And beyond that, the next issue is how do we guarantee one of these weapons, not necessarily this missile, but nuclear weapons ends up in the hands of Al Qaeda or some other terrorist group.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Nuclear weapons continue to occupy a unique place in global security affairs. No other weapons, in my opinion, anyway, match their potential for prompt and long-term damage and their strategic impact.
All nuclear weapon states should now recognize that this is so, and declare - in Treaty form - that they will never be the first to use nuclear weapons. This would open the way to the gradual, mutual reduction of nuclear arsenals, down to zero.
We still need to be conscious of the fact that Russia has intercontinental ballistic missiles.
We've gotten a long way on missile defense. We know how to do it. We know how to take down incoming warheads, but we need to do a lot more work in order to be - to deploy a system that'll defend the United States against those kinds of limited strikes that might be possible by a nuclear armed North Korea or Iran.
National Missile Defense is of a nature to retrigger a proliferation of weapons, notably nuclear missiles. Everything that goes in the direction of proliferation is a bad direction.
We continue to have nuclear weapons relied on as a weapon of choice. If that policy were to continue, we continue to have countries who are in a security bind, if you like, or perceive themselves to be in security bind to look for acquisition of nuclear weapons.
There are some people that will be deterred by the fact that we have nuclear weapons... But those people are the folks we can deal with anyway.
As long as some of us choose to rely on nuclear weapons, we continue to risk that these same weapons will become increasingly attractive to others.
The risk of just one terrorist with just one nuclear weapon is a risk we simply cannot afford to take.
We have to get rid of those nuclear weapons.