[if Edwards sounds younger than usual in that video clip, it's caused by low volume of bass frequencies, probably an audio encoding problem at c-span] Posted by dotpeople at January 13, 2004 09:16 AM | TrackBack"More than a decade has elapsed since the fall of the Berlin Wall, and yet still, 20,000 nuclear warheads and enough other material to produce more than 60,000 Hiroshima-size bombs remain at risk in Russia. Weapons facilities and labs are poorly protected and nuclear scientists are out of work, their services up for sale to the highest bidder. A recent study concluded that 60 percent of Russia's nuclear materials have not been secured, making Russia the Home Depot for terrorists.
Instead of living with this danger for the next three decades or more, I will eliminate it before another decade has passed by simply making it a priority. Not just in rhetoric, but by tripling the amount of money we spend each year. Even with this increase, that will be less than 1 percent of what we spend annually on our entire defense budget.
We pay for this long-term solution to our safety by canceling the Bush administration's plan to create a whole new generation of "bunker-busting" nuclear weapons we don't need, and reducing the more than $9 billion we are spending each year to build a missile defense system that so far has succeeded in shooting down only one thing - the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.
While we need to maintain deterrence and keep a strong defense, it doesn't make sense to spend nine times as much on one program that might work some day than we spend on all the other programs that do work today to protect our citizens from weapons of mass destruction."