Political Quotes

“Just to clean up a couple of earlier debates we had on amendments. I just wanted to make a couple of arguments. On the nuclear weapons issue, I just want to be clear, we support a strong and robust nuclear deterrence. We are not advocating unilateral disarmament by any stretch of the imagination. We are simply asking: In the budget challenge environment that we have, is this the best use of our money to totally rebuild our entire nuclear weapons system? And the amendments that were offered weren't even necessarily saying no. They are just saying this is something we ought to study and ought to talk about. And I will, however, disagree with one argument that was made about how somehow it is a myth that over the last 70 years, all of our adversaries are building nuclear weapons in response to the nuclear weapons that we have built. I think that is a big misreading of history. We all recall that we were first to the table on this. And thank goodness we were. It enabled us to end World War II. But we are still the only nation on Earth that has actually used nuclear weapons. And when the Soviet Union developed theirs, we had them and they didn't. And I think it is a little ridiculous to assume that no part of their thinking was that: Well, if the United States of America, our prime adversary, has nuclear weapons, we better have them, too.…”