Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague, the ranking member of the Rules Committee, Mr. McGovern, for yielding. I thank him and the CPC for organizing this very important Special Order hour. Next month marks 80 years since the atomic bombings of…
Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague, the ranking member of the Rules Committee, Mr. McGovern, for yielding. I thank him and the CPC for organizing this very important Special Order hour.
Next month marks 80 years since the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These were the only times nuclear weapons have ever been used in war.
I have to say that this memorial, this memory, this 80th anniversary milestone is not just historical, it is somewhat personal and unexpectedly so, say, beginning in 2001, 2002 when at the age of 40, 41 I made my first visit to Japan.
I grew up as an American, a Japanese American. One of my grandparents, my only grandparent, my grandfather, Isao Takano, immigrated to the United States around 1916. He was born in 1898 in Japan, and he came from the environs of Hiroshima.
Growing up, we would go to his niece, my second cousin or I don't know how to kind of appropriate the right sort of familial designation of who is a cousin, a second cousin, but Kikue Takagi was my grandfather's niece who married an American and lived in Anaheim and worked at Disneyland.
We knew some facts, but we never in our times when we would get together for our family gatherings would we ever discuss what happened in Hiroshima. It wasn't until I was well into my adulthood on my first trip to Japan visiting Hiroshima and visiting Kikue, who was there taking care of her mother, that I learned that she was a ``survivor''; ``Hibakusha,'' that is the Japanese word for survivor, of the atom bomb.
She lived in the outskirts of Hiroshima. If you have been there, it is mountainous. It is a place, a delta, with five different rivers converging, and she lived in the outskirts. She was a middle school student. On the day that the bomb dropped, she was still ill, so much so that her mother said she didn't need to go into the city center to do her public service work. The middle schoolchildren were needed to clean up the debris of the area around the downtown of Hiroshima. They were doing an urban renewal project to widen the streets.
They knew, the people of Hiroshima, the political class knew that Hiroshima was a target because it was an industrial city. But little did they know that the teachers, the middle schoolteachers and the 13- year-olds who were there at the city center doing this public service work were all going to perish that day. My cousin survived because she stayed home at the behest of her mother.
She had not visited any of the memorials until I had arrived in the early 2000s. And I felt a tinge of guilt for asking her to do this because she had never really sort of delved into this history by visiting the memorial museum.
Riding over the bridge of one of the rivers to the museum the day that Kikue and I decided to go, she told me about how the river was not visible during the day that the bomb was dropped and the days afterward because of the number of bodies that just covered the surface of that water.
When you arrive at the memorial location, you can see bottles of water that many people who attend these memorials will leave for the thirsty souls of those who perished and those who were thirsty from the August heat.
I feel a deep obligation and responsibility to carry this memory forward. I remember as I crossed the bridge thinking to myself how I was personally connected by family to this historical event, that it was not something abstract. It was a moment that who I was, my identity, somewhat shifted and changed.
More than 200,000 people were killed, most of them civilians. Some died instantly. Others suffered for months or years from burns, radiation, and grief.
Mr. Speaker, 80 years after the erasure of two cities we have still not learned the lessons of these terrible bombings.
There are an estimated 13,400 nuclear warheads on Earth today. The United States and Russia hold more than 90 percent of them. Together, we control more than 12,000 warheads, and that is more than enough to end human civilization. While the United States and Russia maintain the largest stockpiles, China is rapidly building.
According to the Department of Defense, China's arsenal already has 500 operational warheads, and if current trends continue, it could surpass 1,000 by the year 2030.
This growth adds to global instability and makes the case for urgent diplomacy and arms control even stronger. Yet, the most important arms control treaty still in force between the United States and Russia is set to expire in less than 200 days.
If we let the New START Treaty expire, we will be left with no legal limits on the size of the two largest nuclear arsenals in the world. At the same time, we are seeing headlines about strikes on Iran's nuclear facilities.
These actions revive a dangerous question: Can we stop the spread of nuclear weapons through military force? I believe the answer is no. We cannot destroy knowledge with a bomb. We cannot erase a nuclear program by targeting one facility.
Strikes might delay a program, but they almost always provoke retaliation and harden resolve. They do nothing to build the kind of long-term trust and transparency that actually reduces nuclear risk.
That is why we need a strategy based on diplomacy, prevention, and protection. We know that this strategy can work because it did in the past. Iran's nuclear weapons program development ground to a halt under the Iran nuclear deal. It was only after President Trump ripped up the accord that Iran set itself on the pathway that it is on today.
The recent strikes reinforce the military theocracy's paranoia that the only pathway to secure the regime's long-term survival is through the development of a nuclear program. Like I said before, if a nation has enough willpower and know-how, they will develop a nuclear weapon. That means that the United States' national security cannot solely rest on deterrence. We should lead by example.
That means modernizing verification tools, supporting the international inspectors, and investing in the diplomatic capacity to negotiate real agreements. It also means rethinking how we can make decisions about the use of nuclear weapons.
Mr. Speaker, Congress has a role to play. We cannot stay silent while the risks grow and the guardrails fall away. The American people deserve transparency about how nuclear launch decisions are made and who is involved in making them. This is not just a matter of policy. It is a matter of survival.
Mr. Speaker, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not mere tragedies. They were warnings. The people who died there cannot speak for themselves, but we can speak for the future they were denied. We can choose a path that avoids repeating the worst mistake in human history.
Let us honor the lives lost not only with remembrance but with responsibility. Let's choose diplomacy over destruction, prevention over provocation, and peace over peril.
Let me return back to that scene of riding over that bridge over the river with my cousin Kikue and the thought that I had that every world leader who has some control over a nuclear arsenal should make a commitment to visit Hiroshima, to walk the grounds and understand what happened there and in Nagasaki. I think that is the only way that one has the moral stature and authority to be a leader of a country that has a nuclear arsenal.