John Kerry: “Again, I appreciate the answer and I appreciate the sensitivity the Senator has shown, as to how we might have gotten…”

“Again, I appreciate the answer and I appreciate the sensitivity the Senator has shown, as to how we might have gotten here otherwise. I cannot disagree with him with respect to that. But, by the same token, there has been a push here to try to achieve certainty with respect to technology, technological feasibility governing an issue of deployment. There are a lot of questions about what kind of system we might or might not really be building. The early concepts that surrounded this entire debate envisioned a system that did more than simply address the question of a rogue missile or an accidental launch or even a few individual missiles. The best estimate of the threat from North Korea, in 15 or 20 years, is still dealing with minimalist numbers. Always, when we are debating in the context of Russia or in the context of China, we are dealing with multiple numbers, and the system you need to deal, with any reality, with those kinds of potential adversaries--I underscore 'potential'; we view neither of them that way today, as the Senator has said--but the kind of system that would be needed to deal with that is a system that most people make the judgment is technologically so expensive and so complicated--because it requires the SWIR intercept capacity at boost phase, it requires the capacity to go exoatmospheric for a certain phase, you have to hand off for the next phase for LWIR capacity for tracking, the capacity to distinguish between multiple decoys--all…”