President Bill Clinton
President William Jefferson Clinton was the 42nd President of the United States. He served two terms and at times enjoyed widespread popularity. In 1998, as a result of issues surrounding personal problems, Clinton was the second US president to be impeached by the House of Representatives. He was tried in the Senate and found not guilty.
In the world, he successfully dispatched peace keeping forces to war-torn Bosnia and bombed Iraq when Saddam Hussein stopped United Nations' inspections for evidence of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons. He became a global proponent for an expanded NATO, more open international trade, and a worldwide campaign against drug trafficking.
Speaking about an incident on the fourth of July in 1999, President Clinton recalled a Blair House meeting with Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif of Pakistan. Pakistan and India were engaged in a conflict and the United States had intelligence that Pakistan was preparing its nuclear arsenal for possible deployment.
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"It was clear that either side might decide to bring nuclear weapons into play," recalls President Clinton. "It was further clear to me that the Indians and the Pakistanis, even though they shared the Indian subcontinent, did not know as much about each other's doctrine for use of nuclear power or capacities as we and the Soviet Union had known during the Cold War."
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"So now you have a subcontinent with a fair number of nuclear weapons, with uncertain doctrines for use and - somewhat questionable security of the weapons themselves and the materials used to make them. And all of a sudden, we've got this huge crisis. No one had thought through, in my opinion, on the Pakistani side - and maybe on the Indian side - how much they were increasing the risk to the whole world by precipitating this huge crisis when they're both sitting on nuclear arsenals," President Clinton says.
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"I knew my only real job on the Fourth of July was to get Pakistan back across that Line of Control under - whatever I had to do to get it done; because, otherwise, we were just out there rolling dice, hoping to goodness that nothing terrible would happen."
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