Political Quotes

“I rise today to discuss the threat posed by the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction around the globe and to introduce legislation aimed at modernizing the way the United States addresses this critical national security challenge. My bill, the Next Generation Cooperative Threat Reduction Act of 2013, requires the President to establish a multi-year comprehensive and well- resourced regional assistance strategy to coordinate and advance cooperative threat reduction and related nonproliferation efforts in one of the most critical regions to U.S. national security interests: the Middle East and North Africa. Fifty years ago, in 1963, President Kennedy famously said that he was ``haunted'' by the possibility that the United States could soon face a rapidly growing number of nuclear powers in our world. At the time, he predicted that by 1975, there could be as many as twenty countries with nuclear weapons. However, thanks to strong, forward-thinking and innovative American leadership on the nonproliferation agenda, including efforts like the Nonproliferation Treaty and the Nunn-Lugar program, we have so far averted Kennedy's nuclear nightmare. Recent WMD-related developments, including Syria's chemical weapons stockpile and Iran's nuclear program, have begun to test the limits of our nonproliferation regime.…”