Political Quotes

“Mr. Chair, I appreciate the gentlewoman's tenacity and her leadership on this issue. We have more than we need to have a credible deterrent; more than we need. This small but important amendment would allow the military leadership to evaluate how to evolve the needs. The land-based nuclear ICBMs are far in excess of what we need, and we have been seeing scandal in the papers in terms of the management of them, drug use, cheating on tests, and they are not necessary for our security. There is no security benefit in this sort of redundancy. We ought to at least be able to examine the path going forward. Locking into 400 permanently is lunacy, it is expensive, and it is dangerous, as anybody who has read, for example, Eric Schlosser's book, ``Command and Control,'' to see how close we have come to nuclear disaster with this stockpile. The record is not very rosy. We at least ought to allow our military leadership to evaluate what we need to do going forward.”