'Our Country Has A Tremendous Amount To Lose': Bill Foster Warns Against Resuming Nuclear Testing

Forbes Breaking News

In House floor remarks before the Congressional recess, Rep. Bill Foster (D-IL) spoke about Iran.

Transcript

00:00Thank you Mr. Speaker and thank you Representative

00:10McGovern for holding this special hour to discuss the dangers of nuclear weapons.

00:14You know when I first entered Congress I was the third PhD physicist elected to

00:21this body. We had at the time Vern Ehlers a nuclear physicist and a conservative

00:28religious Republican representing Western Michigan. We had Rush Hold, a plasma fusion

00:34physicist, a progressive Democrat representing Princeton. And we had me, a sort of garden variety,

00:42garden variety Democrat who spent the last 25 years smashing protons and antiprotons together

00:50to make particles that have not been around since the Big Bang. And although our politics were quite

00:56different we were united by a special responsibility to join the discussion about nuclear weapons and

01:03ask what we can do to strengthen global nuclear security and maintain the U.S. leadership in

01:09trying to prevent nuclear war. One area where we were always in violent agreement was to stop wasting

01:16money on Star Wars which was then rebranded the SDI the Strategic Defense Initiatives and is now

01:23rebranded Golden Dome. For more than 45 years scientists have been patiently explaining to policy

01:32makers that this is never going to work. It is easy to overwhelm with a trivial response to it.

01:38We have spent over 200 billion dollars on it. We have never tested it once against the kind of counter

01:45measures that you know any competent opponent would deploy. And even if we succeed at stopping ballistic

01:56missiles there are unfortunately many other ways to deliver nuclear weapons that we can never stop.

02:02And so this thing is, it is deeply, I guess stupid is not too strong a word. When you explain something

02:10to someone in a variety of terms again and again and they just don't want to hear it because they

02:15think it messages so well wouldn't it be great if we had this magic golden dome or whatever you want

02:21to call it that would stop nuclear weapons. Yeah it would be great but if it is an impossibility to do the

02:27fundamental physics of it then we should stop talking about it. We should certainly stop wasting money on it.

02:33Another place where we are always in strong agreement was how we should be strengthening the non-proliferation

02:43efforts at our national laboratories. Our national labs create an underlying foundation for all of our

02:49nuclear security efforts including the non-proliferation and national security priorities that we're talking

02:56about here today. In order to ensure that current and future arms control efforts are properly fulfilling

03:02their mission. We have to invest in our scientific workforce to maintain our leadership in

03:07verification efforts. You know it's not well known certainly among members of congress but when the IEA

03:15sends inspectors into Iran into you know countries of concern those have been largely trained by the

03:23national labs in the United States and when we gut the the non-proliferation capacities of our national labs or

03:30simply allow them to retire as has been happening we risk putting you know putting aside one of the most

03:39powerful tools we have to actually enforce enforce any deal that we may get. You know the president's very

03:46fond of talking about this deal he's going to get on Iran nuclear we listened to him talk about how he was

03:53going to get North Korea. You know I support efforts to try doing that but if we ever succeed at getting one of

03:59these deals we are going to need for sure to have experts we trust that can go in there

04:04and make sure nobody's cheating. But unfortunately what we're seeing is the gutting of those budgets in that

04:10capacity because you know it doesn't it doesn't satisfy the mega worldview I guess. And over the years I

04:19focused my attention on a few specific areas to strengthen our nuclear security architecture. One of them is what's called a

04:27nuclear well it's it's the business it has a number of names but the the question is if for some reason a

04:36nuclear weapon is detonated somewhere in the United States or anywhere around the world there the president

04:42will come under huge pressure to say who did that whose weapon was it there is a lot of very detailed

04:49knowledge that we have had in the past in our in our national labs to be able to go in there do what's called nuclear

04:56forensics and find out whether that was a bomb from x y or z and that capacity has been um you know

05:04under under duress for a long time and it's it seems like it's every single time the the appropriations

05:10budgets come up we end up having to try to defend that and you know that's something that's completely

05:15irrelevant until it's the most important question in the world who did that who let off this nuclear

05:21weapon and and how do we make sure we don't retaliate um uh against the wrong the wrong person

05:28or entity that did that and so um oh first then there are a number of other things i've been working

05:35on first and foremost is h res 100 it's a resolution that i and introduced in the house with 19 other

05:40members supporting arms control and condemning russians purported suspension of its participation in the

05:47new start treaty the current extension of the new start is set to expire in under a year and anyone

05:53who remembers previous arms control negotiations will know that there's almost no time left to

05:58negotiate a subsequent treaty additionally any negotiations whether with russia china or any other

06:04country will require partners who are willing to have discussions on arm control which is something

06:09that's far easier said than done um this is not something where the two great men leading great

06:16nations can come together and strike a deal the details matter and you have to have technical

06:23experts that you trust going deep down into the weeds to have an agreement that they will come back to you

06:29and say yeah this is a solid agreement that we can trust um you know and and it's a time when

06:34traditional channels of dialogue on arms control and strategic stability have been closed or quiet and we're

06:41going to rely more than ever on keeping alternative channels open and keeping the expertise in place

06:46so when the time comes for these agreements we have people we trust that will can carry them out

06:52a non-governmental organization scientists and research institutions have kept this dialogue

06:57open even during the worst parts of the cold war and we're going to need to rely on them to

07:03fulfill these roles again another crucial institution that we must continue to support in these times

07:09is the iaea the international atomic energy agency we're already seeing the incredibly hard work that

07:15director general grossi and his staff are putting in to responding to the russian invasion of ukraine

07:21with its many nuclear reactors and the myriad of other crises on their doorstep which brings us to iran

07:28you know one of the proudest moments in in my career was standing alongside dr richard garwin who

07:36as representative mcgovern mentioned that you know the often pointed to as the father of the hydrogen bomb

07:42um and a strong advocate for nuclear non-proliferation he stood by my side along with energy secretary dr ernie

07:50moniz as i announced my support for the iran nuclear deal and one of the tragedies of the recent past has

07:56been uh this president's abandonment of the iran nuclear deal which has gotten us into a heck of a pickle

08:03uh the as predicted by the people who actually understood what our true options were in that

08:10negotiation uh you know and you know after the u.s bombing of iran uh you know there's been an immense

08:17amount of debate about whether or not iran's nuclear program was set back by a certain amount of time

08:22you know whether it's years or whatever but the level of technical ignorance that has been displayed by

08:29this administration is frankly frightening they have access to the best weapons designers in the world

08:35and either they're not listening to them or not asking their questions because when when you hear um

08:42secretary rubio for example saying oh don't worry um don't worry about their 60 enriched uranium

08:48inventory because they're going to have to convert it to metal and that will take us years anyone with

08:53the knowledge of the history of the of the manhattan project knows that is not a major activity iran has

09:01done it for a long time they now know how to do it and if you're only interested in converting from uranium

09:08hexafluoride to met to metal of you know a few tens of kilograms which is what you need for your first

09:14weapon and set of weapons you know this is this happens in a laboratory it can happen in a congressional office

09:21you don't need a big space for this the um the conversion of the uranium hex to what's called

09:27green salt and the green salt to metal is something that happens in a in a small industrial building

09:32that can happen anywhere and in any city in iran and will be really hard to to tell so we have not

09:39prevented them from doing what they have to do and and the enrichment level is another thing where we're

09:44seeing frankly technically ignorant statements made you know the we have three levels of uranium

09:51there's the less than 20 percent is generally regarded as as uh relatively safe can be used in

09:57reactors with a lot of uh without a lot of safeguards then when you get above 90 enriched uranium that's

10:03the good stuff for really high performance weapons but what about in between they have 60 uranium guess

10:10what that is that is not weapons grade but it is weapons usable uh for example the hiroshima bomb the

10:17hiroshima bomb was made with a mixture of 50 percent enriched uranium and higher enriched uranium the

10:2360 percent in rain your rich uranium that iran has a significant inventory of is perfectly usable even for a

10:31simple hiroshima style gun type device and and when when our leadership speaks in ignorance apparent ignorance of that fact you know

10:43um beating their chest and saying we set them back by decades whereas in fact that's not the case and

10:51and and this uranium this uranium hexafluoride just to give you a sense of the scale the 400 kilograms that

10:58the iea watched them uh enriched to 60 percent that is stored conventionally in the united states in about 25

11:06scuba tank size pressurized thing containers any five of those scuba tanks have

11:12enough uranium to make a hiroshima style nuclear weapon and these things are not hard to smuggle we

11:21will have a hard time convincing ourselves in fact that the iranians already haven't done it all right

11:26and and so just pretending like um iran has does not have a credible threat here and has no leverage

11:34um is is a dangerous and ignorant um position for our government to be taking and one of the the scariest

11:40things about the many threats that we um that we face right now uh you know i just for those of you

11:49don't know actually you should go look at the wikipedia article on the hiroshima little boy bomb

11:54and you will see a lot of the and the references in it you know it's unfortunately very well documented

11:59over the years because it's not the best weapon you can make by far you can make much more complex and

12:05inefficient uh weapons but the iranians don't have to do that if they simply want to replicate what was

12:11done you you get an old you know 155 millimeter howitzer you replace the explosive shell with um some

12:19some enriched 60 percent enriched will work just fine uh uranium you shoot it into a the right shaped

12:26target and you've you've got something that's as effective as the um you know as a hiroshima weapon

12:32you know this is not uh this is not a trivial risk and the only answer to this is negotiations and we

12:40have to get very serious about that um it's not something that the iranians even have to test we did

12:46not test the hiroshima weapon before we said it was just obviously going to work the physics hasn't

12:52changed in the 80 years since then um and so we're in a very uncertain position on that and we shouldn't

13:00pretend otherwise um another we've also recently been hearing a lot of calls about the resumption of

13:08nuclear testing uh you know this is particularly worrying because the move away from nuclear testing

13:14has been really one of the you know it's one of the cornerstone successes of non-proliferation and

13:20nuclear security but just think of all the attention donald trump could get by and by giving the order

13:26he wants to blow off a nuclear weapon just to make sure it works or whatever it is you know yeah

13:31you get a lot of attention that way but our country has a tremendous amount of to lose if everyone

13:36begins uh nuclear testing again the u.s during the cold war conducted over 1 000 nuclear tests far more

13:43than any other country and we had much better instrumentation knowing exactly what happened in

13:49those explosions and the knowledge that we gained has allowed our nation to maintain the safety security

13:54and effectiveness of our nuclear stockpile without any further testing and if we were to resume

14:01testing the rest of the world would resume testing i'm sure they all have uh bomb designers that are

14:07just chomping at the bit to get more data on exactly what happens if they explode one of their untested

14:13weapons we would if we do this we would be giving away the most significant strategic advantage that our

14:19country has which is this huge database of exactly what works and what does not work in detailed and

14:26very technologically aggressive um designs for our nuclear weapons so if we open that pandora box uh

14:33you know every country which is nuclear capable will will say this is our opportunity to become co-equal

14:40with the united states and knowledge of nuclear weapons and that will be yet another disaster for the

14:45proliferation regime so you know the next few years are going to be crucial to making sure that the

14:50world we live in is remains safe from the threat of nuclear weapons and again i thank you representative

14:56mcgovern for bringing us together to discuss this and i thank the gentleman from illinois for his

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