Bill Clinton: “As you have--all of you have reported this, we have continued to work on missile defense. We spend quite a good deal of…”

“As you have--all of you have reported this, we have continued to work on missile defense. We spend quite a good deal of money on it. Some preliminary tests are encouraging. If we have the potential to protect our people against missiles that could be loaded with nuclear weapons or chemical or biological weapons, coming at us from other countries--and this does not include the Russians with whom we have this ABM Treaty but all of these other countries that are trying to get missile technology--and it would be the responsible thing to try to deploy such a system. The problem is, any such system, even a ground-based one, would violate the literal terms of the ABM Treaty. Now, there are--as you've said, Mary, there are people in the United States Congress who would like to just tear up the ABM Treaty and go on. I, personally, think that would be a terrible mistake. Look, we are--for all of our ups and downs and rough edges, we are working with the Russians, and we have made real progress in reducing threats as a result of it. And let me just tick off a few things. They continue to reduce their nuclear arsenals. If they ratify START II, we'll take our nuclear arsenals to 80 percent below their cold-war high. We're prepared to go into START III negotiations with them if we do. They've also taken their troops out of the Baltics, and they've gotten nuclear weapons out of all those other former Soviet republics. We're getting something out of this, this partnership. And we, I think, would be very foolish to just discard the ABM Treaty. So what we're trying to do is see whether or not we can work with the Russians in a way that enhances their security and ours, to share some of the benefits of these developments, and to go forward in a way that convinces them that they're not the problem. We're also trying to do other things to minimize the problem. As you know, we've been working very hard with North Korea to try to end the missile program there. So I do not want to throw the ABM Treaty away. I do think it is the responsible thing to do to continue to pursue what appears to be far more promising than many had thought, including me a few a years ago, in terms of missile defense. But we have to try to work the two things out together. And I'm confident that if the Russians believe it is in their security interest to do so, that we can. And that will happen if we work with them. If we just scrap the ABM Treaty, it won't happen, and our insecurity will increase. Bill [Bill Plante, CBS News], go ahead. I'll take both of you, just one after the other. Go ahead. Judge Susan Webber Wright's Decision”