Political Quotes

“I have an amendment here that would deal with a study on the cost-effectiveness of the W80-4 Life Extension Program. We have been having these debates over the years before the committee on this issue of nuclear weapons. I am deeply troubled that we really haven't done a deep dive on the floor of the House in terms of the path we have been on. {time} 1530 I have settled, in the past, for trying to have some studies to determine whether or not what we are doing going forward is actually cost-effective. In this case, the father of this device, former Secretary of Defense Bill Perry, has argued that there is scant justification for spending tens of billions of dollars on new weapons. General Mattis has stated numerous times that he is not sold on the LRSO. I simply want to make sure that we know what we are getting into, what the costs are, in terms of some of the increases that are going forward. We need to do a better job of our oversight, our debate. These weapons have not been used, as the gentleman said, since the end of World War II. It is not at all clear that we needed to have the volume of weapons we had, the number of delivery systems. In fact, there is strong argument that we could have done a better job, or just as good a job, of deterrence with less. And there have been a whole host of problems in the past in terms of mismanagement, accident that we have narrowly avoided disaster.…”