Mark Dayton: “I am proud to rise with my very distinguished colleagues who have introduced this measure, Senator Feinstein and Senator…”

“I am proud to rise with my very distinguished colleagues who have introduced this measure, Senator Feinstein and Senator Kennedy; they who have eloquently stated, along with the Senator from Illinois, the reasons why this drastic change in American policy is so ill-advised--to resume the testing, development, and deployment of nuclear bombs. That would put the United States back into the front of the world pack of nations now proceeding with nuclear weapons development. We should be leading the world in the opposite direction, to stop the future proliferation of nuclear bombs. We can't do both. We can't tell other nations around the world not to build even a single nuclear weapon and then do it ourselves. We already have thousands of nuclear bombs. Yet we are going to tell other governments: You can't have even one. We should be negotiating those agreements. We should prevent other nations that do not presently have nuclear weapons from developing them. We should negotiate agreements with North Korea, Iran, whereby they would stop and dismantle their nuclear weapons production in return for economic assistance, food, technological development, whatever it is we can do to improve their peaceful standard of living and help bring them back into the civilized world. We should proceed to carry out the agreement which President Bush and President Putin reached over a year ago to consolidate and reduce the nuclear weapons which our two countries have.”