Political Quotes

“I started off by talking about that letter that the Armed Services Committee, Democrats and Republicans, sent to Israel in 1987 telling them that at some point in the future they would be attacked by ballistic missiles coming from a neighboring nation, probably Russian-made missiles, and that was a prophetic letter because in the Gulf War they were attacked. And I described some of the effects. Even though there wasn't poison gas on those missiles, they had an incredible effect, a traumatic effect on the citizens of Israel. You know, we could have written a letter to ourselves and to our own leadership and the administration at that time and said, at some point ballistic missiles will be launched at the United States. I don't take much comfort from Mr. Tierney's statement that he only wants to stop the funding of long-range missile defense systems, not short-range missile defense systems. We've had a series of successes with our long-range missile defense systems. We've had these collisions 148 miles above the surface of the Earth, the interceptor and the target missile both going about three times the speed of a .30-06 bullet. And because of the incredible dedication of our scientists and our engineers, we've been able to achieve some successes with these long-range missile defense systems. The facts are, you have to defend against all types, against short-range, medium-range and long-range.”