The whole nuclear thing is a terrible mess and it's hard for me to understand why it is that we, the United States, seem to be the only ones that are really particularly concerned about it and prepared to do something.

One nuclear war is going to be the last nuclear - the last war, frankly, if it really gets out of hand. And I just don't think we ought to be prepared to accept that sort of thing.

My own view of this, by the way, is, if the war on terrorism is successful over time, in its own way it's going to box Saddam in in a way that's going to make it much more difficult for him to maintain his power, and that he's going to become increasingly isolated. I think that's going to take time.

Some day, somebody is going to have to start talking about what happens to us all a decade from now if we let these North Koreans and the Iranians go forward with their nuclear weapons program.

Small- and medium-sized companies do not know what we have to offer and that needs to be changed. We must react just as strenuously on their behalf as we do for larger companies.

The consequence of a world full of nuclear powers to me is so incomprehensible in terms of the dangers that that implies.

The fact of the matter is that if we were going to do anything about Gaddafi, it should have been at the beginning. And by fooling around like this as long as we have, we have wasted an opportunity that would have gotten rid of him.

The point is, once they have a missile that can hit the United States, we are now back in the kind of game we used to worry about with the Soviet Union, only the Soviet Union was more mature about this whole thing than I think the North Koreans will be.

What is more important is that Foreign Service Officers understand business, about the needs of U.S. business and how to help U.S. companies make the right connections abroad.

The question really is how do we get Embassy Officers into the minds of the American business community. That is a much more difficult task than understanding a statistical matrix.

Now there is a cultural change under way in the Foreign Service.

There are a lot of other terrorist targets we ought to be focusing on. Well, there is Syria, for example, which is pumping through - because of Iran, is pumping weapons on into Hezbollah and so forth - which is then producing a lot of agony in Palestine and in Israel. We ought to be doing a bit to try to stop that.

There are sometimes problems for which there is no immediate solution, and there are sometimes problems for which there is no solution.

There is a natural partnership between State and Commerce, and the American business community to work together to educate the United States about marketing overseas.

There's Hezbollah, there's Hamas, there is a whole range of terrorist targets out there related to Palestine and to Israel that we ought to be trying to deal with. And there's a great deal of targets in the Philippines, Indonesia. You name it, there are a number of places where there are targets that we ought to be trying to deal with.