Political Quotes

“2 minutes is probably insufficient to persuade my colleagues on the majority side that my argument is worthy of support; but nonetheless, I will take a shot at it. We can build 9 or 10 pits a year now. If we go to two shifts, we could build 20. The only reason we would need 80 has to do with a revamped, refurbished nuclear bomb, which I will talk about tomorrow morning, because at the request of the majority, I was asked to put it off until tomorrow morning. In any case, where are we today? We have enough nuclear weapons to pretty much destroy the entire world or any enemy that would like to take us on. Do we need to have 80 new nuclear pits a year? In all the testimony I have heard in the various classified sessions, the answer is: We would like to have it. We would like to have that capability because sometime maybe somehow we may have a nuclear war, and we will expend all of our existing bombs and we will need to somehow make more. I am not exactly sure why we would be making more after a nuclear war, but there are some who would argue that would be necessary. I don't get it. I really don't understand when we have the capability to build sufficient nuclear bomb components, the pit, the plutonium pit, why we would want to spend a few billion dollars--an unknown number, by the way, not unlike the MOX facility, it is likely to rapidly escalate. But our Los Alamos scientists would like to have something new and fancy when something old is quite necessary.…”