Bill Clinton: “Well, for one thing, I think a lot of countries are taking economic action: Japan is; Canada is; a number of European…”

“Well, for one thing, I think a lot of countries are taking economic action: Japan is; Canada is; a number of European countries are. The European Union is going to have to debate this. I think that's one of the reasons that Prime Minister Blair, who otherwise took quite a hard line here with us--he was quite good on the language of the resolution--but I think that he thinks, as head of the EU, he has to give all these other countries the chance to be heard. I think a number of European countries will take economic actions here. And I think that we just have to--we're going to have to work this situation to turn it back around, because what you don't want is the-- insofar as possible, the best of all worlds would be that this is an isolated event. And then India signs the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty; then Pakistan says it will sign if India does, so they sign. That would be the best conceivable result. The worst conceivable result would be for everybody that's ever worked on this to think they ought to conduct some sort of test and that this is now--it's sort of the new measure of either national security or national greatness. That's a terrible signal for the rest of us to send the world, especially when the Russians and we are doing our very best to put everything in the opposite direction and to reduce the number of nuclear weapons in the world. So we just have to--I'm going to spend a lot of time thinking through this and coming up with an affirmative strategy to try to deal with all the elements of it and all the aspects of the problem. And in the meantime, I hope that Pakistan will find the strength necessary to walk away from a test. 1996 Campaign Financing”