DoD News Briefing

NEWS TRANSCRIPT from the United States Department of Defense
DoD News Briefing
Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld
Friday, June 15, 2001
(Interviewed by Jamie McIntyre, CNN)

McIntyre:  U.S. relations with Europe: you just returned from travel to Europe. President Bush is in Europe now.  The sense that I got when I was 
travelling with you to Europe was that many Europeans are skeptical about whether the threats that you talked about are real and immediate, and whether 
the missile defense that you talked about deploying is workable in any reasonable time frame.  How do you bridge that gulf between the European 
perceptions and the U.S., in terms of making this alliance work?
Rumsfeld:  Well, first of all, there is no Europe, in a sense.  It's a piece of real estate with a number of nations that are there, some of which are in 
NATO, some aren't.  Some are in the EU, European Union, some are not.  Some are in neither.  And so I've always been kind of bemused by the way the 
articles appear in the press, "Europe thinks this."
Not so.  A large number of the countries that I met with are very positive on - fully understand the nature of the threat.  A large number of them 
support the idea of being able to have some capability to defend their populations from ballistic missiles and weapons of mass destruction.
McIntyre:  The big concern seemed to be the ABM Treaty, and we hear from time to time -
Rumsfeld:  True.
McIntyre:  - someone say that scrapping the ABM Treat or amending it would result in a new arms race.  You don't buy that?
Rumsfeld:  No.  No, I don't at all.  I mean, who's going to race?  I mean, Russia is not going to race.  Russia's economy is about the size of Holland's 
or Thailand's.  It's a - they do not have the economic capability to race.  We have no intention to race with anybody.
The ballistic missile defense that we're talking about is designed to deal with small handfuls of these capabilities.  Russia has thousands of ballistic 
missiles and warheads, I should say - nuclear warheads.  Now, that's just not a fact that it would lead to an arms race.  It will not.
The problem is that you've got a treaty that was developed in the early 1970s, or 1970, that has as its sole purpose preventing the United States and the 
old Soviet Union from defending themselves against ballistic missiles.  That made sense then.  That was the Cold War.  They were an enemy then.  They're 
not an enemy today.  We're not worried about Russia launching ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads at the United States.
When you go to sleep at night, you don't worry about it.  When I go to sleep at night, I don't worry about it.  The reality is, however, that these 
weapons are proliferating throughout the world and people unlike them are getting them, the Saddam Husseins of the world.  And they aren't - they don't 
behave according to the same sets of rules.  And I think that a policy of vulnerability to ballistic missiles and weapons of mass destruction in the 
hands of someone like Saddam Hussein is not a policy at all - it's mindless.  And we simply ought to recognize that, set aside that treaty, go beyond it, 
recognize the Cold War is over, get over it, change our language, change our approach, fashion a new construct that makes sense for the 21st century.