Nuclear Terror Threat

Excerpts from Nicholas Kristof's column on page C11 of the 8/12 Cincinnati Enquirer...

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...exactly a month after 9/11, aides told President Bush that a CIA source code-named Dragonfire had reported that al Qaeda had obtained a 10-kiloton nuclear weapon and smuggled it into New York City."

...Bush dispatched nuclear experts to New York to search for the weapon and sent Vice President Dick Cheney and other officials out of town to ensure the continuity of government...

...William Perry, the former secretary of defense,says there is an even chance of a nuclear terror strikde within this decade - that is, in the next six years. "We're racing toward unprecedented catastrophe," Perry warns. "This is preventable but we're not doing the things that could prevent it."

...That is what I find baffling; an utter failure of the political process. The Bush administration repsonded aggressively on military fronts after 9/11, and in November 2003 Bush observed, "The greatest threat of our age is nuclear, chemical or biological weapons in the hands of terrorists, and the dictators who aid them."

But the White House has insisted on tackling the most peripheral elements of the weapons of mass destruction threat, such as Iraq, while largely ignoring the central threat, nuclear proliferation. The upshot is that the risk that a nuclear expolosion will devastate an American city is greater now than it was during the Cold War, and it's growing.

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This administration is continuing a long tradition of conservative disdain for the subject of nuclear proliferation. I clearly remember Jimmy Carter stating in one of the Presidential debates that he thought this was the most serious threat to America. The Reaganites derided that claim and put it on the back burner where conservative politicians like to keep it.

I suspect conservatives avoid the issue because they conflate nuclear non-proliferation with negotiated arms control agreements and nuclear disarmament. Non-proliferation is quite different of course, focusing on the security of existing inventory.

Perhaps conservatives also avoid the issue because they are terrified that if they are strong on nuclear non-proliferation they will be perceived as weak on defense. Or perhaps it's just the fact that "nuclear non-proliferation" is quite a mouthful and Bush is afraid to attempt to enunciate it in public?

Here's the full text of that column entitled "An American Holocaust".

Here's Kristof's follow-up to the original column.

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"Both Bush administration rhetoric and Kerry rhetoric emphasize keeping W.M.D. out of the hands of terrorists as a No. 1 national security priority," noted Mich?lle Flournoy of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "And when you look at what could have been done in the last few years, versus what has been done, there's a real gap."

...The Nunn-Lugar program to safeguard the material is one of the best schemes we have to protect ourselves, and it's bipartisan, championed above all by Senator Richard Lugar, an Indiana Republican. Yet President Bush has, incredibly, at various times even proposed cutting funds for it. He seems bored by this security effort, perhaps because it doesn't involve blowing anything up.

...At other periods when the U.S. has been under threat, we mustered extraordinary resources to protect ourselves. If Mr. Bush focused on nuclear proliferation with the intensity he focuses on Iraq, then we might secure our world for just a bit longer. Right now, we're only whistling in the dark.

NYT source

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<font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif"><font color="#000002"><font size="1">[ August 14, 2004 12:26 PM: Message edited by: LanDroid ]</font></font>

<font color="#000002" size="1">[ August 14, 2004 12:29 PM: Message edited by: LanDroid ]</font>

Lan-

you know your history, you know that talk of "disarmament" and its progeny are just that- talk.

The Cold War wasn't won at the negotiation table.

But switching gears to the current threat....I remember two courses I took at UC in the early 90s. The first dealt with Intelligence/Counterintelligence, the other was on politics of the Soviet Union.

In both courses, multiple speakers from different backgrounds all harped on a common theme- terrorism would someday come to the U.S., and when it did, our whole political culture would be challenged like never before (or at least since the Civil War). And the reason, they said, was two-fold- 1) our intelligence system had sold its soul to the techno-geeks, who were able to convince the higher-ups (starting with President Carter) that the old cloak n dagger days were ancient, and the future of intelligence lied with computers, not people. And 2) our justice system, which is based on civil liberties and personal freedoms from government intrusions, would not be effective at stopping terrorists, which have to be stopped pre-emptively.

Honestly, I don't know the answers. But I do know our resources should be directed at intelligence. There's no way someone could get a nuke into the U.S. without someone else knowing about it. We need to make sure we know about it.

I'm not exonerating Bush, but it goes back long before he became President.

Lan-

you know your history, you know that talk of "disarmament" and its progeny are just that- talk.

The Cold War wasn't won at the negotiation table.

But switching gears to the current threat....I remember two courses I took at UC in the early 90s. The first dealt with Intelligence/Counterintelligence, the other was on politics of the Soviet Union.

In both courses, multiple speakers from different backgrounds all harped on a common theme- terrorism would someday come to the U.S., and when it did, our whole political culture would be challenged like never before (or at least since the Civil War). And the reason, they said, was two-fold- 1) our intelligence system had sold its soul to the techno-geeks, who were able to convince the higher-ups (starting with President Carter) that the old cloak n dagger days were ancient, and the future of intelligence lied with computers, not people. And 2) our justice system, which is based on civil liberties and personal freedoms from government intrusions, would not be effective at stopping terrorists, which have to be stopped pre-emptively.

Honestly, I don't know the answers. But I do know our resources should be directed at intelligence. There's no way someone could get a nuke into the U.S. without someone else knowing about it. We need to make sure we know about it.

I'm not exonerating Bush, but it goes back long before he became President.