Today I am pleased to release a new report that I hope will be a useful resource in the debate over the most important national security issue now facing our nation – the question of our ballistic missile defense program. The report is entitled Stubborn Things – A Decade of Facts About Ballistic Missile Defense, and as its title suggests, it is a compilation of relevant facts about the conduct of our ballistic missile defense program from 1991 through the beginning of last month, when we sent it to the printer.

In assessing the current state and the future of our ballistic missile defense program, it's important to understand how we got to where we are; this report will help do that. For example, last week President Clinton declined to take the first steps toward deployment of our National Missile Defense system in part because he believed the technology was not yet mature enough. In particular, he cited developmental delays with the NMD system's ground-based interceptor missile. The speed of development of the interceptor missile was not due to some law of physics. As Stubborn Things documents, in February of 1993 – less than one month after taking office – the Clinton administration returned unopened to defense contractors their proposals for moving forward with the ground-based interceptor, and the interceptor program languished for several years. The state of our ballistic missile defense program today is the result of deliberate policy decisions taken in the last ten years; Stubborn Things documents those decisions.

The compilation begins in 1991 because three important events took place that year. First, the Scud missile attack which killed 28 American soldiers in a barracks in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia brought home to many Americans the threat of ballistic missiles and our vulnerability to them. Second, 1991 marked the reorientation of the National Missile Defense program to one focused on limited missile attacks. And along with this reorientation, President Bush began promising negotiations with the Soviet Union over amending the 1972 ABM Treaty to reflect the new realities of a post-Cold War world.

As our report documents, those negotiations were abandoned by the Clinton administration as soon as it took office, and revived only last year after passage of the National Missile Defense Act. Now, however, the Russians aren't interested in negotiating, and the President last week cited Russia's refusal to permit him to go forward as the other principal reason he would not begin deployment of the NMD system.

Stubborn Things contains ten chapters, corresponding to each year from 1991 to 2000. Each chapter includes a chronological recitation of events relevant to the ballistic missile defense program – including developments in the missile threat and in arms control – as well as funding data. There are also several appendices, one containing funding summaries such as this one, which contrasts the National Missile Defense funding planned by the Bush administration with that actually requested by the Clinton administration. Another appendix includes statements by Russian government officials which provide a sense of their determination to prevent the United States from defending itself against ballistic missile attack. The appendices also include information on the missile threat as well as the text of the ABM Treaty and related documents.

In 1770, John Adams was called on to defend the British officer and soldiers accused of murder in the Boston Massacre. Adams believed in the power of facts, and at the trial said, "Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence." The report I am releasing today will provide a useful compilation of facts and evidence to remind us in the continuing debate over our ballistic missile defense program that actions and decisions have consequences.