Political Quotes

“I would actually like to respond a little bit about the offset for this amendment. This amendment is offset by reducing the $7.7 billion budget for the NNSA nuclear weapons account by $500 million. This is a 6.5 percent reduction. I want to make it clear that the intent of this amendment is not to reduce the large amount of high-quality research that goes on in NNSA- supported programs; but a large fraction of the funding in this account goes to production and future production facilities for weapons systems that serve no clearly defined strategic purpose in today's geopolitics, or they go to programs for which the cost estimates, the project management, or both have come under repeated criticism when they come under external independent review. To take two examples, the underlying bill funds the B61 life extension program at $23 million more than requested. This program has ballooned in cost, from $4 billion 2 years ago to over $10 billion. A recent independent cost estimate commissioned by the Pentagon called even this estimate into question. Another example is the overall size of the nuclear weapons stockpile. We have, today, more than 5,000 nuclear weapons. Even if the United States and Russia were to cut our arsenals by a factor of 10, our countries would still have significantly more nuclear weapons than our nearest competitors. The reason you spend money on nuclear deterrence is to deter rational actors and to reassure our allies.…”