[Karuna Shinsho, Asia Tonight:] The Bush administration plans to send officials to consult with Asian leaders on the proposal. Major Garrett is standing by at the White House. Major?
[Major Garrett, Cnn Correspondent:] Good day, Karuna. Yes, the president intends to send a high-level delegation of State Department and Pentagon officials to Asia and to the European capitals to consult with leaders around the world, key U.S. allies about this proposal to create eventually downstream a missile defense system not necessarily a shield, but a system that would protect the United States, its troops stationed overseas and any allies who wanted to join in on sharing the costs for that proposal. But the first thing the president is going to have to do, especially in world capitals, is persuade leaders that it's time to put aside the sort of Cold War mentality that pervades, rather, the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty because to do what the president wants to do, that treaty will either have to be scrapped entirely or at least changed dramatically. In a speech yesterday at the National Defense University here in the Washington area, the president said it was time to do exactly that.
[George W. Bush, U.s. President:] We must move beyond the constraints of the 30-year-old ABM Treaty. This treaty does not recognize the present or point us to the future. It enshrines the past. No treaty that prevents us from addressing today's threats, that prohibits us from pursuing promising technology to defend ourselves, our friends and our allies is in our interests or in the interests of world peace.
[Garrett:] Now the president said in that speech also that there is no longer a Cold War standoff between the United States and the former Soviet Union, no longer massive arsenals of nuclear weapons poised and pointed at one another. Instead, the threats are more are smaller and come from potentially rogue nations like North Korea, possibly Iraq, possibly even Iran in the years to come and also the possibility of a accidental launch, which means there needs to be a system that can intercept those fired missiles either from land, from sea or, quite possibly down the road, through the air. That is the overall scope of the president's program, but he has a sales job to do around world and to the U.S. Congress. Karuna?
[Shinsho:] Major, despite all of that, though, there weren't many specifics outlined in the plan. Why is that?
[Garrett:] Well, because they're not quite ready yet, Karuna. They're not quite ready on a technological basis. There has been about $100 billion of U.S. taxpayer funds already devoted to creating a missile defense system. The results have been mixed so far. Even the Pentagon acknowledges that. And the administration doesn't know what it's going to do on the other side of the equation dealing with the entire question of nuclear arsenals. The United States has about 7,200. There have been proposals suggested to drop that number even to 1,500, but the Pentagon isn't quite ready to sign off on that. Neither is the president, and no one quite knows exactly how much this type of system would cost. So no specifics about cost, no specifics about dramatically reducing the size of the nuclear arsenal here in the United States and no specifics about when and how exactly the system would work. Those are yet to come, but the president wanted to set the broad outlines of this policy and make it clear in capitals around the world he is going to move forward as fast as technology and money from Congress will allow. Karuna?
[Shinsho:] Major, you mention technology. There were a number of glitches earlier in the system. Have those been resolved or not yet?
[Garrett:] Not yet entirely. There have been some tests that have been complete failures, utter disasters from the technical end for that matter, a political point of view. Some more recent tests, however, have proved more successful. But this is very complicated technology. The Pentagon readily acknowledges that. It's like hitting a bullet in space with a missile fired either from a ship at sea, from an airplane using a laser that technology is way down the line or from land-based systems. All of this is closer to theory than practice. But the president believes that the technology can be found, that it's worth investigating and that he intends to find out just what works as soon as possible. Karuna?
[Shinsho:] OK, Major, thank you. Major Garrett, reporting from the White House. END TO ORDER VIDEOTAPES AND TRANSCRIPTS OF CNN INTERNATIONAL PROGRAMMING, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE THE SECURE ONLINE ORDER FROM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com