Joe Biden

Mr. BIDEN

Mr. BIDEN. I yield time to the Senator.

Mr. BIDEN. I will be happy to yield.

Mr. BIDEN. Mr. President, I will yield myself 5 minutes. The argument has been made that the United States will not be able to modernize its deterrent arsenal to meet new threats or encounter new technologies under the Strategic Stockpile Stewardship Program, and that is why some of my colleagues are saying we cannot go ahead with this treaty. I want to make it clear, the test ban treaty does not prevent us from adapting most operational characteristics of a nuclear weapons system to changing military missions, should we determine we have to do that. Many important parts of a nuclear weapon can confidently be developed, tested, and integrated into nuclear weapons without any nuclear tests because they do not involve changes in the primary or secondary components of the warhead; that is, the so-called physics package. Dr. Paul Robinson, the Director of the Sandia National Laboratory, told the Armed Services Committee on Thursday night: Adapting deployed nuclear designs to new delivery systems, or even other delivery modes, is not constrained by the elimination of nuclear yield testing. Let me put this in ordinary English. We keep being told here what has happened is, if we sign on to this treaty without this Stockpile Stewardship Program being fully completed, we are going to put ourselves at great disadvantage, amounting to nuclear disarmament; we will not be able to modernize our systems, and our systems are going to atrophy. Dr. Robinson, the Director of Sandia, went on to describe a prominent success in the Stockpile Stewardship Program that is working now. We have nine deployed systems, nine different kinds of nuclear bombs. One of them is the B61 Mod-7 strategic bomb. That was adapted without any nuclear tests. I have a photograph of that I will hold up now. That is a B-1 bomber. That red missile that is being dropped out of the belly of that bomber is a change in the B61 Mod-7 to a B61 Mod-11, in response to a different requirement. What was the different requirement? The military said they needed a nuclear weapon that could destroy targets that were buried very deeply in the ground, and that Mod-7 version of the B61 nuclear warhead could not do that. So without any nuclear test, they tested a new system. It is called the Mod-11. That can penetrate the Earth deeply and destroy deeply buried targets. This picture illustrates an important fact. You can test nearly everything in a nuclear weapon so long as you do not put enough nuclear material in it to cause an uncontrolled chain reaction. We did not set off this bomb, but we did test the bomb. You can take the plutonium out of the bomb, and put uranium in the bomb, and you can test it. It just doesn't set off this uncontrolled chain reaction. So this idea that we cannot change anything in our arsenal if we sign on to this is simply not correct. By the way, the JASON Group, which is the most prestigious group of nuclear scientists in the United States of America, studied this, and they said the Strategic Stockpile Stewardship Program can maintain all of our systems. One particular member of that group, testifying before the committee, Dr. Garwin, points out that we can even exchange entire physics packages; that is the plutonium and that secondary package, that device that explodes it, that blows up. In my visual image of it, the best way to explain it, as I was trying to explain it to my daughter who is a freshman in college, what happens is you get this plutonium, and you have to have something to ignite it, set it off. So there is a secondary explosion that takes place, and it shoots all these rods into this plutonium at incredible speeds. I yield myself 2 more minutes. What happens is it detonates the weapon, this chain reaction starts, and you have a thermonuclear explosion. The question has been raised whether or not, if we figured out that this plutonium was no longer either stable or functional or was not reliable, could you take out of the warhead the thing that makes it go boom, the thing that causes the chain reaction, the thermonuclear explosion, and put a new package in? Dr. Garwin says you sure can do that, without testing, without nuclear tests. This year, the first W-87--that is another warhead--life extension unit was assembled in February for the Air Force at the Y12 plant in Oak Ridge. It met the first production milestone for the W-87 life extension. These are major milestones and successes in the Stockpile Stewardship Program. I might add, as my friend from Massachusetts knows, nobody is suggesting we start to test now--nobody that I am aware of. I should not say nobody. Nobody I am aware of. There may be somebody suggesting it. Preservation of the option of modernizing U.S. nuclear weapons to counter emerging defensive technologies, the phrase you hear, does not require ongoing nuclear testing. The most likely countermeasures would involve changes to the missile and its reentry system, not to the nuclear explosive. It is a red herring to suggest if we sign on to this treaty, we are locking ourselves into a system that is decaying and moving into atrophy and we are going to find ourselves some day essentially unilaterally disarmed. That is a specious argument.

Mr. BIDEN. I thank the Chair. Mr. President, I yield 10 minutes to the Senator from Massachusetts, Mr. Kennedy.

Mr. BIDEN. Parliamentary inquiry: If we go into a quorum call at this point, the time is taken out equally from the opponents and proponents; is that right or wrong?

Mr. BIDEN. I yield to the Senator from Montana.

Mr. BIDEN. How much time does the Senator need?

Mr. BIDEN. Madam President, I want to print in the Record, without taking the time from the Senator from New Hampshire, some other quotes from Dr. Robinson from his testimony on October 7, 1999. I ask unanimous consent they be printed in the Record.

Mr. BIDEN. I will try to respond briefly. No. 1, to suggest our actions would affect the international community should not be taken in the context and consideration of what is happening in the international community is naive in the extreme. It is not suggesting anyone should dictate what we should or should not do. It is suggesting that it makes sense to take into consideration what is happening around the world and what appropriate or inappropriate conclusion from our action will be drawn by other countries. We have always done that in our undertakings around the world. It is just responsible stewardship of our national security. The suggestion was not that because there is a coup, failure to ratify this treaty, turning it down or ratifying it would have affected that coup. That is not the issue. The issue is there is a struggle today within Pakistan, evidenced by the coup, as there was within India, as evidenced by their recent elections, about what they should do with their nuclear capacity, whether they should test further, enhance it, and deploy it, or whether or not they should refrain from testing and sign the treaty. The only point I am making is that our actions will impact upon that debate within those countries. The debate happens to be taking place in the context of a military coup right now in Pakistan. It took place in the context of an election where the BJP won and made significant gains in India just last week, but it does impact upon that. We lose any leverage we have to impose upon Pakistan, which still wants to deal with us, still relies upon us or interfaces with us in a number of areas in terms of food, trade, and aid all the way through to military relationships. It does make a difference if we are able to say to them, I posit: We want you to refrain from testing and sign on to this treaty if, in fact, we have done it. If we say: We want you to refrain from testing and sign on to the treaty, but by the way, we already have 6,000 of these little things and we are going to test ourselves, it makes it very difficult to make that case. Lastly, I say with regard to Pakistan, it is not so much what anyone will be able to prove; it will be what will be asserted. We all know in politics what is asserted is sometimes more important than what is provable. It should not be, but it is. It does have ramifications domestically and internationally, I suggest. Also, with regard to this issue of the preferred versus the only method by which we can guarantee the reliability of our stockpile, nobody, including the present lab Directors, suggests that our present stockpile is, in fact, unreliable or not safe. We have not tested since 1992. The issue is, and my colleague knows this, the intersection--and it is clear if we do not test, if we do nothing to the stockpile, it will over time degrade, just like my friend and I as we approach our older years, as a matter of medical fact, our memories fade. It is a medical fact. To suggest that because our memories fade we should not listen to someone on the floor who is 8 years older than someone else would be viewed by everyone as mildly preposterous because when that older person was younger, their memory may have been so far superior to the person who is younger now that they still have a better memory. It does not make a point. It is a distinction without a difference. It is the same way with regard to our stockpile degrading. At what point does the degradation occur that it is no longer reliable? I asked that of Secretary Schlesinger. He said he thinks we are down from 99 percent to about 85 percent now, and he thinks there is no worry at that 85-percent level. But what he worries about, and then he held up a little graph and the graph showed based on years and amount of reliability this curve going down like this, at the same time there was a dotted line showing the Stockpile Stewardship Program and how that mirrored that ability to intersect with where we would intersect our confidence that our Stockpile Stewardship Program would be able to assure that the stockpile was reliable. It comes around where the shelf life of these weapons occur about 10 years out. Everyone has said that between now and then, the overwhelming body of opinion is, from the Jason Group to other leading scientists, including these 32 Nobel laureates in physics, the Stockpile Stewardship Program is working now and will if we make the commitment to intersect at a point where the shelf life begins to change where it continues to guarantee. We are never going to be in that line where it is so degraded that any lab Director will have to say: Mr. President, I cannot certify anymore. But as a fail safe, no pun intended, for that possibility--that is why the amendment was just adopted--the amendment says in the last paragraph, if that happens and a lab Director tells the President that has happened and it cannot certify in terms of reliability, the President must get out of the treaty. It is true; we are stringing together a lot of true statements that are not particularly relevant to the question, and the question is: Is our stockpile now reliable and safe? Is it a deterrent still? Do other people believe it? Is it a deterrent so that our allies believe it and they do not go nuclear, such as Japan and Germany? And is it a deterrent so that our potential enemies, such as China and Russia and others, believe it so they will not try to do anything that will jeopardize our security? That is the second question. The third question is: Are we able to verify this? My answer to all three of those questions is, yes, yes, yes. And the answer of the overwhelming body of opinion is yes, yes, yes. But just in case it is no, the President has to get out. He has to get out. We just adopted a condition, so he has to get out. By the way, I listened to people being quoted, like Edward Teller. God love him. I had the great honor of debating him around the country on four setup debates. It was intimidating because he would stand there with those bushy eyelashes and say: My young friend from Delaware does not know--here is the guy who invented the hydrogen bomb. What am I going to say? Yeah, right? I would listen to him, and he would even get me thinking he was right for a while. Then I would listen to what he said. Last night, I watched a documentary that is 7 or 8--actually, it is older than that; it was President Reagan's last year--on the Star Wars notion. Dr. Teller was sitting there, a very distinguished man, saying things like--and I will get the exact quote for the Record tomorrow--but he said things like: We must act now because the Russians are on the verge of having a missile defense capability. On the verge; they were on the verge of collapsing. He is never right about his predictions, so far. But he did invent the hydrogen bomb. That is a big deal. I cannot argue with that. As my mother would say, just because you can do one thing well does not mean you can do everything well. If I need to blow somebody up, I want him with me. If I need somebody to predict to me what is going to happen in terms of our interest, of our adversaries, or us, he ``ain't'' the guy I am going to because he has not been right. Here we are, we are going to do this weight of authority--we all learned, and, again, I am not kidding when I say this. Senator Kyl is not only a first-rate lawyer, he has a first-rate mind. We both went to undergraduate school and took courses in logic. We learned about the 13 logical falacies. We engage in them all the time. One is the appeal of authority. I will take my authority and trump your authority. I have 32 Nobel laureates. Are you going to raise me with six Secretaries of Defense? I have four of the last five Chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, with what are you going to raise me? This is crazy. What is true is that it is better to test if you want to know for certain whether weapons are reliable. I hope if I acknowledge that, he will acknowledge it is better not to test on one area: If you want to discourage others from testing. Just discourage. He does not have to agree that it would do everything, just discourage. It is better not to test. If you tell your kid he cannot smoke and you are standing there smoking and saying: By the way, you can't smoke, it kind of undermines your credibility. On the other hand, if you do not smoke--like I don't--and say to your kid, you can't smoke, they may smoke anyway; but one thing is for certain: If you are smoking--as my friend who is presiding would say in a different context--you might lose your moral authority to make the case. I think we lose our moral authority to make the case internationally when we say: By the way, we are unquestionably the most powerful nuclear nation in the history of the world, and in relative terms we are far in excess of anyone else, including the former Soviets--now the Russians--that the Chinese are not, as they say where I come from, a ``patch on our trousers,'' that the Libyans and others may be able to get themselves a Hiroshima bomb, but they are going to have to carry it in a suitcase--it ``ain't'' close. But I tell you what: Because we worry about our reliability--even though we are going to spend $45 billion, even though we have the best scientists in the world, the best scientists that we can attract from other parts of the world--we know we can put up a shield around America that can stop 10, 20, 100, 1,000 hydrogen bombs from dropping on the United States--but we believe that we have to test our nuclear weapons now or be able to test them in the near term in order to be able to assure that we are safe and secure and that you believe we are credible. I will end where I began this debate a long time ago. When the Senator from New Hampshire and I were college kids, you used to ride along--he was heading off to Vietnam--and there used to be a bumper sticker which said: One hydrogen bomb can ruin your day. It just takes one. One hydrogen bomb can ruin your day. We are not talking about one hydrogen bomb. No one is doubting that 1,000 people and 15 nations in the world can develop not a hydrogen bomb but a nuclear bomb like the one dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. No doubt about that. This is not going to stop that. This isn't going to guarantee that because you do not, everyone has to test that. They can do that without testing. We dropped it without testing it. The second one we did not test. So they can test; they cannot test. But, folks, this is high-stakes poker. All I am saying to you is, you take the worst case scenario my friends lay out, that we have the stockpile, but we cannot guarantee it, and we cannot detect testing, and we have an escape clause--you get out of it because the treaty is not working. That is their worst case scenario. The escape clause is we have to get out because it says we must get out. Let me tell you my worst case scenario. My worst case scenario is we, in fact, do not sign this treaty, and the Chinese decide all moral restraints are off--even though they are not particularly a moral country--we can now, with impunity, go and test and not be buffeted by world opinion in terms of affecting our trade or our commerce and the rest. We can go from 16, 18, 20--however many intercontinental ballistic missiles they have--we can now test to build lighter, smaller ones with that information we stole from the laboratories. We can now MIRV our missiles. The Pakistanis and the Indians agree that: Look, what we have to do is now deploy nuclear weapons because the restraints are off. I do not know what we do with that worst case scenario. There is nothing the President can say, such as: By the way, stop. Out. I want to pull out. You all can't do that. China, you can't do that. There is no way out of that one. This is not like us making the mistake on a tax bill. This is not like us making a mistake on a piece of welfare or social legislation. We can correct that in a day. I have been here when we passed reforms on health care that within 6 months we repealed because we thought it was a mistake. You cannot legislate on this floor of the Senate a course of action that the world is engaged in, a road that has been been taken down away from nonproliferation to proliferation by a piece of legislation. I cannot guarantee the Presiding Officer that if this passes there will not be more proliferation of nuclear weapons. But I am prepared to bet you anything, if we reject this treaty, there will be significantly more proliferation of nuclear capability than there was before because there would be no restraint whatsoever on the one thing every nation has to do to become a nuclear power that is not already a significant nuclear power--and that is to test. I yield the floor. Mr. KYL addressed the Chair.

Mr. BIDEN. Madam President, I won't take the time.

Mr. BIDEN. I never thought the Senator was liberal in what he said.

Mr. BIDEN. That is not what he said, if I may interrupt, if I could quote what he said.

Mr. BIDEN. He said it will give North Korea ``an obvious reason not to ratify CTBT.'' He did not say it will give them reason to produce nuclear weapons.

Mr. BIDEN. I wish to respond, if I may. I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. BIDEN. As well, I ask unanimous consent to print in the Record quotes from the October 7 testimony of Dr. Robinson, Dr. Tarter, Dr. Tarter again, Dr. Browne, Dr. Robinson, Mr. Levin, Dr. Robinson, Dr. Robinson, Dr. Tarter, Dr. Tarter and Dr. Browne; it is an exchange.

Mr. BIDEN. I thank the Chair, my colleagues, and my friend from New Hampshire.

Mr. BIDEN. If the Senator will yield, from what document is he reading?

Mr. BIDEN. Mr. President, the Senator from Virginia would be next, but he has kindly yielded to the Senator from New Mexico. My friend from Arizona keeps saying the ``acknowledged flawed treaty.'' It is not acknowledged to be flawed by 32 Nobel laureates in physics. It is not acknowledged to be flawed by four of the last five Chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. It is not acknowledged to be flawed by the weapons lab Directors, et cetera. I want to make it clear, he states some believe it is flawed. The majority of the people who are in command and have been in command--the Secretaries of Defense who have been mentioned--if we balance it out, clearly think this is not a flawed treaty. I yield on the Republican time to my friend from New Mexico.

Mr. BIDEN. I yield 10 minutes to my friend from Virginia.

Mr. BIDEN. I yield 10 minutes to the Senator from Maryland.

Mr. BIDEN. Mr. President, we have been going back and forth. Senator Sarbanes is seeking recognition, but I see our friend Senator Brownback is here. It is his turn if he wishes to speak.

Mr. BIDEN. I will be delighted to.

Mr. BIDEN

Mr. BIDEN. They seem to work.

Mr. BIDEN. Will the Senator yield for 30 seconds for me to respond? We did pass the ABM Treaty, SALT I treaty, the START I treaty, the INF Treaty, the CFE Treaty, and we did it during the cold war.

Mr. BIDEN. Madam President, if the Senator will yield, not on his scientific assessments, on his political judgment.