Bill Nelson: “if I may be recognized, I will use these remarks to tell the Senate that it has been a pleasure to work with the…”

“if I may be recognized, I will use these remarks to tell the Senate that it has been a pleasure to work with the chairman of the full committee, Senator Levin, who has consistently given this Senator free rein as the chairman of the Strategic Subcommittee of the Armed Services Committee. What it looked like last winter was that all the thorny issues of nuclear weapons and the follow-on nuclear weapons and the question of national missile defense, the strategic posture of the United States, would get us all wound up around the axle. But it didn't turn out that way, and I want to give credit to my colleague, Senator Sessions, the ranking member of our subcommittee, for working with me and the members of the committee in resolving these issues. What we worked out in subcommittee, basically, is what is in the bill. Although the administration would like to go ahead and start building national missile defense sites in Eastern Europe, the fact is, they haven't even worked it out with the countries involved in Eastern Europe. So what we did was we put a fence around any funding other than the acquisition and the preparation of the land for such a site. At the end of the day, there is going to have to be continued research and development should the need arise for locating those missiles in Eastern Europe because they are not the same version that is in the silos in Alaska. That is a three-stage version; this is a two-stage version.”