On the recordFebruary 10, 2016
Mr. President, I thank the Senator from Colorado, Mr. Gardner, for his leadership on this issue--together with the chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, Senator Corker--for bringing us to this moment. This is a rare bipartisan moment, where the Senate has come together and agreed to debate, vote, and pass an important bill that imposes sanctions on one of the most dangerous regimes in the world. Recently, I was in Hawaii at the Pacific Command and we asked Admiral Harris, a four-star U.S. Navy admiral who heads Pacific Command, to rank the areas of the world that he was most concerned about, the regimes that he thought represented the biggest danger to peace. He listed North Korea as No. 1. That may be because of the proximity of his area of responsibility to North Korea, but there is no question an unstable leader with nuclear weapons and intercontinental ballistic missiles is a threat not only to the region but to the United States as well. We know over the weekend North Korea successfully launched a long- range rocket and put a satellite into orbit. This was done in defiance of sanctions and represents a dangerous trend of an increasingly hostile and unstable North Korea. It was particularly alarming for several reasons. First, the same technology that put that satellite in orbit can be used to deliver a nuclear weapon. Long-range ballistic missiles have the potential to hit the U.S. homeland.…
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