Political Quotes

“Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman from Indiana for yielding. As the only Ph.D. physicist in Congress, I would like to take a moment to highlight the risks of underfunding both nuclear nonproliferation and detection. When discussing the dangers of nuclear weapons, we often overfocus our attention on missiles and missile defense. Unfortunately, proliferation challenges are changing significantly, and there are, unfortunately, many ways to deliver a nuclear weapon, for example, the smuggling of nuclear radiological materials into the United States through our maritime ports or borders or through the use of commercial and recreational vehicles to deliver waterborne nuclear devices. We must focus our resources on developing and deploying technologies that will lead to a substantial improvement in our ability to detect, verify, and monitor fissile material and devices. And we must continue to strengthen our workforce at our national laboratories by continuing to recruit the best and the brightest technical experts. I note that much of this expertise is the same as will be required to ensure complete, verifiable, and irreversible dismantlement of North Korea's nuclear weapons programs and their nuclear weapons. We can have the most expensive missile defense system in the world, but unless we address these unconventional threats as well, it is simply a false sense of security.…”