W. Todd Akin: “The history of missile defense goes back quite a ways. It goes back to Ronald Reagan, who proposed the whole idea of…”

“The history of missile defense goes back quite a ways. It goes back to Ronald Reagan, who proposed the whole idea of missile defense; and people, liberals, tried to make fun of it. They said it was Star Wars, and it will never work, and it will destabilize relations between nuclear armed countries like us and the Soviet Union. Ronald Reagan said, no, I don't think so. He said, we have a responsibility to defend our citizens, and we need to build a missile defense. Of course, we, all the way through from the time of Reagan to when I came here in 2001, we had really not done it. President Bush went to the Russians, went to the Europeans and said, sorry, guys, I am going to let you know, here is your 6-months' notice. We are going to start developing missile defense. And, of course, the Democrats had been opposed to it, but they were in the minority, and we passed it when we were on the Armed Services Committee to do missile defense. And it wasn't missile defense against China or Russia, but it was missile defense against these rogue nations like Iran and North Korea. So we built it. In spite of the fact people said you couldn't do it, we did it. Test after test, we did it, and we made it work, and we built missile defense. Then they made a treaty with Poland and the Czech Republic, saying we are going to deploy missile defense not just in Alaska but in Poland and the Czech Republic.”