28 June 2000 Press Conference Excerpt: President Clinton's NMD Comments At his June 28 press conference, President Clinton was asked the following: Question: Mr. President, we hear increasingly from senior officials here and at the Pentagon that when it comes to national missile defense, your inclined essentially to split the difference, authorize the contracting, but leave the decision about whether to break from the ABM Treaty to the next President. Is that a fair reflection of your thinking? The President: The most important thing I can say to you about that today is that I have not made a final decision and that most of this speculation that is coming in the press is coming from people who have not talked to me about it. Let me try to at least set up the thing, because I'm working hard on it now. Remember when we put out -- when Congress passed a law about this a couple years ago, you remember, and we had to sort of come up with some timetables, I said two things that I want to repeat today. First of all, insofar as there might be technology available which would protect us and other people around the world from missile attacks with warheads of weapons of mass destruction, obviously, anybody would have a moral obligation to explore that technology and its potential. I believe that. Secondly, whether I would make a decision to go forward with deployment would depend upon four things: one, the nature of the threat; two, the feasibility of the technology; three, the cost and, therefore, the relative cost of doing this as compared with something else to protect the national security; and, four, the overall impact on our national security, which includes our nuclear allies and our European alliance, our relationships with Russia, our relationships with China, what the boomerang effect might be about whatever China might do in South Asia, with the Indians and then the Pakistanis, and so on. So what I have tried to do since then is to say as little as possible, except to explore what would have to be done in our relationships with the Europeans, our allies and with the Russians, in the first instance, to keep our options open -- could we get an agreed upon modification to the ABM (Anti-Ballistic Missile) Treaty. Even the Russians -- keep in mind, don't minimize -- everybody talked about how we didn't reach an agreement, Mr. Putin and I, when I was in Russia. And that's absolutely true, we didn't. But we did get a document out of there which I think is quite important, because the Russians acknowledged that there are new and different security threats on the horizon. That is, that it's quite possible that in the next few years, countries not part of the arms control regimes of the last three decades could develop both long-range missile delivery capability and weapons of mass destruction which they could put on warheads, and that none of this would be covered by, essentially, the mutual deterrence structure of the ABM Treaty and all the things we've done since then. So they recognize, too, that we, in the new century, in the coming decades, are going to have to make adjustments. Now, what they don't say is they don't want America unilaterally building a missile defense that they think someday can undermine their deterrent capacity. That's kind of where they are now, and we're still talking about all that. But, John, the truly accurate thing is that I have not yet formulated a position which I am prepared to go to the American people with, but I will do so some time over the next several weeks based on those four criteria and what I think is the right thing to do... (Distributed by the Office of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov) Return to the Washington File