 of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Ambassador Bill Burns. Good evening, everyone. I am very pleased and honored to welcome Vice President Biden back to Carnegie. But I must admit this moment is bittersweet. We're at the end of an extraordinary chapter of an extraordinary life, of an extraordinary American. In his farewell address last night, President Obama said that selecting Joe Biden as his running mate was the first decision he made as a presidential nominee. And he said it was the best. President Obama's wisdom was our good fortune as a country. I've learned a great deal from the Vice President over the course of my many years as an American diplomat. I've been deeply touched personally by his thoughtfulness and encouragement. And like so many other Americans, I've been inspired by his unfailing belief in our country's promise and potential, his fierce determination to deliver on that promise, and his willingness to speak truth to power and advocate for what is right, especially when it's hard or inconvenient. That is especially true when it comes to foreign policy and his contributions over many decades to American leadership. Indeed, he's been on the front lines of one critical issue after another, from the Balkans, Iraq, and Afghanistan, to strengthening our alliances, to building new partnerships for the coming century, Asia, our own hemisphere, and beyond. No issue better exemplifies the Vice President's remarkable leadership, courage, experience, and vision than the topic that brings us together here today, nuclear security. The Vice President contributed to all the major nuclear policy initiatives over the past four decades, from formulating arms control agreements at the height of the Cold War, to managing nuclear arsenals in its aftermath, and tackling the new threat of nuclear terrorism. The Vice President has truly been indispensable to the success of the administration's four nuclear security summits, the passage of the New START Treaty with Russia, and the nuclear agreement with Iran. The hard truth is that no issue is more critical for the future of international peace and security than the global nuclear order. For many decades, Carnegie's nuclear policy program has worked to highlight the fragility of that order and offer new practical ideas to strengthen it. And I hope you'll all join us in March for Carnegie's biannual nuclear policy conference. Ladies and gentlemen, I said at the outset that we're marking the end of an extraordinary chapter in an extraordinary life. I also know that there are many more extraordinary chapters to come for the Vice President, rich in their benefits for American society and for a role in the world. So please join me in welcoming the Vice President of the United States, Joe Biden. Thank you very much. Thank you. I'm a late Joe Biden, and I apologize. It's an honor to be here with back at Carnegie, but with so many people who have not only a view, but depth of knowledge and an expertise in the subject that is not spoken of nearly as often as it should be, or debated as thoroughly as it should be. And I'm happy to have the opportunity to speak with you all. You know, I know it's Ambassador Burns, but I kind of think of him as Secretary Burns. I know Ambassador's a hired type, but I think of him as Secretary Burns. And I know, by the way, he would have been the next Secretary of State, by the way. That's just what I know. And so that's one of the great losses that are occurring in this election. Forget the President, the Vice President. It's been an honor to work with you, Bill. Any one of you who've worked with Bill, or most of you have, you know when you deal with Bill, three things are gonna happen. One, you know that you're dealing with a man of enormous, enormous integrity. You will never, ever, ever, ever have to wonder whether he inadvertently or inadvertently did anything or in any way compromise or diminish your efforts in trying to work for peace and security for the United States. The second thing about Bill is that he is a really, really effective diplomat because although he is strong and fervent in his views, he has a way of dealing with friends and folks alike that put them at ease and generate trust. They know whatever he says he means and they know whatever he says he speaks for the administration that he's with at the time. And lastly, he has a prodigious amount of knowledge about the vast array of foreign policy issues. So Bill, I've enjoyed traveling around the world. I've enjoyed working with you and I've learned a lot from you and I do not plan on, don't think you're getting rid of me. I continue to need your help. And everyone here at the Carnegie Mellon International Peace, thank you for your continued unrelenting commitment to peace, to peace. You know, in the summer of 1969, in the mid to deep freeze of the Cold War, I was a 35-year-old kid, 36-year-old kid and I walked into the Kremlin, into the mayor's office. Actually, I walked into our minister's office first and sat down across the table with seven members of the National Security of the National Security establishment of Russia. And that was when Andropov was Bill and he had to leave the meeting and Kosigin headed up the meeting. And I remember sitting across the table with him and I had five United States senators with me because we were there to discuss the strategic arm control agreement, then known as SALT II. And to gauge whether or not the Soviets were likely to abide by the modifications and the codicils that the United States Senate had voted defining some of the elements of the agreement themselves. You know, you can amend a treaty, but you can seek understandings of what individual sentences are phrased in the meeting. And it was a very close call as to whether or not we were gonna get the votes to pass the SALT II treaty. Frank Church asked me whether I'd lead the delegation since I was such an old timer and then they're six years with a lot of the newer members of the United States Senate who were in the process of making up their mind. And across the table from me sat Kosigin. He grizzled Soviet Premier, a veteran of World War II and a very hard line guy. And there was no love between us. There was no love between our countries at the time and we didn't trust one another. I remember how we started off the conversation to make sure to put me in my place. He said, you're a very young man and I was chairing the delegation. You're a very young man, Senator. He said, when I was your age, I was coordinating the Siege of Leningrad. I mean, I was doing something really important when I was your age, not like you. Let's get this straight. And then he went on to say, and I mean it sincerely, notwithstanding the fact that neither of our nations wanted to be responsible for unleashing nuclear apocalypse, Kosigin did most of the talking that day. And one of the first things he said to me and my colleagues was he said, let's agree at the outset, Mr. Senator, that you are the only nation in the history of mankind that has ever used a nuclear weapon, not once but twice. I'm not second guessing your judgment to do that, but you use them. So you have to understand why we think, we the Soviets think, that you might use them again. This is not about trust. Oh, I came out of that meeting with the assurances we went to, we saw it for the reason we went. We got the assurances. They would accept the, not amendments, but the understandings we brought forward. And I came away with a lesson that has served me relatively well throughout my entire career. And that is the assumption that good intentions rarely exists in international diplomacy, or the assumption that they do exist is an exception. Motion is that the Soviets wanted to do with us not because they trusted us, but because they didn't trust us at all. It's precisely because we didn't trust our adversaries. We didn't trust the Russians. That's the reason we have treaties. And I remember these endless debates with Jesse Helms and the Foreign Relations Committee. Don't make treaties with your friends as necessary. Make treaties with those who you have stark disagreements. Constrain human capacity for destruction. Treaties are indispensable to the security of the United States of America. Arms controls an integral to our national defense and when it comes to nuclear weapons to our self-preservation. Almost from almost the moment we unlocked the destruction hidden in the worlds hidden within the atom, we recognized the equally powerful imperative that preserving the doomsday clock, preventing the doomsday clock from striking midnight was an overarching responsibility of humankind. Already in 1953, President Eisenhower, a man synonymous with the American military strategy, warned that our security could never be achieved through a nuclear arms race without end. He said, quote, let no one think that the expenditure of vast sums of weapons and systems defense can guarantee absolute safety for the cities and the citizens of any nation. The awful arithmetic of the atomic bomb does not permit any such easy solution. Even against the most powerful defense and the aggressor and possession of an effective minimum number of atomic bombs for a surprise attack could cause hideous damage. And quote, in a world possessed with nuclear technology, an effective minimum number of bombs is pretty small. Even one, I remember I was saying to Dr. Carl, now security advisor, I'm obviously over 40. But in my day in undergraduate school, in graduate school, phrase was there was a bumper sticker. One nuclear weapon can ruin your day. One can cause hideous damage. With that knowledge over the course of decades, we negotiated agreements to reduce and control the world's supply of nuclear weapons. Despite what some extreme voices have argued at the time, the arms control agreements we hammered out with the Soviets were not concessions to an enemy, were signs of weakness in the United States. They were a carefully constructed barrier between the American people and total annihilation. You know, it was how we managed that dangerous rival. That dangerous rival. I was telling Bill, I was putting on the Foreign Relations Committee as a very young man, early 30s, 31 years old. And if you wanted to have anything to do and be engaged at all in the conduct of foreign policy, there was only one arena you had to learn. You had to understand strategic doctrine. There was really nothing much else on the table. And so we spent a lot of time trying to keep things things from spiraling out of control to prevent thermonuclear war. Republicans and Democratic presidents alike have understood nothing is more fundamental to our security. And for more than four decades, I've been deeply involved with the ins and outs of our strategic agreements. As I said, I was a forceful advocate for start or some result too in the 70s. And the limits it sought to impose upon the growth of the Soviet Union's nuclear capacity. In the 80s, I fought against President Reagan's efforts to weaken the ABM treaty, which threatened the very cornerstone of the arms control between the United States and the Soviet Union. But I fought equally hard for his treaty on intermediate-range nuclear forces, the first treaty to eliminate a whole class of nuclear arms. I fought hard to see that it succeeded. I traveled at the time across Europe meeting with Helmut Kohl, Francois Mitterrand, Margaret Thatcher, Soviet leaders like Gromyko to bolster support for the treaty. And after the collapse of the Soviet Union, I called for the global elimination of nuclear weapons, tactical nuclear weapons, position that President George H. W. Bush also worked toward. And I made sure that the START agreement included appropriate measures to monitor nuclear stockpiles in the former Supreme. Today, the risk of a massive nuclear exchange between Russia and the United States and the terminologic of mutual assured destruction is far less than it was when I arrived in the Senate in the early 70s. Yet nuclear weapons and the proliferation of the deadly knowledge to more nations and the possibility of terrorists obtaining nuclear materials remain among our most pressing security challenges as I speak to you. Even one nuclear bomb, as they say, can still cause hideous damage. And that's why, from the moment the President I took office eight years ago, reducing the threat of nuclear attack has been the chief national security priority of this administration. In Prague in 2009, in his very first foreign policy speech, President Obama passionately argued that the only way the world would be completely safe from nuclear weapons is to pursue a world without nuclear weapons. For the past eight years, that's the vision we have relentlessly pursued. Thanks to American leadership and the international community is newly focused on preventing nuclear terrorism. We know the terrorists have both the capacity and the goal of transforming nuclear materials into weapons to so have it. We're all just radiological bombs. We can do an awful lot of damage. Render place is uninhabitable for a long time. We know that no nation acting alone can defeat this threat. That's why in 2010, President Obama gathered leaders from around the globe for the first ever nuclear security summit here in Washington. To create concrete multilateral strategies to lock down those nuclear materials and prevent nuclear smuggling. Since then, the world has met more than three times in Seoul, at the Hague, and last year in DC to continue to build on that progress. Our efforts have reduced the supply of nuclear weapons, nuclear weapon usable material around the world. And we've not only stepped up physical protection facilities when nuclear materials are stored, we have greatly improved the ability to detect and seize unregulated nuclear and radiological materials being smuggled in secret. Acting together with international partners, we strengthen the global nuclear security architecture that monitors and enforces nuclear norms, ratifying and bringing in the force important international treaties to secure nuclear materials to prevent them from falling into the hands of terrorists. Providing, providing better funding resources for international atomic energy agents and expanding the proliferation security initiative. These steps have bolstered international norms and institutions around protecting nuclear materials. And with the creation of the Nuclear Security Contact Group, the world can continue to build on this momentum to deliver progress for many more years to come. But it's going to take many more years to come. Great years the United States has led in strengthening the non-proliferation regime, including the non-proliferation treaty. That basic agreement that countries with nuclear weapons will pursue good faith negotiations on this armament. Countries without nuclear weapons will seek to gain, will not seek to gain them. And countries, countries, all countries can access and benefit peaceful nuclear energy. To build a global consensus that nuclear arms must be, nuclear norms must be upheld, international commitments must be honored. And those that violate those standards must be held and called into account. That's why the United States made an international priority to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons. Decades of animosity and chest beating, not cut off Iran's burgeoning nuclear approach. We did. We're international economic pressure combined with hard-nosed diplomacy. The Soviet Union during the Civil War, excuse me, in Cold War, we negotiated with Iran precisely the same way we did with them because we do not and did not trust them. Not because there's any trust. That's why we sought an internationally verifiable agreement to constrain their nuclear activities. One that cut off every single path that could lead to a nuclear weapon, the one that instituted the most rigorous inspection regime in history to ensure that they hold up their end of the bargain. If full implementation continues, the deal will prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons, remove the threat of Iran using nuclear weapons against us or our allies, and we will have accomplished this without initiating another devastating war in the Middle East. When we came to office, Iran was inching closer to a nuclear weapon capacity. North Korea already crossed that threshold. And as North Korea and the ballistic missile capacity continue to expand in North Korea, it poses a growing threat to international security and our own national defense. That's why we've been so vigilant in keeping international and international community united to raise the cost on North Korea for its flagrant violations of nuclear norms. Just last year, a response to a legal nuclear test by North Korea and the United Nations Security Council, including China and Russia, unanimously adopted two resolutions imposing the most far-reaching and comprehensive sanctions on North Korea today. We need to ensure that these sanctions aren't forced by all. To ensure that North Korea understands and will continue to impose costs for their legal behavior. We know these sanctions in and of itself did not stop North Korea. As of the reign of the bowl of sanctions, it's not to punish people of North Korea but to induce their leadership to negotiate an earnest. North Korea's growing capacity is one of the most significant challenges the next administration will face. I would argue maybe the most significant challenge. There are no simple solutions, but any viable path forward must include standing with our Asian allies to send a clear message upon them and point to the capital of North Korea. Attempts at coercion or intimidation will fail. You should know that. Security and international respect cannot be attained through illegal weapons. You should know that. As long as that is a choice, North Korean leaders continue to make their country remain economically isolated and in an international variety. We have to continue working closely though with our international community, particularly China. Commence North Korea to reverse course. That in and of itself will be worth a seminar on that subject alone. As we've worked to stem the spread of nuclear weapons, we've also advanced the second half of our non-fulfillation work. That every nation can use peaceful nuclear technology for energy, for medical advances, for research to better human condition. Again, this understanding dates back to President Eisenhower who said, it is not enough to take this weapon out of the hands of the soldiers. We must put it into the hands of those who will know how to strip its military casing and adapt it to the arts of peace. We've invested significant time and energy in buttressing the international framework for civil nuclear cooperation. We've taken practical steps, like supporting the IAE's low-enriched uranium bank, setting up our own American fuel bank so that states are insured reliable access to nuclear energy without setting up fuel cycle capabilities in their own countries. 10 years ago, as chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, I issued in our civil nuclear cooperation agreement with India through the United States Senate agreement that will allow US nuclear reactors to provide enough electrical power for Delhi and Mumbai through peak usages in the hottest summer days. And parenthetically, keep India from moving in that direction, able to supply themselves. Over the past eight years, our administration pursued and brought in the force new peaceful nuclear cooperation agreements with Russia, China, Republican Korea, Vietnam, and others. In total, the United States now has 22 such agreements with 47 partners resulting in the production of more than 1.5 million gigawatts hours of safe, clean nuclear power worldwide in the year 2015. Enough to power 150 million homes for an entire year. Of course, no discussion of nuclear weapons can ignore the fact the United States possesses one of the two largest arsenals of nuclear weapons in the world. Nuclear deterrent has been the bedrock of our national defense since World War II. And so long as other countries possess nuclear weapons that can be used against us, we too must maintain safe, secure, and effective nuclear arsenals that deter attacks against ourselves and our allies. That's why, early in this administration, we increased funding to maintain our arsenal and modernize our nuclear infrastructure so that our arsenal remains safe and reliable even with fewer weapons and without testing. The investment was not only consistent with our non-proliferation goals, it was essential to maintain our non-proliferation goals. Guaranteeing the capacity of our stockpile allow us to continue to pursue nuclear reductions without any compromise of our security. As part of President Obama's change to reduce reliance on launch under attack procedures in US planning, the Department of Defense has adjusted our planning and processes to give the president more flexibility in deciding how to respond to a range of nuclear scenarios. In our 2010 nuclear posture review, we made a commitment to create the conditions by which the sole purpose of nuclear weapons would be to deter others from launching the nuclear attack. Accordingly, over the course of our administration, we have steadily reduced the primacy of nuclear weapons and the primacy of nuclear weapons that have held since our post-World War II timing while improving our ability to deter and defeat our adversaries and reassure our allies without reliance on nuclear weapons. Given our non-nuclear capacities and the nature of today's threats, it's hard to envision a plausible scenario in which the first use of nuclear weapons by the United States would be necessary or would make sense in the view of the president and me. President Obama and I are confident we can deter and defend ourselves and our allies against non-nuclear threats through other means. Next administration will put forward its own policies. Seven years after the nuclear posture review, the president and I strongly believe we have made enough progress that deterring and if necessary, retaliating against the nuclear attack should be the sole purpose of U.S. nuclear arsenal. If you want a world without nuclear weapons, the United States must take the initiative to lead the world there. Moreover, as President Obama pointedly highlighted during his visit just last month to Hiroshima, as the only nation to have used nuclear weapons, we bear a great moral responsibility to lead this change in the world. That's why we negotiated with Russia the most ambitious arms control reduction treaty in two decades, a new start. I fought hard for this treaty as I have for every substance of arms control agreement since the 70s because it makes America safer. Again, it's not about trust or goodwill. It's about strategic stability and greater transparency between the world's two great nuclear powers. Fact that has become more critical as our relationship with Russia has grown increasingly more strained than the last 70 years. New start enshrines rigorous verification and monitoring mechanisms for nuclear reductions. And next year, when the central limits of the treaty come into effect, the strategic nuclear arsenals of our two countries will be at their lowest level in six decades. That's a major step forward in my opinion. But I can vest it's not as much progress as our administration had hoped we would have made by this point. The past three years, Russia has refused to negotiate additional reductions of deployed and non-deployed arsenals. But American leadership in this issue need not wait for Russia. Since 2009, the United States has dismantled 2,226 nuclear warheads. And I'm proud to share some additional news in here. After determining that we can safely reduce our nuclear stockpiles even further, over the past year, President Obama set aside almost 500 warfares for a dismantlement on top of those previously scheduled for retirement last year. That puts our active nuclear stockpile of 4,018 warheads in service in approximately 2,800 in line to be destroyed. And we recommend to the next administration conduct a comprehensive nuclear posture review to determine whether additional reductions we'll be able to. As I've long said, the United States is the strongest when we lead not only by the example of our power, but by the power of our example. Our efforts have not only reduced the threat of nuclear weapons that pose the future generation, they positioned our successors to continue making progress toward the day when we can finally and forever rid our world of this scourge. But I'm not here to only laud our successes. We didn't accomplish all that we'd hoped to. We lobbied hard for the U.S. to ratify the comprehensive nuclear, the comprehensive test pantry. The United States has not conducted a nuclear test for more than two decades. The directors of our nuclear laboratories tell us, we know more about our arsenal today and its reliability through stockpile stewardship than we did when testing was commonplace. Ratifying the treaty would be an incredible boon to strengthening the existing global norm against nuclear testing. It were blocked at every turn in the United States Senate. I did not always support the decisions made by President Reagan or either of the President's Bush to remind 36 years as U.S. Senate. Repeatedly helped improve and pass anti-arms control measures pursued by Republican presidents, though, for the same reason. Nuclear security is too important, too important to be a party policy for our nation and for the world. Although we no longer live with a daily dread of nuclear confrontation, the dangers we face today require a bipartisan spirit. The challenges looming on the horizon are gonna require leadership not only from the next president and vice president, but from the Congress as well. While the vast majority of the international community understands that the world is more dangerous when more nations and people wield nuclear weapons, there are still those who seek to grow their arsenals and develop new types of nuclear weapons. Not just North Korea, but Russia, Pakistan, others have made counterproductive moves that only increase the risk of nuclear weapons could be used in a regional conflict in Europe, South Asia, or East Asia. So working with Congress, the next administration will have to navigate these dangers and I hope continue leading the global consensus to reduce the role of nuclear weapons. Particularly, they'll have to determine how best to improve strategic stability with Russia, which has eroded over the past few years. While we have shifted our security doctrine away from our nuclear arsenal, they have moved to rely more heavily on theirs. Some of that has to do with Russia's concerns about our technological advances, our superior conventional capacity, and the capacity of the United States military. But it's a shift in strategy that increases the nuclear danger for the world. Furthermore, Russia is currently in violation of the Intermediate Range Nuclear Force Treaty, which has been in effect for almost 30 years. They have thus far refused to engage constructing with the United States and returning to compliance or to broach discussions about strategic stability in future arms reductions. As the next administration navigates these difficult security talks, they'll have to make decisions for American security that recognize budgetary constraints and require trade-offs. If future budgets reverse the choices we've made and pour additional money in the nuclear build-up, it harkens back to the Cold War. It will do nothing to increase the day-to-day security of the United States for our allies. And it will mean we will have forever be in a position where we have fewer resources to devote to the areas that are indispensable for 21st-century security needs of the United States, like cybersecurity, space, the health and modernization of our conventional forces. It risks placing the theoretical power of a weapon we hope to guide never to use again above the tools the military uses each and every day. It risks increasing the chances of nuclear conflict through miscalculation and destroying the confidence-building measures and security agreements that have protected American people for the past four decades. And it risks, this I think is an important point, it risks degrading our moral leadership, diminishing our standing with our allies and compromising our capacity to achieve any of our other goals in the international community. I know that as we move forward in this debate, there'll be voices of counsel and nuclear arms race in the name of realism. I know because I've heard that argument from the time I entered the United States Senate in 1972. Their arguments make even less sense today in my opinion. In a world where the most challenging nuclear threat comes not from foreign governments and advanced technologies, but from terrorists with crude Cold War relics in the suitcase, heading for any major city inside a cargo container pulling the port of New York or San Francisco. That first speech in Prague eight years ago, President Obama distilled the essence of the problem when he said, and I quote, "'Some argue the spread of these weapons "'can not be stopped, can not be checked. "'There were a destined to live in a world "'where more nations and more people "'possess the ultimate tools of destruction.'" We're not gonna say such fatalism is a deadly adversary, or if we believe the spread of nuclear weapons is inevitable, then in some way we are admitting to ourselves that the use of nuclear weapons is inevitable. Over the past eight years, we've sought to defeat fatalism. We have rejected inevitabilities. As a nation, I believe we must keep pursuing peace and security for a world without nuclear weapons because that is the only surety we have against the nightmare scenario becoming a reality. This was a problem created by human ingenuity. It can only be solved with human ingenuity and the belief in our better angels. Our capacity for destruction must always be balanced by the weight of our shared responsibility. That's a belief I've held for more than 40 years, one that I've fought to make real time and time again in my career, one that I've been honored to keep advancing through the American people alongside President Obama in the past eight years. I think that effort has to continue. God continue to bless the United States of America and make God protect our troops. Thank you for your patience.