Political Quotes

“I object to the passage of the conference report because it contains billions of dollars for the inception of a failed missile program which has already cost the taxpayers of the United States over $60 billion in its previous presentations. I ask my colleagues to review the record of failures and also to review the anti-democratic lengths to which the Department of Defense is going to try to cover-up the failures of the system. National Missile Defense How it is Supposed to Work The ground-based anti-missile system would track warheads using ground-based radars and satellite-based infrared sensors, and the kill vehicles would use infrared sensors to home in on their targets. An intercontinental missile when it is launched starts out early in its trajectory as a large missile, hot (because the rocket engine is still burning) and slow. This is called the boost phase. It would take approximately 30 minutes for a missile to reach its farthest point of 6,000 miles. The boost phase lasts 5 minutes. When the boost phase ends and there is about 300 miles left before impact, only the warhead is left, leaving a small, cold (and therefore hard for infra-red sensors to see) and fast.”