Benjamin Gilman: “I believe my colleague, Mr. Solomon's, amendment is an important one that opens a debate that this body needs to have.…”

“I believe my colleague, Mr. Solomon's, amendment is an important one that opens a debate that this body needs to have. Many of us here have been supportive of the goals of the Cooperative Threat Reduction program--or Nunn-Lugar program as it is commonly known. Few, if any, of the Members of this House have difficulty in accepting that it is in our national interest to help the states of the former Soviet Union dismantle a large portion of their weapons of mass destruction and safely store nuclear warheads and other materials. None of us deny that the denuclearization of Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Belarus, by lessening the number of nuclear-armed states in the world, was a real achievement. The problem now lies in the fact that we cannot ignore other American interests that lie beyond the process of reducing weapons of mass destruction. What my colleague's amendment does is simply make that case. We cannot long ignore the fact that the Russian military is spending large sums on its brutal operation in the separatist region of Chechnya, or that it may be better able to defray the cost of that operation due to Nunn-Lugar assistance elsewhere in the Russian military budget.”