John Garamendi: “My congratulations to the chairman of our committee, Mr. Thornberry, and the ranking member, Mr. Smith, for helping us…”

“My congratulations to the chairman of our committee, Mr. Thornberry, and the ranking member, Mr. Smith, for helping us put together an extremely important bill that does many, many good things for our military and our national security. You have heard speakers before me talk about those issues ranging from the additional pay for our military personnel, both civil and enlisted. All that is good. However, I do want to raise an issue here, and that is, this bill also pushes even further and faster down the path towards a new nuclear arms race. I said before, we are well into the first quarter of it. Well, when this bill goes into law, we will be well into the second quarter, an extraordinarily expensive proposition, costing this country well over $1.2 trillion to $1.5 trillion over the next 20 years. It also puts us in a position where I believe we are not going to be more safe. Many of the weapons that are being developed--the bombs, the delivery systems--are designed not to be observed. So much of what we have learned over the years about how to keep ourselves and our enemies at bay on the mutually assured destruction track will not apply as we go into this. A couple of things immediately on my mind. A low-yield nuclear weapon, there is no such thing as ``low.'' It happens to be a whole lot, much larger than the bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima. So where are we going to go here?…”