John Kerry: “I ask my colleagues to stop and think hard about this, not just be swayed by the fact the Pentagon is asking for it, not…”

“I ask my colleagues to stop and think hard about this, not just be swayed by the fact the Pentagon is asking for it, not just be swayed by the fact our great friend, the distinguished chairman of the Armed Services Committee, is arguing in favor of it. But I ask my colleagues to stop and think about this for a minute: Do we have a bunker buster with a nuclear warhead today? The answer is no, we do not. So if we are going to study the--whatever you want to call it--the modification, creation, it is the creation of a weapon we do not have today. By any definition anywhere in the world, any leader in any country looking at us sees that as a new weapon, as a new weapon capacity. I do not remember everything from nuclear, chemical, biological warfare school, but that is one of the things the Navy did for me. I will tell you, a nuclear weapon that goes 10 or 12 feet into the ground with 70 times the capacity of Hiroshima is a weapon that is going to have unbelievable consequences to civilian populations all over the world. This is a study of the absurd. There are two outcomes to this study: Either you find it does not work and you don't use it, or you find that it does and then you have to confront the choice, would you ever use it. With the thousands of warheads we still have, with the deterrent we still have, do we need to go seeking yet another kind of nuclear weapon to send some kind of deterrent threat?…”