Mike Gallagher: “It is my privilege to offer my colleague, Ms. Cheney's, amendment to restore badly needed funding for Trident II…”

“It is my privilege to offer my colleague, Ms. Cheney's, amendment to restore badly needed funding for Trident II Modifications relating to low-yield submarine-launched ballistic missile warheads. This amendment seeks to address an urgent operational requirement. Russia has a nuclear doctrine known as escalate to deescalate. This doctrine emphasizes using low-yield nuclear weapons against U.S. and allied forces on the battlefield. As the logic behind this doctrine goes, destroying large portions of NATO forces with low-yield nuclear weapons would leave allied decision- makers with an unenviable decision between accepting Russian conquest and the effective end of NATO, or launching strategic nuclear weapons and ushering in a nuclear holocaust. In other words, they put the onus of escalation and all of the attendant international opprobrium on us. I don't know about you, but that does not sound like a good choice to me. The Nuclear Posture Review is actually clear on this subject: ``Expanding flexible U.S. nuclear options now, to include low-yield options, is important for the preservation of credible deterrence against regional aggression . . . will raise the nuclear threshold and help ensure that potential adversaries perceive no possible advantage in limited nuclear escalation, making nuclear weapons employment less likely.'' Critics may argue that we have already had low-yield weapons in our arsenal and we do not need a submarine-launched variant.…”