National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2005

NATIONAL DEFENSE AUTHORIZATION ACT FOR FISCAL YEAR 2005 -- (House of Representatives - May 20, 2004)

The SPEAKER pro tempore. Pursuant to House Resolution 648 and rule XVIII, the Chair declares the House in the Committee of the Whole House on the State of the Union for the further consideration of the bill, H.R. 4200.

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Mr. MARKEY. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentlewoman for yielding me time.

Mr. Chairman, the gentlewoman and I have been making this amendment for 3 years, $500 million on a program for a weapon which is unusable. Can you imagine on the first day of Shock and Awe if we had dropped a nuclear bunker buster in the middle of Baghdad to get Saddam Hussein, and he was not in the command bunker, he was not there at all? The catastrophe for our country across the whole world would have been disastrous. We found him in a spider hole, 5 feet deep.

You cannot drop a nuclear bomb in the middle of a city. It is an unusable weapon.

Our threat is that Iran and North Korea and other terrorist groups are trying to get a nuclear weapon. We cannot preach temperance from a bar stool; you cannot tell a kid not to smoke while holding a Camel cigarette in your hand.

If we want other countries to disavow the desire to develop nuclear weapons, we cannot be developing new usable nuclear weapons, which is what the Republican majority, the Bush administration, wants to do. We must use our political and our moral high ground to convince every other country in the world to disavow that interest.

This is the worst public policy decision that the Bush administration is making. We started a war in Iraq because of our fear of him having nuclear weapons. We are sending a signal to Iran, to North Korea, to Syria, to Egypt, to every other country in the world, that nuclear weapons are usable and we will use them. Well, they will develop them as well, Mr. Chairman, and the next generations of Americans will be less secure, not more secure.

Vote for the Tauscher amendment if you care about the security of the children and the grandchildren in our country. It is the only way in which we can convince this military-industrial complex that they could not have won in Iraq if they had used nuclear weapons. They would have destroyed our capacity for evermore to be a political and moral force in the world.

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