Jim Risch: “I want to back up on that one more time and say that, in my judgment, and in the judgment of members of this commission…”

“I want to back up on that one more time and say that, in my judgment, and in the judgment of members of this commission, the issue of tactical weapons exceeds, in severity, in concern, the issue of strategic weapons. I understand one might argue that you are arguing about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin as opposed to which is of the most concern. But I come back to the reasons I gave as to why I think the tactical issue is important more than the strategic issue. That is, on the strategic issue, we are in about the same position we were 40 years ago, with the exception, and admittedly an important exception, that the raw numbers are down. When we started this 40 years ago, each party had about 6,000 warheads. As I said, if either party pulled the trigger and launched 6,000 or some significant part of that, obviously that is the deterrence that each party was counting on that neither would do that.”