Political Quotes

“I listened to my good friend from Florida, and I agree in terms of the necessity of having a strong nuclear deterrent, but he just ticked off that we would still have the air-based bombers and we would have land-based missiles. Even with eight nuclear submarines, we would have more than enough capacity. Now, the historic arguments, I think, are a little bit distorted. Each of these new submarines carries 16 to 20 missiles. Each missile today carries four to five nuclear warheads, each 20 times more powerful than the bombs that decimated Hiroshima. One of these submarines--two, three, four--is adequate to serve as a deterrent for anybody going forward, especially when we have our air- and land-based in addition to this. We have a deterrent that will make a difference to anybody as we are moving now to scale down the overall number of warheads, because who is it that we are deterring? North Korea? It doesn't yet have a missile that can even get to us, one, and a fraction of the firepower would destroy it. We could wreck China. We could decimate the Soviet Union. Deterrence is alive and well with a fraction of this, but embarking on a program to spend hundreds of billions of dollars--freezing us in time with, as I mentioned, $347 billion going forward--is foolish. Every independent analysis suggests that we will be better off in going forward with being able to right-size the nuclear deterrent. Even the 1,000 is probably more than we need today.…”