Joe Lieberman

Has to be domestic, of course. I appreciate that and am reassured to hear that.

I hate to do that reflexively. We give too much to the White House, really.

This attempt to set up an architecture to prevent a terrorist nuclear attack on the United States did not just begin on September 11, 2001.

I am right, is it not so, that the Homeland Security Presidential Directive 14 made clear that DNDO had this authority to work with other agencies for the specific purpose of developing the Global Nuclear Detection Architecture?

So is part of this organizational? In other words, does DNDO not have adequate authority to coordinate across the various departments, even though the Homeland Security Presidential Directive 14 designated DNDO as the lead organization and…

The absence of a plan certainly facilitated what it sounds to me like what you would say was the most significant mistake that DNDO has made

It needs fresh new leadership, and we look forward to working with you on the progress that we all want.

The threat of nuclear terrorism is real and that terrorist groups continue to have an active interest in gaining the capability to carry out a nuclear terrorist attack, including within the United States.

President Obama must appoint a coordinator for the prevention of weapons of mass destruction, proliferation, and terrorism as required by the 2007 Homeland Security Act written by the Chairman and myself.

To date, DHS has spent $4 billion on various aspects of the Nuclear Detection Architecture, but has not developed a strategic plan to guide its efforts to develop and implement this architecture, as we recommended in 2008.

The sooner the better, obviously.

Mr. Chairman, I know my time's up. I leave it to you. I don't want to intrude on Senator Hagan's time.

We are so grateful to our military personnel. They serve with such honor and capability and sacrifice.

This suggests a broader societal problem.

In some sense, my question is, how do you transfer that concern down the chain of command so that individual members of your Services feel that they can go for help for a mental problem, just like you go for help if your leg is bothering…

Every suicide is a tragedy, and we want to prevent them all.

So, to us, as a leadership issue. We focus on operational stress control and management.

I think the stigma issue is one that's going to be very, very difficult to overcome.

It would be hard to explain to people why we did not stop it.

The risk of allowing someone on the watchlist to board a plane without being subjected to at least a secondary physical screening for a bomb or weapons concealed or anything else is really intolerable.

I hope you will make that a priority.

I appreciate that, and I stress it again because as you know, anytime anything happens there are immediate investigations done by the media, by Congress, and by the agency itself.

I hope you will push that envelope a little bit, at least to explore it.

I think that there is an opportunity to negotiate with the Russians post New START treaty the kinds of exchanges of telemetry and other information regarding ICBMs that we are discussing now?

The treaty does provide for less transparency than we would prefer into Russian missile programs.