In a September 10, 2006, appearance on Meet the Press, Vice President Dick Cheney said, regarding 9/11: ” ‘…we learned a lot from 9/11. We saw, in spite of the hundreds of billions of dollars we’d spent on national security in the years up to 9/11, on that morning, 19 men with box cutters and airline tickets came into the country and killed 3,000 people. We had to take that and, and also the fact of their interest of weapons of mass destruction and recognize, at that time, it was the threat then and it’s the threat today that drives much of our thinking, that the real threat is the possibility of a cell of al-Qaeda in the midst of one of our own cities with a nuclear weapon, or a biological agent. In that case, you’d be dealing–for example, if on 9/11 they’d had a nuke instead of an airplane, you’d have been looking at a casualty toll that would rival all the deaths in all wars fought by Americans in 230 years. That’s the threat we have to deal with, and that drove our thinking in the aftermath of 9/11 and does today.’ ”
– Ron Suskind, The Way of the World, Page 68