Byron Dorgan: “This is a piece of a wing strut of a Russian bomber. We didn't shoot it down. We cut the wing off. I happen to have a…”

“This is a piece of a wing strut of a Russian bomber. We didn't shoot it down. We cut the wing off. I happen to have a piece of it. This was happening because our colleagues, Senators Nunn and Lugar, put together a program by which we actually paid for the dismantlement of Russian bombers. I also have copper wiring from the ground-up copper of the electrical wires of a Russian submarine. We didn't sink that submarine. We paid money to have that submarine destroyed, as part of our agreement with Russia to reduce that country's nuclear weapons. This is a hinge from a silo in the Ukraine that previously housed a missile with warheads aimed at the United States. There is now planted on that ground sunflowers, not missiles, because we paid the cost of reducing delivery vehicles and reducing nuclear weapons in the stockpile of the former Soviet Union. This is a program that works--a program that is unbelievably important. And as I and some others viewed these programs in Russia, we understood again the importance of what we have been doing under the Nunn-Lugar program: The Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Belarus are now nuclear weapons free. That didn't used to be the case. There are no nuclear weapons in those three countries. Albania is chemical weapons free. We have deactivated, under the Nunn-Lugar program, 7,500 former Soviet nuclear warheads.”