Russ Feingold: “It is a great joy working with the distinguished Senator from Michigan, and I regret having to be on the opposite side…”

“It is a great joy working with the distinguished Senator from Michigan, and I regret having to be on the opposite side of this amendment, especially since it is our two States that are most affected by this project--ELF. But this truly is a project in search of a justification. It had a purpose in the cold war. But when the Senator from Michigan lays out the purpose of the program, what isn't clearly identified is all this Project ELF does. He talks about the slower speeds and the fact that the submarines have to come up. But that is premised, somehow, on the notion that the submarines are being told something of any detail while they are submerged. They are not. Project ELF can only tell the submarine: ``Come up.'' It is sort of like: ``ET, phone home.'' That is all you get. ``Come up and get your messages. Check your answering machine.'' While the submarine is submerged, it cannot learn what the threat is, it cannot get instructions, it cannot get anything. All it gets is a message that it has to come up anyway, that it has to slow down anyway. For 5 years I have been searching for a justification for something that is nothing more than really a very primitive beeper system that you can't communicate back with and you can't get any real information from. The only justification for it was the fact that we had a threat from Soviet nuclear submarines. That threat is no longer there, and there is no two-way communication that comes from this.”