Mr. Speaker, I would be happy to explain. I think what the hon. member is missing in the context of this entire debate is that the security environment changed dramatically on September 11.
Yes, the people who were involved were using box cutters to hijack aircraft and to fly them into populated office towers. That in and of itself constituted, in my view, a weapon of mass destruction. It was a weapon of mass destruction that killed thousands of people. We know that. There is no debate on that.
What we are talking about here is the strategic environment, the use of cell-based terrorism to acquire weapons of mass destruction. As well, we are talking about the situation that currently exists, again within the strategic environment we are operating in, of rogue nations acquiring the technology involved in ballistic missile delivery systems.
The world has changed very dramatically in the last number of years. We have seen rogue states in action. We have seen North Korea in action, for instance. There is no direct connection between North Korea and al-Qaeda, obviously, but some of the thinking on the other side of the House, and specifically within the Bloc and the NDP, involves a kind of cold war approach to the world that does not exist anymore. These were some of the same people who were telling us, when the U.S. cancelled the ABM treaty, that the non-proliferation efforts of the international community were about to collapse. They did not collapse, and they did not collapse because the ABM treaty was a relic of the cold war. It had effectively died back in 1976 when the Americans decommissioned their own missiles at Grand Forks, South Dakota.
What has to be understood here is that we are dealing with an entirely new strategic environment with new challenges that we are going to have to address in new ways. Ballistic missile technology has been around since the Germans launched V-2 rockets on London in July, 1944. Since then, governments have been looking to protect their populations.
At this point in the course of human history, what we see is that Russia is not a threat anymore. China certainly does not appear to be a threat anymore. The Europeans are not going to launch missiles at us. So where are they going to come from? Typically they will come from states that we now categorize as rogue states. Or we may have developments that overthrow governments and replace them with rogue states that are a threat to our security. They are a threat anytime anyone can use weapons of mass destruction to blackmail us as well, as we have seen in terms of some of the attempts that have occurred with North Korea, for example, in using its weapons systems to try to extort food from the international community in order to feed starving populations. We cannot allow that to happen. We cannot allow ourselves to be blackmailed. We must have the defence capabilities in place.
This is not a debate that is occurring just exclusively in the United States. It is a debate that is taking place in Europe as well. They are talking about theatre missile defence, but effectively what we are talking about is a missile defence system which will protect civilian populations in a way that I think all governments have a responsibility to do.