took action. I thank him for that, and I know the people of Madison County do as well.

Before we intervened, DOD had initially set fiscal year 2009 funding for the Assembled Chemical Weapons Alternatives Program, or ACWA, at $351 million. ACWA is the program that will dispose of these chemical weapons.

Now the ACWA budget has been increased to nearly $398 million, thanks to Secretary Gates. This is the third consecutive year we have been able to persuade DOD to increase the ACWA budget request. By increasing the funding level, we can speed up the disposal.

In addition to adequate funding, legislation I authored and that was enacted into law now sets a deadline for DOD to complete work on disposal by 2017. That is right, it is now law that disposal must be completed in less than 10 years, by 2017.

This is a two-pronged approach to solving this problem and these two prongs complement each other. Together, increased funding for disposal and a deadline set into law are moving us closer to the disposal of these heinous weapons.

In short, when it comes to the chemical weapons stored at Blue Grass Army Depot, dollars plus a deadline equals disposal. That is the goal: the quick and safe disposal of these chemical weapons. The people of Kentucky deserve no less.

I yield the floor.

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