John Kerry: “It is ironic that a Democrat would be here interpreting the words of the putative Republican nominee. But let me say to…”

“It is ironic that a Democrat would be here interpreting the words of the putative Republican nominee. But let me say to my colleague, he very clearly talked about unilateral reductions. His father, President Bush, also was supportive of and negotiated the policy of START II and wanted to move in that direction. Now START II takes us down to 3,000 warheads. I do not know anybody in the world of nuclear assessments--you look at the SIOPs. I think there are public targeting figures that do not violate classification. But I will be careful with this because I do not want to violate it. Let me just say that the Senator well knows that the SIOPs plans of the United States have a number of targets that are well taken care of by the current levels of START II, which is why the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Pentagon, and everybody signed off on it. In today's world, in a non-cold-war world, the greatest threat is a rusty freighter hobbling its way into New York Harbor, or nearby, and has the potential to launch a cruise missile at us, or the greater threat is some group of terrorists assembling in New York the multiple parts of a nuclear weapon and holding us hostage, or, as we saw in Japan with the sarin gas attack, terrorists who want to cripple the community through chemical or biological warfare. Those threats chill me far more than the concept of reducing to 3,000 weapons over the course of the next years. It is going to happen.”