Political Quotes

“I agree very strongly with my colleague from the Armed Services Committee, Mr. Rogers, that we need a strong nuclear deterrent. Russia is primarily the focus of that, but not exclusively the focus of that. China has nuclear weapons, North Korea has nuclear weapons, Iran aspires to have them. Without question, we need a strong deterrent. My argument is that we have one. We have over 4,000 nuclear weapons. We do have some low-yield nuclear weapons. We don't have them in the standoff capacity. But more than that, what we need to communicate to Russia is not that nuclear war is something of degree; that, basically, well, if you were to use a low-yield nuclear weapon, we wouldn't know what to do because we don't have one that is equally as small. I think that is the exact wrong approach. Our approach should be that nuclear weapons are the red line to end all red lines. There is no such thing as a tactical nuclear weapon. Even these tactical nuclear weapons that the gentleman talks about Russia having, I think are some 100 times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. What we need to communicate to Russia is: If you use a nuclear weapon, we will respond with nuclear weapons. So don't. We don't need to build small nuclear weapons so that military people can start to imagine a survivable nuclear war.…”