On the recordJuly 11, 2019
I thank the gentlewoman for yielding. Mr. Chair, I simply want to make two points. One is that the Under Secretary of State for Arms Control is supposed to meet with her Russian counterpart on this issue next week. What are we doing? We come to the floor, and we want to tie her hands. We want to restrict her ability to negotiate with the Russians. That doesn't make any sense to me. There has been discussion about flaws in the treaty, how it has not kept up with changes in technology. Yet the House wants to come and say, ``Well, we think we ought to extend it anyway,'' giving the Russians a benefit that they don't have to give anything up for. It may be that we come to a point where we think extending New START makes sense. The Russians ought to participate in that as part of a negotiation, not a unilateral move for us. Secondly, I have to note more broadly in this bill that when New START was ratified, part of the agreement was, yes, we will go down to a lower number of nuclear weapons, but we are going to put increased investment into the nuclear weapons complex to make it more responsive, because with lower weapons, if something goes wrong, you have less margin for error. This bill before us cuts the requested funding from the nuclear weapons complex. It cuts funding requested for the Minuteman III replacement. It cuts in a variety of ways our attempt to have a strong nuclear deterrent.
