Vice President Dick Cheney during an interview with TIME magazine.
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Cheney: I think we're at a time when there is going to be a major test of the international community's ability and determination to deal with the proliferation problem, and the test obviously is North Korea and Iran. So far, I would say, with respect to North Korea, I've been generally pleased with the way in which the international community has come together in the last week or two after the test by North Korea. The Chinese have been vital in that process, and they clearly have -- I think they've undergone a significant transformation in terms of how they look at the problem. And the unanimous vote in the Security Council, a pretty good set of resolutions, sanctions under Title 7, the U.N. Charter, those are positive signs.
The ultimate test though will be whether or not we can complete the task of the de-nuclearization, if you will, of the Korean Peninsula, and also get the Iranians to come into compliance with their obligations under the NPT and give up their aspirations to build nuclear weapons. And the jury is still out, but this is sort of the ultimate test for the U.N Security Council, or the ability of the international community to come together and devise and put in place sanctions, implement those sanctions, and enforce those sanctions, and achieve a result.
TIME: And if they fail?
Cheney: As the President said, we haven't taken any options of the table.
TIME: Mr. Vice President, do you worry that North Korea's action and the attention it's gotten will encourage that behavior by other states that you worry about?
Cheney: Well, we'll have to see. The main one we focus on clearly is Iran. We've had some success in this area with Libyans getting ready to give up - they did give up their nuclear materials, their centrifuges, weapons design, uranium feedstock. A lot of that I personally feel was directly the result of what we did in Iraq. As we launched into Iraq, they indicated a willingness to talk about their weapons of mass destruction. And right after we dug Saddam Hussein out of his hole, nine months later, then they went forward and announced that they were giving it all up, and they've turned it all over to us, and we've got all that material now.
We also were able to shut down the A.Q. Khan black-market network that provided that, so we've had one great success so far in the proliferation area.
But again, as I said, a lot of that is due directly to what the United States and Britain did in Iraq. And we'll see now whether or not the U.N. Security Council, basically, is willing to step up. And there is a test for that organization. If there's a problem, they ought to be able to deal with this issue, the proliferation of nuclear weapons technology to these regimes that clearly are a threat to their neighbors. I don't know how it's going to come out diplomatically, but we hope we can resolve it diplomatically.
TIME: Mr. Vice President, do you believe that we'll have a confrontation with Iran before you leave office?
Cheney: I am hopeful we can resolve all these differences diplomatically.