Software Vault: The Gold Collection/Software Vault - The Gold Collection (American Databankers) (1993).ISO/cdr11/wh930523.zip/05-23B.TXT

Internet Message Format | 1993-06-10 | 19KB

From @lex-luthor.ai.mit.edu:[e-mail]  Fri May 21 00:17:15 1993
Date: Thu, 20 May 1993 21:43-0400
From: The White House <[e-mail]>
To: [e-mail]
Subject: President's Remarks To The Los Alamos Community 5.17.93

 Transcript of Remarks by President Clinton To The Los Alamos
Community
 To: National Desk
 Contact: White House Press Office, 202-456-2100

   WASHINGTON, May 17 /U.S. Newswire/ -- Following is a transcript
of President Clinton's Remarks to the Los Alamos Community:

                    Los Alamos High School
                    Los Alamos, New Mexico

1:05 P.M. MDT

             THE PRESIDENT:  Thank you very much.  Governor King,
Senator Bingaman, Senator Domenici, Congressman Richardson,
Congressman Schiff, Dr. Hecker, and the other directors of the
other wonderful labs here present -- Dr. Narath and Dr. Ruckolls;
and my distinguished Secretary of Energy Hazel O'Leary, who is
celebrating her birthday with all of you here in Los Alamos
today.  (Applause.)

             I want to say a special word of thanks to the
students from Los Alamos High School here behind us.  (Applause.)
I love the tee-shirts, and I was so gratified to be invited to
come to the high school commencement.  I didn't make it, but this
is almost as good, don't you think?  I'm really glad to be here.
(Applause.)

             I want to say, too, a special word of appreciation
to all those who spoke here before me today for what they said.
I thought Senator Domenici did a pretty good job of gliding over
our differences and getting right in there.  (Applause.)  I want
to tell you how grateful I am for the national leadership that
Congressman Richardson has given not only to the Congress, but to
the efforts I made to become your President.  And I can't say
enough about the work that Senator Bingaman has done on the issue
I came here talk about today, which is giving us a good high-
wage, high-growth future through the wise and sensible investment
in technology.  You should be very proud of these people, all of
whom represent you in the United States Congress.

             I want to say a special word of thanks to
Congressman Schiff.  Since he's not here in his home district, he
actually gave up the opportunity to speak, which may make him the
most popular person here today.  You can't tell.  (Applause.)

             Bruce King told you the truth -- we were governors
in the '70s, the '80s and the '90s.  Made an old man of me, but
he still looks pretty good.  (Laughter.)  He was the first
governor to endorse my campaign, and New Mexico was the next to
the last stop I made on Election Day, when I stayed up all night
long.  (Applause.)

             I want to say I've come back here today in the light
of day, and a beautiful  day it is, to celebrate with the Los
Alamos Lab the 50th anniversary of a genuine, remarkable American
success story.  For the first half century of Los Alamos's
service, it was the leading edge of our nation's security.  And
now as we go into the next half century, Los Alamos will be, as
Senator Bingaman said, the leading edge of our prosperity,
developing and nurturing the technology that will put all these
young Americans who are here in this great crowd today at the
front of a new race, the race to compete and to cooperate in a
world that is getting smaller, richer, more diverse, but very,
very rigorous in its challenges.

             New Mexico should be very proud to be the home of
Los Alamos and Sandia.  America, indeed the entire democratic
world, owes an enormous debt of gratitude to Los Alamos, to
Sandia, and to the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in California.
When we needed the military muscle to end a global war the answer
was the Manhattan Project.  When we needed the muscle to win the
Cold War, the long and costly effort to contain and then to
triumph over communism, the ideas that made that possible came
out of these laboratories.

             That struggle gave us a focus not just in how we
spend our defense dollars, but how we invested in everything from
our children's education to the interstate highway system.  These
labs were at the core of that effort, providing our nuclear
deterrent.  From the Berlin crisis in 1948 to the Berlin
celebration in 1989 when the wall came down, the work of this
laboratory helped to ensure America's might, America's security
and, in the end, a total triumph for democracy and freedom and
free market economics in the Cold War.  You should all be very
proud of that.  That's a good 50 years of work if I ever heard
it.  (Applause.)

             Now we are in the post-Cold War effort.  Most of the
young people here present will live more of their lives in the
21st century than they have in the 20th.  And we need a new focus
for our efforts.  Our job today is to preserve the American Dream
and America's leadership in the world that America has done so
much to make.  We have to prove that we can compete and win in
this highly complex and rigorous world.  We have to do it so that
all the young people here will not be the first generation of
Americans to grow up to do worse than their parents.  We have to
do it so that we can continue to be a beacon of hope, so that we
can prove that freedom and free enterprise and democracy work.

             We have to begin by putting our own house in order,
by bringing down our enormous deficit, dealing with our health
care crisis, which has produced a system that costs way too much
and covers too few and leaves too many in the insecurity of daily
living, knowing that any moment, they might lose the insurance
they have.  (Applause.)

             We have to follow policies that enable us to educate
and train our people for a lifetime and then promote economic
growth so that they will have jobs that they're educated for.
These are the things we have to do in this time to be worthy,
worthy, worthy successors to the American legacy we have
inherited.

             I've asked the Congress to reduce the deficit by
$500 billion over the next five years, with a combination of
spending cuts and tax increases, none of which are popular,
especially in particular.  Everybody's for deficit reduction in
general.  It's the details that swallows us alive.  (Laughter.)

             I have asked that all this money be put into a trust
fund by law so that nothing can be done with it but to reduce the
debt, so that the children of our country eventually will be able
to get out from under the burden their parents and grandparents
have left for them.  (Applause.)

             I have committed to all the members of Congress and
to the American people without regard to party that this is just
a down payment, that reducing the deficit doesn't begin to bring
the debt down until you get it down to zero.  And we have to keep
working until we do that.  We owe that to the young people here.
(Applause.)

             But we also owe you something more.  We have to
think about the challenges that are here before us; and when they
require us to invest in education and technology and new jobs, we
have to do that as well, for we have to remember that the thing
which enables us to bring our debt down is the economic strength
which reduces working people and incomes from people who then can
pay taxes, who can then deal with less government supports, who
don't need the government spending as much money if they all have
jobs and incomes in a strong free enterprise system.  That is our
obligation to you and to your future.  (Applause.)

             So the question I came here to discuss today for all
of you -- and hopefully it will reverberate throughout the United
States to people who have never been to New Mexico, and may not
have even known of the existence of Los Alamos -- is what is the
opportunity we have right here to revolutionize the economy not
just for those thousands of you who are here, but for every
American family, for every American young person?  Can you affect
the future of America as you have the past?  I think the answer
is a resounding yes.  (Applause.)

             If we are going to march confidently into the 21st
century, we will have to do it on the minds and with the
creativity and with the investment represented here in this
laboratory and in others like it around the country.  And with
the spirit of partnership between government and the private
sector that pervades so many of the efforts now underway here.

             At Los Alamos alone, there are 100 partnerships with
industry.  Technology has led to the creation of 30 new
companies.  Before coming here today I took a look at some of the
projects underway at a plant facility that handles -- listen to
this -- plasma ion implantation.  Now, that sounds like something
a plastic surgeon would do, but it has nothing to do with the
human body.  Instead, it involves a steel vacuum chamber
containing high energy ions which can be pumped in to metal
surfaces or plastic surfaces and used to harden them so that they
will last longer and do better work.  This could revolutionize
America's ability to manufacture automobiles and other machines
to keep going and to have higher productivity longer and lower
costs, so we can once again begin to grow high-wage manufacturing
jobs.  And if it happens, it will happen because of the ideas
that started here in the kind of partnerships we need for
America's tomorrows.  (Applause.)

             And this technology was a direct outgrowth of the
research done on the Strategic Defense Initiative, the so-called
Star Wars Initiative, which means that no matter whatever happens
there and whatever happens to the final shape of that project,
something good came out of it because people were looking to
break down frontiers in the human minds and to explore unexplored
territory.

             This defense technology is now being used as part of
a four-year partnership with General Motors.  Another project
involves GM in helping to build a clean car.  Think of it:  What
if we could build a car that operated on energy sources provided
here in this country, that reduced our dependence on foreign oil,
reduced air pollution, increased energy efficiency, and helped us
to become a partner in the effort to save the global environment,
at the same time exploding American jobs and economic
opportunities.  If that happens, it will be because of what began
here.  (Applause.)

             I saw biomedical technology, analyzing and sorting
single biological cells using lasers, with valuable applications
for AIDS and leukemia diagnosis, a technology that has already
led to an $800 million a year business for three new companies.
There are projects underway for efficient oil recovery,
environmental cleanup, the analysis of air pollution.  With these
partnerships and others like them, we can find the technology-
based answers for the jobs of tomorrow.

             In this economic chain reaction, the result will be
high-paying jobs here in New Mexico.  I saw one project today
which is projected to produce 2,000 jobs in New Mexico within the
next three or four years.  But there will be jobs all across this
nation, in wide-ranging fields, ever more critical to our future.

             Supercomputers developed to design nuclear weapons
are now being used to improve the fuel efficiency of engines, to
help the oil industry find more oil in less time here in the
United States at lower cost.  They're used to educate youngsters
in ways we could never have dreamed of just a few years ago.  I
met some of those bright students earlier today.  They were
actually developing programs for energy conservation, using the
world's largest supercomputer -- having won a contest in the use
of computers sponsored statewide in New Mexico and held here at
Los Alamos.  You could be very proud that you have students like
that who can use a facility like this.  (Applause.)

             We are counting on our nation's labs to make real
contributions in these and other areas of needs that arise our of
our energy and national security missions.  In these tasks, that
laboratories will be helping not only Americans, but our fellow
citizens around the world.  If we can find ways to make the
American people healthier and lower health care costs, it will
benefit us enormously economically, it will provide personal
scurity to millions of American families.  But we will not keep
those things as secrets here in our own borders.  They will
spread around the world and make the world a better and safer and
healthier place.  (Applause.)

             Let me also say that there is still a national
defense mission for these labs.  We have to continue to maintain
the safety and reliability of our nuclear deterrent until all the
nuclear weapons in the worl d are gone.  (Applause.)  We have to
make sure that we can focus on new technologies to counter
proliferation of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons by
other irresponsible countries around the world.  (Applause.)

             There are still too many nations who have not
learned the lesson of the Cold War and how much money was
diverted by the United States and the Soviet Union from other
important efforts.  There are still to many nations who seem
determined to define the quality of their lives by -- based on
whether they can develop a nuclear weapon or a biological or
chemical weapons that can have no other purpose than to destroy
other human beings.  It is a mistake, and we should try to
contain it and to stop it.  (Applause.)

             And so, my fellow Americans, there is a peacetime
commercial mission for these labs.  And there is a national
defense mission for these labs.  And the line between those two
missions is coming down fast, and there is a partnership with the
private sector which will spread and grow and strengthen
America's support for and understanding of what is done here.

             These labs are our great national mine's treasure.
The world's finest scientists and engineers, more PhDs per capita
here in Los Alamos than any other place on the planet .
(Applause.)

             It's pretty humbling when you're a President and you
walk into a room and you realize you're lowering the average IQ
of the room just by going in the door.  (Laughter.)

             You have the world's most powerful computers and
lasers and accelerators, some of the world's best materials
facilities, the most sophisticated diagnostics.  You are our
crown jewels in technology and science.

             Under the technology policy I have proposed, this
lab at Los Angeles -- Los Alamos -- booo -- I'm going there
tomorrow.  And if I say Los Alamos, will you cheer when I'm in
Los Angeles?  (Applause.)  I owe you one.  (Applause.)

             This lab will work with the Departments of Energy
and Defense and Commerce to sustain constant innovation.  We're
going to have to reorganize a lot of things to get that done.  We
can't just have the money coming in for specific projects from --
some from defense and some from the Energy Department.  We'll
have all kinds of dislocations.  And we had some great
conversations today about how we can make a flexible and always
available pool of funds there for the kinds of projects that need
to be done.  And our administration has pledged to do that.
(Applause.)

             So I say to you again, we must change the whole
notion we have of the federal government.  We're going to have to
cut a lot of spending.  We're going to have to change a lot of
things we have taken for granted.  But we will still have to find
a way to invest in our future.  Our competitors are investing in
their futures.  There is a race to tomorrow, which is partly
cooperation, but make no mistake about it, largely competition.
And if we want all of these young people to have the chance to go
as far as their efforts and their God-given abilities will taken
them, we have to do both -- we've got to bring this deficit down
and sharply invest in things like these laboratories so we can
grow the economy for tomorrow.  (Applause.)

             The reductions in the defense budget, made possible
by the end of the Cold War, have presented some great challenges
to the laboratories, to the defense plants, to the wonderful men
and women who have served our nation in uniform.  We owe all of
them the opportunity to convert to success in the commercial
private enterprise world of America.  We have earmarked, this
year alone, over $1.7 billion for defense conversion, and I
propose to invest about $20 billion in it over the next five
years.  It is a good beginning.  It is a good beginning.
(Applause.)

             I ask you today as I close to consider the
alternative.  If we refuse to bring our deficit down and we still
continue to squeeze these areas critical to our investment
future, the alternative will be:  a rising deficit, a declining
rate of investment, more unemployment and more stagnant incomes,
longer work weeks for less funds and continued insecurity for
America's working families.  We must change our priorities, no
matter how difficult it is.  That is the challenge of this day,
and we must meet it.  (Applause.)  As has already been said,
President Kennedy stood in this very spot just over 30 years ago
and saluted the great patriots of Los Alamos.  He said in part --
and I quote -- "We want to express our thanks to you.  It is not
merely what was done in the days of the Second War, but what has
been done since then, not only in developing weapons of
destruction which, by irony of fate, helped maintain peace and
freedom, but also in medicine and in space, and all the other
related fields which can mean so much to mankind if we can
maintain the peace and protect our freedom."

             Well, today, maintaining the peace and protecting
the freedom seem more secure than they did when President Kennedy
uttered those words.  And so, today I come here to thank Los
Alamos, not merely for what was done in the Cold War and what has
been done since, but for what you can and will do to secure a
stronger, brighter future for all the American people.  If we do
our job, then perhaps 30 years from now another American
President will be able to come to this very site, and some of you
who are now children will be here with your children.  And you
can say, again, thank you -- thank you to the labs, thank you to
the men and women who used their minds to advance the cause of
learning.  Thank you for the contributions you have made to the
progress of the American Dream.  May it never stop.

             Good bless you and thank you very much.  (Applause.)

               END                  1:27 P.M. MDT

 -0-
 /U.S. Newswire  202-347-2770/