studied your report and those of us that have been more peripheral our study reported that it's a very serious compilation of these very important issues i want to ask more i guess  diplomatic question it seems to me that the timing of the report is a good one in terms of the relationship between the united states and russia that i don't know in my amateurism in the last opportunity i must say though it's not an opportunity we foresaw when we were working on a point this is only developed in the last few months and by the time it developed i was probably already pretty much put together in the report we  we're going to have our ups and downs with russia but the important thing is to focus on the priorities our priorities are dealing with terrorism dealing with over georgia should not mislead us about what is central should be central in our relationship if one can object to a tenor of american for the progress and the new guy the first is the funding that's a necessary condition but also requires a russia that motivated to fully cooperate and so it gets back to your first point tha cop list of their priority things that need to be done now dealing with deliberation but it is it is on their last and therefore we ought to be able to find some way of cooperating that field if we get other things off the table i believe myself but the main factor the relationship between united states and russia last couple years has had nothing really to do with this nuclear field or such it's had to do with the nato expansion has had to do with the dispute over georgia t's difficult dealing with the russians because of security problems but if you look over the years nuclear weapons are reasonably well they haven't done as well  thank you dr schlessinger when you said in your testimony that he turned that has affected his in use every day i remembered the emotional response i had when i was privileged to spend an overnight on one of the big boomer sobs and standing there beside that missile tube and the captain said you know if we ever have to use one of these we will have failed thank you for reminding us how important they are i think in practice everybody knows the rules of the nuclear nonproliferation treaty if you don't have nuclear weapons you absolutely certainly cannot have nuclear weapons until you have them and then it's ok and you're a member of the club witness india and pakistan  north korea iran tomorrow certainly the threat is proliferating i think that's a very high probability that our anti ballistic missile shield in alaska will never be used the only country i think that would use it to come over the pole today is russia and they would very quickly overwhelm our system there there's no other country i believe china maybe tomorrow but no other country that's going to come over the pole no other country that's going to launch from their soil we would certainly detect that and we would vaporize them and they know that i think that if a nuclear weapon is delivered by missile on us it will certainly come from the sea they will then sink the ship and they will believe there are no fingerprints you may argue that there is a signature in the weapon or signature in the missiles that you could detect i'm not sure they believe that and i'm not sure we would be certain that it was in the non state actors that was doing that so our response would be very difficult to predict since this is true and we have large coke's how are we going to deter that kind of an attack and how could we protect ourselves from a missed about of let me take one compound question which has to do with north korea not the whole thing story you're talking about but it is an important part of that story i do not believe united states should accept north korea as a nuclear power and i believe that the u s government should make every effort to roll back the weapons they have and i think of some possibility we can be successful in that the possibility of success depends on being able to apply what i think could reasonably be called coercive diplomacy of course through diplomacy to have a chance of success it's going to require the cooperation o several of the key nations most importantly china so the key to that i see ads did have any success in rolling back north korea nuclear program is finding a way of getting a common strategy with china and how to do that because w we supply some of the have some of the positive incentives for north korea in more importantly to south korea and japan have some of the positive incentives in north korea all of the negative incentives their proposals so my question to you considering what should we what should we do what should we do to try to prevent terrorists from obtaining nuclear weapons in particular why what are the reasons that it's not getting support for the proposals i put forward on this been very well to enhance the whole world security had they been accepted secondly i have not yet given up on them or something like those photos being accepted to try to get to your question what is the reason the nation to turn down not a very happy reason but nations iran and other other nations have been able to make they case that they have a right to enrich uranium they have a right to reprocess tony m and that in its nuclear powers like the united states and russia and so on should not be trying to abridge that right they have put it among some sixty or seventy countries non nuclear countries who feel who have been swayed by that argument i think we need to be much more effective in addressing that argument i and equipment and technologies and giving them to move towards nuclear weapons so this battle this debate is not yet over and i think we should be much more effective in pursuing  the move to get support for the additional protocols of the i a e a otherwise the move to contain the enrich uranium enrichment and then and protocol will be lost and the probability of a nuclear weapon falling into the hands of terrorists has greatly increased complex agree with with president obama and secretary gates that as long as nuclear weapons exist the united states needs to maintain a safe secure and effective arsenal however i'm concerned by what exactly maintaining an effective and modernised arsenal entails and how it would be perceived by the international community so my question to the two of you is what is the commission's recommendation for the most efficient way to maintain a credible safe secure and reliable deterrent and with the comments of secretary gates what has been your knowledge of what the rest of the international community has said to the fact that we might want to start a major section of the report there's into that in quite a lot of detail i'll try to summarize the main points from is that  important key is maintaining a robust health the weapons laboratories and that's related to that is a strong stockpile stewardship program and effective life extension program as we proceed but it but as our weapons continue to age we may find that the things that they have done in the past to keep to keep the credibility of our deterrent may not be adequate and so i believe we should be open to as we take each new weapon into us life extension program we should be open to a variety of approaches on how that how that should be done if it can be done through the life extension program techniques in the past they would be should be done that way if it requires mining  we ought not to be arguing about modernization which have created more clouds than light and if we c expect that the russians are prepared to attack us and i do not expect that we would need to respond with a full strike i think that both sides have learned from the past and that's a lot of our rhetoric got out of hand so we are going to make sure destruction capability them but i think that that possibility with respect to the problems of missile defense i think that we have to recognize that neither russia soviet union deployed missile defense around moscow secretary mcnamara said no we are not going to try and create a damage limit provide a defense against a very limited iranian capability should look very different from a system designed to defend against a russian largescale missile attack and therefore we ought to be able to have one without threatening the other moreover to the extent we are focused on defense or on a nuclear missile you know iran is a great actually greater threat to russia than a nuclear missile is against the united states and therefore there ought to be communicating with russia on this problem and maybe even cooperating in providing that defense and to the extent you have that communication and even the possibility of cooperation then this should be no basis for the russians increasing expanding their missile program to try to offset this missile defense which in any event is not directed against them but it does require assessing what the threat is and much to be done about that because i say again it is at least as much a threat to russia as they are to the united states and if we are working together on this issue then it should not become three months i think we are probably already on the way to getting that problem  solved there has been discussion over the course of the last thirty or forty years about unauthorized launches alternatively accidental launches intellectual infrastructure is also in serious trouble a major cause of the recent and projected decline in resources unquote the report went on to say that if funding for the n s a does not increase that the agency will be unable to transform the weapons complex form the necessary life extension work and sustain the scientific basis of the weapons program indeed the report points out that the n s a is already planning to reduce lab budgets by twenty to thirty percent regardless of the impact on scientific capabilities and without having even studied that impact recognizing that you believe that a funding study should be performed i'd like to ask did the commission reach any consensus on the level of resources that should be allocated in the short run to n s a to ensure that these three key objectives can be achieved the short answer your question is no we have not done a detailed cost analysis we have reached through a judgment that it is a mistake to proceed with this decrease intellectual capital of the laboratories without any question i add to that my own personal judgment that we should restore it to the previous levels that can be done either by increasing the overall budget n s a or by time phasing out some of the physical infrastructure changes being made and we gave a set of priorities on how that might be done but without question we have to put first priority is maintaining the intellectual capit and far beyond my expectations when we created this commission two years ago let me thank you for your significant and extraordinary pedigrees that you have brought forward you have done extraordinary service for this committee for the congress and for the american people let me thank you for your patriotism and some of you have been in the service of this country all of your adult lives and i will tell you that for all of the work that you have done this i think is is  fantastic combination i will tell the american people and my constituents the most impressive thing about this is that not only is it so important and timely but it is readable and i really commend this to average americans who are interested in understanding where we are on this issue when i met with you the first time one of the things i asked you for was a narrative for the american people for us to be able to lift this among above  partisan politics and ideology to a place where average americans could understand exactly where we are exactly what the threats are exactly what our opportunities are and to really leverage the time of a new administration a time when we have a nuclear posture treaty review when we have a new nuclear posture review coming out not liberation treaty review a potential for a c t bt all of these things coming together in this extraordinary time and i think that you have given a roadmap my baby by the way is graduating high school and is going to bucknell university to play vision one volley ball thank you very much