Jon Kyl: “this debate has been held before, as has been noted. About a year ago, a similar amendment was defeated by a vote of 55…”

“this debate has been held before, as has been noted. About a year ago, a similar amendment was defeated by a vote of 55 to 42 in this body. I urge my colleagues to defeat the amendment this year as well. The question has been asked about whether we would be going down a road that we would be taking a step toward something--I am not exactly sure--if we were to conduct this study. As my colleague, the distinguished chairman of the Armed Services Committee has noted, this is not the testing of a weapon or even the design of a weapon. This is merely to study the feasibility. I want to make the point clear, to study the feasibility of what? To study the feasibility of taking an existing warhead and simply providing a different kind of casing for it and a different kind of fuse which would enable it to penetrate deep into the earth and potentially take out something that a potential enemy would have very deep underground. The deterrent effect of this is obvious. A country that might wish us harm, such as North Korea, for example, that thinks it can bury something deep within the ground because we have no way of getting to it, would no longer be able to pursue that course of action if they understood that we had this kind of a weapon. It is precisely the point that Secretary Rumsfeld made when he said: Countries all across the globe are putting things underground. And we have no capability, conventional or nuclear, to deal with the issue of deep penetrator.…”