Political Quotes

“And I would further argue, although I have not read the document, that if the document is complete, which it is asserted to be and I believe it to be, that the strategic judgment made to rely upon nuclear weapons was arrived at in the same way that NATO arrived at a similar judgment 30 years earlier when we concluded that we were not prepared or able to keep 40 or 50 or 60 divisions in Europe to meet a conventional attack by our Warsaw Pact enemies. That is a long way of saying that, were we to announce that we were ceasing and desisting from an effort to expand NATO at this moment and went on record, the strategic planners in Moscow, in my view, would be compelled to reach the conclusion that they reached in the document that was posited on the Senate floor for the Record today. I do not in any way underestimate the impact of damaged psyches on national policy. I do not in any way, in any sense, underestimate that feelings of isolation on the part of the Russian military, the Russians, might produce an extension of a position that otherwise would have been reached anyway. But I would conclude by saying I do not believe that the strategic document that the Senator spoke to today is as a consequence--notwithstanding that it mentions the expansion of NATO--of the talk of expanding with the inclusion of Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Poland into NATO.”