onald Rumsfeld served as Secretary of Defense under presidents Nixon and Ford. He chaired a bipartisan congressional commission on ballistic-missile threats, which released its findings in 1998.

Lopez: What do you make of the missile-defense news coming out of the President's overseas tour to Europe and Russia?

Rumsfeld: The thing that struck me about the missile-defense issue as it is being considered in the United States, in Russia, in China, in Western Europe is this: If you think about it, Russia and the People's Republic of China, along with North Korea, are the principle proliferators of missile technology and weapons of mass destruction. The Russians, for example, have helped North Korea. They are currently providing assistance to China. They are providing assistance to Iran. They have, over a sustained period, provided assistance to India. They have helped Iraq over time. They are active in spreading these technologies around the world. So to, with China. China has helped Iran, Pakistan, North Korea.

The ironic thing is that here you have two countries that are actively creating a more dangerous world through the proliferation of these technologies, complaining and protesting that the United States has decided that it thinks that it is in our best interest to provide a capability to defend against those various technologies. Their argument is that it is destabilizing. What is destabilizing is proliferation. They are the ones who are taking an act that is causing an instability to be injected into the world equation. Only leaders that are deluding themselves can fail to see what's happening. And it is just beyond comprehension why someone doesn't just call them on it. For them to be arguing that the United States should not take steps to defend itself against ballistic missiles from states that they have been providing assistance to, because it's destabilizing, is on its face inconsistent.

Lopez: But does the threat of rogue states with technology make sharing necessary?

Rumsfeld: One thing that is new in the world equation is that the Soviet Union does not exist. And therefore the threat of a Soviet attack across Germany or the threat of a nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union has diminished substantially. What has come up — a relatively new phenomenon — is the fact that, given the number of years since nuclear weapons have existed, and given the end of the Cold War and the relaxed mood around the world, proliferation has become pervasive. With the result being, if a country wants those capabilities, they can, in fact, over a period of time, get them. Not a lot of them, and not highly accurate, and not particularly safe. But they can get weapons that can threaten and impose great damage on their neighbors and other countries. Now that's a fact.

What ought to be done about it? Well, at the moment, the nations that have those are nations that have essentially been cooperating with Russia and China because Russia and China have been providing them assistance. They are nations that in many instances are not friendly to the United States or Western Europe or to the United States's friends and allies in Northeast Asia. So, the question is, who are they more likely to threaten? Obviously, not China or Russia at the present time. So, it's not surprising that Mr. Putin apparently conceded in his communiqué that there is in fact a growing threat from such countries in the world. But the reality is that that threat is essentially not against Russia or China at the present time, but much more likely against the United States and our friends and allies around the world.

The truth, however, is that when proliferation starts, it tends to not stop. That is to say, if Russia helps Iran, Iran does not necessarily have to take an oath that they'll never take those same technologies and give them to anybody else. And over time Iran could decide to give those technologies to someone who could in fact threaten Russia. So Russia is playing a very dangerous game by continuing this pattern of proliferation.

The issue of sharing of technologies is a complex one. It could be done in a variety of ways. At one extreme, someone could argue that you could have a world system that would immediately shoot down any missile that had not been previously announced and understood to be for peaceful purposes. And it could be independently operated. There have been people who've proposed that. You could have a theater system that the United States could help to use to protect a friend or an ally or a location where we have deployed troops. So that is a sharing of the capability, as we are discussing with Israel. You could have, for example, a system where the United States might have a shared warning system, a detection system, as opposed to a shoot-down system. So there are pieces that could be shared. There are technologies that could be shared. It's an enormously complex subject, and there are things that we would not want to share. And there are things that we would not want jointly operated. But there are other things that we could conceivably share or that could be jointly operated.