Political Quotes

“As you know, the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2018 tasks the Missile Defense Agency with developing a space-based ballistic missile intercept layer. There is no doubt that a space-based missile defense, if it is technologically feasible and economically justifiable, would make an important contribution to our national security. So would the Star Trek transporter or the warp drive, but as a scientist and, in fact, the only Ph.D. scientist in the U.S. Congress, I think that we need to do our homework before investing hundreds of billions of dollars into attempting to develop this system. As such, my amendment would prohibit the use of funds to attempt to develop a space-based missile intercept layer. It has been more than 30 years since President Reagan called for defending the United States against a first strike by developing a strategic defense system, commonly known as Star Wars. The idea of a space-based version of this has gone in and out of fashion for the last 30 years, but every time this space-based concept has been looked at by technologically competent outside experts, it was deemed to be unworkable, impossibly expensive, vulnerable to countermeasures, easy for an opponent to destroy, easy to overwhelm with a small number of enemy missiles, or all of the above. This approach was judged technologically unworkable in 1983, and the status quo has not changed.…”