We also, I think, can be confident that no country is going to challenge us to a nuclear war under the theory that, say, ten percent or twenty percent of our warheads are not going to go off. But if you project out ten years or twenty years, when our current crop of designers has died, when our testing data is old, when we've remanufactured weapons maybe once or twice without testing them with new materials and perhaps new components, then I think that it is a legitimate scientific question whether you can have the requisite degree of confidence. This concern about the safety and reliability of nuclear weapons applies to every country that has them. And if the United States is in trouble here, then we can only imagine what kind of trouble other countries will be in with far less capability, far less of infrastructure, far less talent, far less money, and far less advanced machinery, to answer these questions. My view, though, is more basic than that.
Nuclear weapons create devastating effects.
The first weapons that were designed were designed without the benefit of any of this fancy equipment that we are going to provide to our own laboratory scientists. They can kill a city. This treaty does not prohibit the development and maintenance of that kind of stockpile. What it does prohibit pretty effectively is the development of advanced weapons designs. And there are lots of countries that are interested in acquiring them.