Bill Clinton: “Even though we're talking about hundreds of millions of dollars and in the aggregate a few billion dollars, it's nowhere…”

“Even though we're talking about hundreds of millions of dollars and in the aggregate a few billion dollars, it's nowhere near as expensive as maintaining this sort of basic infrastructure of defense; the case of public health, the basic infrastructure of public health. I say to them, they should understand that we have intelligence--and a lot of it is in the public arena, you all write about it--about all the countries that are trying--the countries and the groups that want chemical weapons, that want biological weapons, that are trying to get agents, precursor agents that you can use to develop chemicals or basic agents you can use to develop biological weapons. And everybody knows now the world is full of hackers that seek to intrude on networks, that seek to insert bogus codes into programs, and all this sort of stuff. And it would be completely irresponsible for us not to allocate a substantial investment in trying to protect America from threats that will be, in all probability, as likely or more likely in the future than the threats we think we face today. That's why we started this conversation by saying, I don't want to say anything that will overly alarm anybody. I'm not trying to stir up a lot of false threats. But if you look at just what the UNSCOM people in Iraq--they say that they don't believe that the reporting in Iraq is consistent with what they believe the chemical capacity there is. If you look at the fact with regard to chemicals, with the Chemical Weapons Convention, if we can get it properly implemented, at least we will be able to track probably, that plus intelligence, large volumes of chemical stocks. But with biological stocks, a very small laboratory with the right materials to work with, you could develop supplies that could kill a large number of people. It simply is irresponsible for us not to both do the best we can with public health protections, do the best research we can on vaccines, stockpile what we know works, and then get out there and try to build a defense and an ability to interrupt and stop, with export controls and any other way we can, these developments. And it costs money. But to me, it's money well spent. And if there is never an incident, nobody would be happier than me 20 years from now if the same critics would be able to say, ``Oh, see, Clinton was a kook; nothing happened.'' I would be the happiest man on Earth. I would be the happiest man on Earth. If they could say, ``He overexaggerated it; nothing happened; all he did was make a bunch of jobs for scientists and build the Pentagon budget,'' I would be elated 20 years from now to be subject to that criticism because it would mean that nothing happened, and in no small measure because of the efforts we've made. Russia”