ondoleezza Rice is a foreign policy advisor to presidential candidate Governor George W. Bush.

NR: Vice President Gore constantly refers to Bush's plan as a "so-called Star Wars plan." What's behind that argot and choice of words?

Rice: I assume that Vice President Gore is trying to imply that this is a plan that is so grand as to be something that cannot be implemented. I suppose that's something of a shot at Ronald Reagan, although I don't understand why anyone would want to do that — given the success that Reagan had in bringing about the Soviet disarmament on a number of weapons systems, and the fact that we ended up with the end of the Cold War. I think if it's meant to be a shot at Reagan, it's ill-advised.

Nonetheless, it's not true that Governor Bush is advocating building the same kind of system that Ronald Reagan was talking about. That was a system that was going to attempt to shield the United States against thousands of nuclear warheads, and the governor's talking about a much more limited threat. In fact, in his recent nuclear-policy speech, he made a very strong point that we are not in the same environment that we were in the 1970s and 1980s. Now the emerging threats are from rogue states or from accidental launching. You're talking about a defense against a few nuclear missiles.

NR: Now this Welch panel or commission just recently came out with a report suggesting that even the limited schedule we're on now may be too ambitious. What do you make of that?

Rice: The reason that we're having problems is that the program hasn't been very well run. I don't mean to impugn the people in the program. I really think that the problem is that the administration has not really given leadership on missile defense, because they never believed in it. And so we now have gotten toward the end of the president's term, with an election campaign involving his vice president coming up very shortly, and they have tried to sprint at the end to protect themselves politically on missile defense. And so it's not surprising to me that there is a lot of chaos in the program, and I think that what Governor Bush would like to do is to have a free hand in January, if he's elected, to get inside, look at the options before us, and put the kind of leadership and emphasis behind the program that might give us options for an effective missile defense.

NR: What does the governor make of the Putin initiative to have a European-wide, regional missile defense with a lot of the components based in Russia?

Rice: I think that Putin was making a very smart political play, and he's obviously trying to take advantage of the vacuum that has been created because the administration has not been effective in dealing with the allies on missile defense. There's no doubt that there is tremendous unrest among the allies about our plans for missile defense. First of all, we have said that we're going to build a system that won't defend them, therefore decoupling their security from our own, and secondly most of the indications are that we didn't spend any time talking to them about the importance of missile defense. So there's a lot of work to be done on the diplomatic front to close this gap, but I think that Putin has sort of moved into a vacuum that we in fact created. Now, as to the proposal itself, I don't think anybody should rule out that there might be some sort of cooperative arrangements with Russia, but there is one very big and overwhelming impediment to that, and that is Russian proliferation behavior. After all, the Russians have been the ones who have probably done more to help the Iranians to build ballistic missiles than any other country in the world. So why would you share technologies with the Russians if they're going to pass those technologies on to the Iranians?

NR: The governor has raised the prospect of sharing technology with them as well, right?

Rice: Yes, but I think you have to deal with the proliferation behavior first. The other point that I was going to make is that the devil's in the details about what you do share. I think that it's entirely possible some sort of cooperative arrangements with the Russians might be worked out, but the issue is, do you actually share technology? Do you share beta? Do you share sensors? Do you share warning? There are lots of sub-categories of sharing that might not get you into the proliferation problem if you actually share the system or share the technology.

NR: So you see both on the technological and the diplomatic front, the administration is going to drop the ball through its lack of native enthusiasm for this?

Rice: Exactly, and didn't really come to put any focus on this until maybe a year ago.

NR: With the recent Korean summit and all of a sudden North Korea deciding it's supposedly going to behave itself, you have people questioning, well, where are these rogue states, what threat do we need to defend ourselves against? What is your reaction to that?

Rice: My reaction is that the Korean summit is something to welcome, and to hope that they actually do carry through this time on a lot of the promises that were made in Seoul. After all we've had a couple of false starts in South Korean-North Korean rapprochement. But that aside, nothing that happened in Seoul changed one iota the military situation on the Korean peninsula. And, in fact, it was only a matter of minutes before Kim Il Jong went home and started lambasting the United States for its forces in Korea. So I don't think anything has changed in the military situation. This could take a very long time and the North Korean regime is nothing if it's not mercurial. So I think that this is a time to certainly watch, but I don't see anything that has happened that should at this point obviate the need to defend against a Korean missile.

NR: The State Department the other day said that it's no longer going to refer to other nations as rogue states, because that's unduly harsh, and instead going to adopt the phrase, "states of concern." Will that be the phrase used in the Bush Administration?

Rice: I think we'll try to avoid categories of this kind. Maybe. The best interpretation that I can put on it is that they're trying to signal probably the North Koreans that they want to be open to a redefinition of the relationship with North Korea.

NR: What's the worst interpretation?

Rice: The worst interpretation is that this is what diplomats do. They sit around and redefine terms. But I don't want to put the worst interpretation on it. I want to put the best interpretation on it. But I think the fact of the matter is you must not be fooled by the character of the states that they used to call rogue states.

NR: States formerly known as "rogue states."

Rice: States formerly known as rogue states. As long as you're not confused about the following facts: That these are states that have been adamantly and consistently opposed to American interests, these are states that have been trying to acquire weapons of mass destruction, these are states that are stirring up trouble in all kinds of places of interest and importance to the United States, and they are opaque regimes that seem bent on destabilizing the international system, not acting within it. As long as you're not confused about that, I don't care what you call them.