Dale Bumpers: “I want to voice those concerns both for the Record and for a response by the chairman of the subcommittee dealing with…”

“I want to voice those concerns both for the Record and for a response by the chairman of the subcommittee dealing with weapons activities. Now, for the Record and people who read it and may not know, the Energy Department not only tries to develop solar energy and better ways to explore for oil and gas and that sort of thing, the Energy Department is also charged with the responsibility of developing and maintaining our nuclear weapons. They build them, they stockpile them, they guarantee to the people of this country their safety and reliability. They guarantee the safety of them for our benefit; they guarantee the reliability of them for the benefit of the Defense Department which is going to put these nuclear weapons on submarines, missiles, and so on. But I have been concerned about the amount of money we are spending on that. What I wanted to do was to engage the chairman in a discussion of why we are spending the kind of money we are on this project. For example, this year, 1997, the year we are in right now, we are spending somewhere around $120 million to $200 million more on the so-called DOE weapons activities account than we did in 1996.”