The facts are what missile defence can do. It can stop one or two missiles, and I'm not even convinced that the Israeli Iron Dome was as successful as they said it was. Nobody really knows. This is still at a highly developmental stage which is one of the reasons, maybe going back to the original question about why we didn't go in at the time, was that nobody was sure it was going to work. It looked like it was going to be a lot of money. It was crazy. It's not anymore. It's definitely there.
The geopolitical situation was.... We had, at our committee, a former secretary of defense of the United States come up, McNamara, and he was very definite. He said, “If you can develop a perfect missile defence, then of course you've developed the perfect aggressive weapon because the other guy can't attack you. You can attack everything.” This is why the Russians and the Chinese want to inhibit ballistic missile defence because that will then attenuate the deterrents factor of their weapon system.
Our argument is that this can never deal with 10,000 ICBMs. It can only deal with one or two, which is why it is, in my view, particularly important at this time when we're looking at something like North Korea. As a country, we've agreed in Europe on the NATO front. We've accepted this. I think the defence review did say that we'll explore with our American colleagues as NORAD goes ahead, so there's an opportunity. I'm just urging the government at this time that they should be relooking at this, that's all.