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Speeches

SPEECH | Jan. 31, 2008

Strategic Weapons in the 21st Century

General Chilton: Thanks, Mike. First of all let me begin by thanking you Mike and George, for hosting this conference, this gathering. I think everybody was able to attend. I sure appreciate the opportunity to be here with you all and share some of my thoughts as the current commander of STRATCOM.

We just had the benefit, and unfortunately I didn't get over here in time to hear some of the thoughts of former Commander Admiral [Bayson]. I recognize you, sir, and than you for your leadership and command of STRATCOM. We're soldiering on, or sailing on as the case may be, to take it to greater heights. [Laughter].

What I'd like to talk about today is bringing the perspective of a new commander to STRATCOM. Coming into the nuclear weapon business, the strategic deterrence business at a point in his career where although I've had opportunities as the Commander of 8th Air Force and Task Force 204 Commander in charge of B-52s and B-2s and their role in the nuclear missions, I have not been immersed in the nuclear mission throughout my career. So I recognize that I'm coming in the door probably most vividly in congressional testimony at my confirmation when I was asked a few questions with some acronyms in them that I had to frankly say, I'll take those for the record, Senator. [Laughter]. Which was probably exactly the right answer.

I got some good counsel, too, as I was preparing for this position, from Senator Nelson from Florida. He said I commend you to go out and immerse yourself in the first three months in the position in the nuclear business. Go to the labs. Go talk to the experts. Find out where we are today, because I'm going to ask you in the spring where you think we ought to be going tomorrow. I took that advice to heart.

So what I bring to you today and what I'd like to talk to you about today is not philosophical discussions on deterrence. Those are important. I think they've been covered and will continue, but kind of a new guy's perspective. Coming in with a clean sheet of paper, objective, unbiased, and taking a look at the landscape, and asking myself as the Commander of Strategic Command what do I need to have, what do I need, to do the mission that has been given to Strategic Command in the area of deterrence, and in particular, in today's discussion I want to focus on nuclear deterrence.

We could talk all morning about the need for nuclear weapons or not in the deterrence posture. I don't want to do that. My going-in assumption is that as long as there are other nations in the world that have enough nuclear weapons to hold this country's way of life at risk, we will need nuclear weapons as a part of our deterrence. But that's a given for me coming in.

I don't think that need today, and oh by the way I believe it's a need that we will have for the foreseeable future if not all of the 21st Century. I don't think that is in conflict at all with the desire to reduce the number of nuclear weapons in the world. I don't think there's a conflict there. I think you can feel strongly about both the need to have them, yet at the same time the need to work on reduction. Indeed, if we get to the targets that have been set in the Moscow Treaty, when we get to those targets, we'll have reduced nuclear weapons in the country to a quarter of what they were since the height of the Cold War. So they're not mutually exclusive discussions in my view.

Now what have I learned as the new guy? Well, I started asking pretty fundamental questions about the weapons we have today like what were the design requirements for them? How did we get what we have today? Most of you know this in this room, but I'll kind of walk through the evolution of my brain.

The primary design requirement in the ""50s and the ""60s was to maximize yield and minimize volume. We had certain size rockets that could carry certain size things, and we wanted to get as many warheads as we could available to the nation. That's what we needed to do in the Cold War.

Then got into longevity of the weapons, performance margins, and manufacturability and maintainability were requirements that were traded off and prioritized lower than [bang] and volume. And I think that's an important point. That is what we are living with today are those weapons, and those were the requirements that laid the foundation for what we have today.

Tight performance margins and maintainability. Why were we able to trade those off? I think there are a couple of reasons. One, we had an engine in place to produce weapons at a pretty phenomenal rate, and the thought was we could replace them and we did in fact, with new designs about every 15 to 20 years, if not more frequently. And we kept them. So you could take risk in your design, maximize bang, minimize volume, take risk in maintainability, take risk in margins because of those two factors.

Then what happened in the 1990s? We took away some underlying assumptions that bolstered those requirements on which you'd like your weapons to look like. We got rid of our production capacity in this country and we stopped testing. So now things like maintainability and performance margins come to the forefront in the discussions on what you really want in the weapons that you have assigned to you to conduct your mission as the Strategic Command Commander.

The other thing I learned about nuclear weapons is when you set one off it's a high energy system. It's pretty hard to understand and explain in models, but we're trying like crazy to do all that. But when they're sitting on the shelf what I didn't appreciate was that they're chemistry experiments. They're chemistry in motion. Things are changing. They're not static at all. In fact the physics package is not static and the things that surround the physics package are being impacted by the fact that it is not static. It affects the life and functionality of any non-nuclear and in some cases nuclear components of the weapon system that are absolutely important to the function of the system. Just by sitting there on the shelf doing nothing.

That was kind of an ""aha"" moment for me. It was maybe something I should have learned in high school chemistry, but I didn't.

What I've come to understand well is that as the weapons age a thing that is referred to as margins begins to decrease. So what was margin, I asked? A simple way in mind of thinking of it is the likelihood it's going to work the way you want it to work the day you need it. In fact you're confident it's going to work the way you want it to work long before the day you need it because that is critical, your confidence in that and your ability to exude that confidence to your potential adversaries is critical to deterrence. So you've got to be comfortable with the margins.

What I learned is because of the requirements in the design of these weapons, margin is tight by design in these weapons coming in. It was something that could be traded off because of our manufacturability and our testing capability. And margin, because of shelf life and the chemistry, is decreasing.

So we asked ourselves what are today's needs? Not the needs of the 1950s and ""60s in the Cold War, what's different about today?

Well, we'd like fewer numbers. The President has said we'd like fewer numbers. In fact we'd like the minimum number that is required to provide the deterrence this country needs. As opposed to in the Cold War, I don't think anybody thought about minimum numbers.

The need for fewer numbers means that the need for packaging efficiency, the volume constraints of the past probably can be relieved. That requirement can probably be traded off. It's not as high a priority.

The other thing is we decided we don't want to test if at all possible. That's different. That drives a different set of requirements as you look to the future.

I think something else that's different about today and what maybe the STRATCOM Commander of today worries about vice the STRATCOM Commanders of the 1950s and ""60s -- not to say they didn't worry at all about this, but probably it's more on my mind today, is about the prospect of lost or stolen weapons or nuclear material given the threats we face today from non-state actors and global terrorism and their expressed desire to get their hands on them. That's different, I think, and the priority of that is different in today's world.

So what would be today's design requirements or design points that I would not necessarily want to trade off as I look to the future if you want me to provide strategic nuclear deterrence for this country? Well, I put reliability right up at the top of the chart, given that we don't want to test and given that if we're going to have, we have a desire for a fewer number of weapons. I would like more margin.

I don't need, I think, a really high end Indy car sitting in the garage. At the start of the big races you hear this, ""Ladies and gentlemen, start your engines,"" and people hold their breath. More than one person has had their engine not start and get shoved off to the side. After all that work of getting to that point at the start of the Indy or Daytona or whatever, it doesn't start. All the engineering, all the technology put into that, all the speed, all the design for performance, and it doesn't start. I need something that starts every time. Even if it's been sitting in the garage for 25 years. And I need to have that kind of confidence in it. That's the kind of margin I'm talking about.

Today if I was starting over I'd want a safe weapon than we have today. Our weapons are safe today, but I'd like them to be safer. Why is that? Again, I think with the environment where we're worried about threats to these weapons when they're in storage, transport, transit or mated up to their weapon system, there's probably a higher threat today, a higher desire today among folks to do damage to them, to embarrass us, spread panic, fear, whatever. I think there are things that can be done to make safe weapons that we have today even safer. So I would raise that at the top of the design criteria.

Security, for the very same reason. I would want security raised for the design point in the weapon. We worry about someone taking one of our weapons, frankly. And so we build in delays, we use technology, we use monitoring systems, we do all kinds of things to try and minimize that. And we have people who can respond.

So pick a number. Let's say in a catastrophe or a crisis you have 500 people that can respond with weapons and get there in a certain amount of time. Then guys always say, well what if 501 bad guys show up? There's always the ""what if"" they've out-countered your counter. What if they can beat you to the punch? What if that? And wouldn't it be nice if even in spite of all that you can say well it doesn't matter because if they get their hands on one of these things it's useless to them. If they try to activate it, if they try to use it, if they try go take it apart, take nuclear material out of it for other purposes, it becomes useless to them. I believe that technology exists today to do that, and that would be something I would certainly want in the weapon systems of the future.

The last one I'd put on there is maintainability. It's something that we didn't have a high priority on in the weapons that we have today. We've come a lot further in understanding materials and impacts of handling those materials on people. The other side of it too, a weapon that is maintainable, you can increase availability of that weapon. You can put fear, and make it more likely that it's going to be ready to be used when needed. Easier to repair.

Again, I use the car analogy. I think about this jeep I owned in the 1980s. I could lift up the hood and I could work on it. And I could monitor the key parts associated with the main power plant to determine the reliability of whether or not it was going to start when I turned it on. I don't want to lift up the hood and see what I see under car today in a future design, which is I don't know where to begin to look to monitor, and it's hard to get at, it's not user friendly, it's not maintenance friendly. In fact they weren't designed to be maintained.

So it runs the gamut on maintainability from safety in my mind to availability. How wide do we have to those design points as you went forward.

Now if we're going to have nuclear weapons in this country I think the NPR has it exactly right, that we ought to look at those, the U.S. ought to have nuclear capability that is second to none. If you're going to have them, I don't care if it's one or 2,000 or whatever the number is, we owe it to the American public to take care of them, and taking care of them means you invest in the requisite infrastructure to support those weapons. That can be brick and mortar and technology. But you also have to invest in the requisite human capital to maintain those weapons and provide those weapons for this country.

Someone said, I'll steal this quote from somebody, ""The knowledge of how to design and fix and work on and understand nuclear weapons in this country today is aging faster than the plutonium in the weapon system."" That is a real concern. A real concern.

Human capital is every bit as important to having a nuclear capability second to none as is the appropriate bricks and mortar and infrastructure to support that capability.

I think the interesting thing is that if you size appropriately the infrastructure, then you can build a plan that will allow you to keep the human capital [inaudible] for a sustained period of time without going through the sinusoidal effect, and not sinusoidal at this point. I'd say we haven't pulled out on the graph, that would come from starting the program and shutting it down for a number of years, and then trying to go through all the processes that are required to start it up again. If you can build an infrastructure that's sustainable, that keeps the human capital, that keeps your weapon system sharp, keeps the people sharp, something that will avoid crisis management in the future for the 21st Century, I think that's a good strategy to go forward.

And I think if you have that production capability, which is what manufacturing gives you, you have the opportunity to meet another one of our goals that I talked about earlier that we have today, and that's to further reduce the stockpile of nuclear weapons. If you don't, you've got to keep too much of a hedge in the backup for the day when things go wrong.

Some would say that the development of a more reliable, a safer, a more secure or a more maintainable nuclear weapon by the United States of America will only lead to further proliferation around the world. It would be a bad signal for us. I've looked at this and thought about it as the new guy, and listened to the other side of the argument, and I think the other side of the argument is where I'm at.

There are enough countries in this world who believe I our commitment to provide a nuclear umbrella for the protection of their existence that if they ever felt we were not taking that nuclear umbrella seriously for the future that the temptation on their part, and it certainly would be mine if I were them, would be to develop my own indigenous nuclear program.

So I think in neglecting, we're not moving forward appropriately. In fact we increase the chance of proliferation globally than if we do the responsible thing.

There are other benefits to being more reliable and more safe and more secure and more maintainable, I think, and I've alluded to it a little bit already. There's the potential of reducing the stockpile.

Now I've got to be careful with my terminology, because as I said, I'm new and the stockpile is kind of like information operations. [Laughter]. You use those words, it conjures up different thoughts in everybody's minds in the room perhaps.

When I say the stockpile, I'm talking about the stuff that isn't deployed on the weapon system. So the stuff back in the bunkers. The reserve is a way to think about it. Forgive me if I have my terminology wrong.

But there's a potential if you do this right to be able to reduce the numbers that you have in the stockpile, which is a goal along the lines that I've talked about earlier. Reduce the total number of weapons required to a minimum to provide appropriate nuclear deterrence.

Why do we have such a large number in the stockpile today, or the numbers that we have I should say. Some would call it large, and some not large enough. Well, it's because we are worried about a family-wide failure of one of our weapons. We have certain failure in the weapon system and you determine that system if probably or highly likely endemic throughout that particular weapon in the inventory, you better have enough of something else to put in its place if you want to maintain your deployed status.

Also I would say because of the lack of a production capacity there's a fear that you might need to increase your deployed numbers because of the changing and uncertain strategic environment in the future. So to hedge against that you have a few extra, non-deployed weapons. More than a few extra because you need it, because you have no other way to respond should the world change and someone else starts to arm up dramatically and we make the decision that that is also necessary for us to do. Which is not beyond the realm of the possible.

Lastly there's a maintainability issue. If you take the steps that I've talked about earlier, you decrease the amount of time in depot to allow for maintenance and correcting problems in a design that you may discover throughout its life, you can decrease the amount of extras you've got to have on hand to make sure you keep the force deployed that you want to have deployed.

So I think this is an added benefit that if done properly is achievable. To increase the reliability, safety and security and maintainability of the system, also marries up with the desire to decrease the total number of weapons that we have to maintain. And if for no other reason, that's a noble cause for fiscal concern. That's the other thing I've learned. These things are not only expensive to develop, they're expensive to own. Incredibly expensive to own. We ought to look at ways to decrease the cost of providing this deterrent when we can.

I think the last thing I've learned, and then we'll open things up for questions, is that the time to act is now. This is not a problem that we can push down the road to another generation to worry about certainly. This is a problem that we have to face today, and we ought to face today. We ought to address it and we ought to close on it. I don't say we need a decision right now, but we ought to be spending the resources to answer the questions, and they're very fair questions, that are on the table today. There are engineering questions on the table. There are quantity, size, and various other questions that are on the table. And we need to take the time to answer them so that we can tee up for a decision in the next administration, I believe is our time horizon at the latest. A decision on which way we are going to go to make sure we have the most capable nuclear deterrent, first class quality, that we can provide for the citizens of this country for the remainder of this century. Those are the kinds of decisions we're looking at here. These are century-long decisions. I say let's get on with it.

From the perspective of a new STRATCOM Commander, thank you very much for your patience because you probably knew most of this anyway, but now you know where my head is. I welcome your questions. Thank you very much.

[Applause].

Question: Thank you General, for a terrific, very interesting presentation.

I was left with a couple of questions that had to do perhaps with nuances of a couple of points you made. The first had to do with your comment that when weapons are on the shelf they're chemistry experiments, and that you've come to understand that as weapons age the margin decreases. I wonder if you could say a little bit about how the laboratory findings in 2006 that nuclear weapons had lifetimes exceeding 85 years factor into that assessment.

And similarly, with respect to your question about why we have the numbers today that we have in the stockpile, and that one reason for that is that we're worried about a family-wide failure in one of our weapons. When you think about that problem, to what extent do you worry about the implications of having a stockpile that's dominated increasingly by a warhead that doesn't have the extensive direct testing history of the legacy stockpile. Thank you.

General Chilton: Sure. I heard, and this goes back to anecdotal, listening in on conversations before I was as interested as I am today, that people were worried about plutonium aging. That was one thing I thought I'd kind of [inaudible], some nuclear courses I'd taken in college, that a half life of plutonium is kind of out there a little longer than what I was hearing. So that didn't quite jive with me. So that was one of the first questions I asked. I want to make sure I understand what our concerns are with regard to the age of the weapons, is it the plutonium. Not the half life of plutonium, that's not the issue. The immediate issue, I should say. [Laughter]. There are other components. A half life doesn't continue to tick on. It will happen one day. If the estimates are 80 years and we've had them deployed for 30 or 40 already, then we're looking at 40 years from now we have to address that problem.

But the other chemistry part of it can affect, and this would be a hot moment, other key components of the weapon that are not the plutonium, that can affect the margin and performance of the weapon system. Some of those components can be nuclear components as well.

But you raise an interesting point. To me it's kind of an arithmetic question. Let's say 80 years is exactly right. I won't argue with the physicists on that one. I would say for argument that we're 40 years into that and we've got 40 mores years of plutonium life before you would have to think about replacing the plutonium element of the weapon.

And let's just pick a number, which is I think a reasonable number. We are, by the Moscow Treaty, heading towards 1700 to 2200 deployed nuclear warheads by 2012. Let's say to just pick a number, let's pick 2000, and say 2000 is the number we would like to have maintained deployed.

The last thing you want to have happen I think, when you have no manufacturing capability is to have them all go bad in the same year. It's kind of the problem the Air Force is facing with the KC-135s. In the day of Curt LeMay we'd have built 600 of those in three years. We can only afford to build 12 or 15 a year now, so we're going to have a lot of risk with old airplanes, probably flying 80 year old ones before we fire the last one, the way we can replace them. And that's with a manufacturing capability.

So if you're following me on this, not just in terms of arithmetic, and I'm pretty sure we can get this, there are 2000 out there. If you can replace 50 a year, then it takes 40 years. We better get going. If you can do 80 a year it takes 25 years. Well, we've got a little time then but we don't have much time to waste on getting that infrastructure built and getting going.

So that kind of helps, in my mind, size the issue with regard to near term issues and long term and we can't look at this as just an immediate issue. You know, we do a stockpile stewardship program which has been marvelous, it's helped us build confidence in where we are today in our stockpile and to address some issues along the way so we don't get in trouble. It's been a great program. But we can't just look at this year by year. We have to look 40 years out in the future, particularly because we have no capability today to do something about that problem 40 years from now.

I got a little wound up there.

Your second question was on --

Question: It had to do with numbers in the stockpile then, and worried about a family-wide failure.

General Chilton: If you've got N number of this kind and X number of that and Y of that and you lose the N, you're going to want to probably have enough X's and Y's to backfill all the N's. So that [provides] a number of X's and Y's to be in your stockpile that perhaps you wouldn't need otherwise if you had a manufacturing capability or a responsive infrastructure that could address those problems, or a maintainable weapon system that will allow you to go in and fix the problem as opposed to say we've got to put those on the shelf and we just have to live at where we are. That's where I kind of connect the dots.

Question: Thank you and it was specifically the issue of a warhead that doesn't have the direct extensive testing history as the legacy would in that thinking.

General Chilton: This is a hard one. Let's look to the future and a future where we do not want to test. It doesn't mean we won't test. That's a hard thing for folks to say. But I think even in all the things that we've signed up to there is a caveat in there that allows us to test. And I would think if it was important enough for this nation for the defense of this nation that we got to a point and said Mr. President, we need to test to continue to have a nuclear deterrence in this nation, that the President would say then test. So I'm pushing on that all the time.

These are some of the key questions I would say we need to spend the money now to understand, and one of the key things we have up front in every design criteria that we have going forward is, can I build the margin into this weapon such that I can go forward with a design that is high probability one that I'm going to have great enough confidence in to certify without testing? That's a tough question. We need to spend the money and the time and the effort to do that or again, lay that out.

For what's in the stockpile, and it's a completely different question, although related. When you get to the point where you say hey, the margins in our estimation have increased to the point that I'm only going to feel comfortable in certifying the stockpile by testing. We're not there today. My problem is there's a cliff out there maybe, and I don't know how close I am to it. I'm not comfortable with that, particularly as an aircraft guy who's used to 1.4 factors of safety designed into the wings when I pull 12 Gs and the airplane's only stressed to 9. I like having that 1.4 factor of safety. That's just kind of in my nature.

I'm not sure I'm answering your question exactly, but I'm trying. If your question is about testing and about whether we need to test based on what we have in the stockpile today or if we're going to need to test when we develop a new weapon, I don't know. We need to figure that out.

Question: Thank you. You're doing very well as the new guy on the block. [Laughter].

On the other hand, we do test. We test all the time these components other than the pits that are exposed to the radiation. We must have the ability to replace them rapidly. And if we have an RRW it's always possible that we make a bonehead mistake and that we will find it and it will lead to recovery.

But my main point right now is that RRW is not the solution because it will be produced at a finite rate and there will have to be two of them, according to Johnny Foster, and more if you're going to have them to replace one another.

So when do you expect to have a fleet full of RRWs so that you're relieved from this worrying? It's likely to be 30 years from now. And if that's true, we still have this worry up to that time. We still have to have responsive infrastructure to take care of the legacy warheads while we're doing the other.

General Chilton: Sir, your point is very well taken. I think I get it. I've had this discussion. That is there's a danger in connecting investment in the human capital and infrastructure with, coupling that too tightly with the need for a new weapon. You need this independently of the new weapon. We need that infrastructure, we need that human capital.

We also need, in my view, a new weapon. And new gets everybody nervous when you say that. Let me say it a different way. A weapon with the capabilities I described, with increased margin, more reliable, more safe, more secure and maintainable. I believe we need that as we're moving further into the 21st Century. But it's not an either/or.

Question: I've got a simple question, I don't know if you can give a simple answer. Yours is a command with many missions. Can you give us your thoughts on how the nuclear mission fits into the core mission?

General Chilton: Sure. The question is STRATCOM is a command with many missions. My thoughts on how the nuclear mission fits into it. I use an analogy with my team mates in STRATCOM that goes like this. We juggle a lot of balls in STRATCOM. We're in charge of space, cyberspace, nuclear deterrence, deterrence -- which is another whole discussion about the broadening of the whole philosophy of deterrence in the coming century and how it's changed, combating weapons of mass destruction, making sure we deploy an integrated missile defense system, information operations and the rest of that. We have a lot of balls we juggle every day in this command.

All but one are rubber. One is crystal. Most of them that we drop, they're going to bounce. We can pick them back up, throw it back into the stream and juggle them. But the nuclear mission is a crystal ball. That's how important it is to me. We cannot afford to drop that. This is a mission area where we as human beings are challenged to be perfect. We're not perfect. That's our challenge.

Did that help?

Question: Henry Sikulsky with the Non-Proliferation Policy Education Center.

I'd like to talk a little bit about one of those rubber balls. Countering weapons of mass ""discussion"". I would use it over and over again.

I understand, and I am actually quite sympathetic with the problems you have making sure the weapons work, that they're ready, and your constantly being painted into a corner with fewer options. But when I listen to you I'm wondering whether it would be wise for there to be a Pakistani or an Indian or a Russian or a Chinese person in this room. I wonder what they would take away from it?

One of your problems is that maybe these weapons and what you do with them may not have much effect on the people that want to get them, but it sounds to me if I was one of those people it would, what you do would have a lot of impact on my thinking if I had them already.

Can you comment on what you think you need to be doing when you're in a room with audiences which contain countries that have these weapons. Assuming you don't want to encourage them to get more, particularly about Pakistan.

General Chilton: My comments would not be any different if I was in a room with -- In fact I wish they were all here today. In fact I'm a proponent of increased dialogue with all nations that have nuclear weapons. Transparency is important in my view, and understanding of rationale of why you do things is certainly important to prevent miscalculation. This is a mission area where we don't want miscalculation between nations. I would welcome them into this type of conversation.

At the end of the day they, like the United States, are going to do what's best for their own country. When I look around the world what I see is modernization in the weapon systems that deliver these type of weapons in just about every country that you unnamed.

So my estimation is that they're looking forward and planning on having this capability throughout the 21st Century. That's okay. Let's sit down and talk about it. Let's remove misperception and chances for mistakes as best we can through dialogue.

Question: Sir, Doug Perkowitz from [inaudible].

Your last response to Henry kind of left me hanging. It goes to the issue of testing which you said you were equivocal about, but it certainly is an interest. I think on that one, the dialogue that you might have with the Pakistanis or Indians or Israelis would be different because I don't think we perceive it in U.S. interest t have them testing, for example. Because an Israeli test we can all sit and kind of go through the likely consequences of that. An Indian test would definitely beget a Pakistani test or more, which makes it much, much more difficult to contain interest in nuclear weapons in Pakistan's neighborhood. So you can have a cascading effect with testing, precisely because all the countries with nuclear weapons right now probably have a similar anxiety to that which you're describing which we've been hearing here all morning. But something's keeping them back from testing. So the first one who goes, you're probably going to get a cascade of testing and it's not so clear then what the President and the Secretary of State or others are going to be thinking about how to then contain the implications of a renewed cascade of tests. So I wonder about your thoughts on that.

General Chilton: I think it is in our interest not to test today or else we wouldn't have agreed to that. We usually don't make agreements that aren't in our interest. So I think our desire is not to test. I don't want to speak for anybody. That's the way I would read it. I certainly don't want to speak for the future potential.

I can't argue one way or the other. I can't say that your logic is good or bad with regard to a cascading effect should one country test again. Pakistan tested in the 1990s and I didn't see, well the Indians and the Pakistanis went back and forth so that cascaded quickly between those two countries and stopped. So I can't say whether you're right or wrong there, but I won't argue with that.

But I think that it's important to recognize that where we are today is the U.S. policy not to test, try to not test. That's our policy. We wouldn't have that if it wasn't in our interest as well. It may well be along the line of your concerns, maybe broader than that. I'd defer to some of the policy folks, their thoughts on that. They can chime in too, if they'd like to.

No? Is there a taker on the policy side?

Question: [Inaudible].

General Chilton: Thankfully that wasn't a question. [Laughter].

Moderator: On that, let's thank the speaker so we can move on to the next one.

[Applause]