Political Quotes

“I do not understand this amendment because we reached a compromise on the floor of the House last year, and it was not as my colleagues said, Republicans. In fact, I have the vote here. It was 243 to 172. The last time I checked, there are not 243 Republicans in this House. And that very carefully crafted amendment that we passed was an amendment that was crafted by the gentleman from South Carolina (Mr. Spratt) and by others that said we should be allowed to continue to do research. My colleague makes it out as if we want to automatically build some kind of Earth penetrator and that we are some kind of Darth Vaders. The fact is anyone who has studied the Ministry of Atomic Energy and has watched the career of Mr. Mikhailov, who used to be the director of that agency, when he left that agency, he came back as the number two person, and we put on the record in committee from Mr. Mikhailov's own mouth that his job was to develop a whole new class of small atomic munitions that are nuclear. If we follow through on the logic of those like my friend from Massachusetts, we cannot even research what the Russians are building. That has nothing to do with what we want to build. We cannot even research the small weapons the Russians have said publicly they are building. That is outrageous. That is outrageously stupid. This is not about whether or not we are going to nuke underground. It is whether or not we allow our scientists to have the ability to do research.”