Political Quotes

“If I could make another comment. Perhaps the Senator from Oklahoma would want to add to this, too. Let us go back a little bit and put this in perspective. The weapon that killed 28 Americans in Saudi Arabia during the gulf war was a conventional explosive organ, just high explosives they call it, and yet the single largest number of American casualties occurred in that one instant. And 28 Americans died when that 1 Scud missile hit the barracks in Saudi Arabia. That was a relatively crude Scud missile with a range of maybe 300 miles or thereabouts. The point is that every year countries learn how to cause their missiles to go farther and farther and farther, and they put heavier payloads on them, and they make them more accurate in terms of where they will fall. What our intelligence has been telling us about the North Korean missile is that they are on a subsequent generation now. They have already developed missiles that will go these intermediate distances. They are working on missiles that will go farther and farther and farther. So what we are trying to do is estimate just when will it be that they will have advanced to the point that they can deliver that warhead all the way to the United States? We cannot tell that with precision. We do not know when that will happen. But the information we had suggested they were now getting along to the point where it would be perhaps within 3 to 5 years that they had that capability. That is what we are talking about here.”