Pete Domenici: “In 1989, this pink portion of the Senator's chart called ``Defense Environmental Restoration and Waste Management'' was…”

“In 1989, this pink portion of the Senator's chart called ``Defense Environmental Restoration and Waste Management'' was $800 million. It is now in excess of $5.5 billion. And actually, everybody understands that we must clean up the leftovers in the Senator's State, in the Savannah River area, in a couple of other areas in the United States, we must clean them up because that is our responsibility, and it is a leftover defense activity. So we pay for it here. So whenever we talk about defense money, unless somebody wants to take that out and say it is no longer a defense function, in which event I assume we would reduce defense spending by that amount and put it in some other civilian funding, that amount is in this appropriations bill and in every other one. Now, I want to comment on two other things. When we were involved in the confrontation with the Soviet Union, we had a number of things that we have since decided we would not do. First, we did underground testing. For some--and I am not attaching any quality to this debate--we should have stopped them a long time ago. But for those who have to be accountable for the quality of the weapons, they were very reluctant to give up underground testing.”