“The whole nuclear thing is a terrible mess and it's hard for me to understand why it is that we, the United States, seem to be the only ones that are really particularly concerned about it and prepared to do something.”
“Some day, somebody is going to have to start talking about what happens to us all a decade from now if we let these North Koreans and the Iranians go forward with their nuclear weapons program.”
“That said, there is a tendency to help the large industrial conglomerate more quickly than the small company you have never heard of. That is something in the culture we are trying to change.”
“The point is, once they have a missile that can hit the United States, we are now back in the kind of game we used to worry about with the Soviet Union, only the Soviet Union was more mature about this whole thing than I think the North Koreans will be.”
“I believe that sooner or later we're going to have to deal with Saddam Hussein, because of his general reputation, because of what I'm convinced he's done with regard to terrorism and the support thereof. But I'm not at all sure I believe that it has to be right now.”
“I think what he's - what he believes, and he may be correct, I don't know, that we have some intelligence information that leads us to know some things about what's going on in Iraq that we haven't revealed to others.”
“If we had made it clear from the very beginning that we were not going to tolerate another nuclear power on the face of the earth, and had done it in Korea, where we could have accomplished it militarily, if necessary, I would put a stop to it and would have put a stop to it there.”
“In a time of constrained resources we will have to shift emphasis. but not necessarily from the traditional Political Officer to the traditional Economic Officer.”
“My own view of this, by the way, is, if the war on terrorism is successful over time, in its own way it's going to box Saddam in in a way that's going to make it much more difficult for him to maintain his power, and that he's going to become increasingly isolated. I think that's going to take time.”
“My point here is I think international pressures of our acting unilaterally again are going to be such that the administration will say, well, we just can't take this on now.”