Bush's Nuclear Failures
The Bush Administration has not done nearly enough to defuse the two biggest nuclear threats we face, and yes we still face them.
The first threat is of an accidental nuclear war, which may sound improbable, but we've come awfully close, even in the last decade, because our nuclear weapons and those of Russia remain on hair-trigger alert.
The President of Russia or the President of the United States can launch a nuclear weapon at a moment's notice. This is dangerous because, as has happened before, computers--or the humans reading them--may falsely detect an incoming nuclear missile.
In such cases, the opposing President has as little as three minutes to decide whether it's a false alarm or the real thing. If he misreads the situation, he is likely to launch his own nuclear weapons, which cannot be recalled or destroyed prior to impact, and then we're in nuclear hell.
The second threat is loose nukes, and the Bush Administration has been woefully lax in this department.
"We are not refocusing our energies on stopping proliferation," says Gary Milhollin, director of the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control.
Despite all the rhetoric about WMDs, Bush has not fully funded the Nunn-Lugar program to round up the leftover nuclear material in the former Soviet Union, safeguard the storage of nuclear material in Russia, and work with former nuclear scientists there.
And the Administration, like others before it, has not recovered the weapons-grade uranium that Washington foolishly spread around the world to help other countries build nuclear power plants. There's enough of this uranium floating out there to build 1,000 nukes, according to a March 7 article in The New York Times. And for the past eight years, the United States has been charging countries $50,000 to get back the uranium needed for one single bomb, that article notes. We should be paying them to return it, not vice versa.
What's more, for three years, Bush was asleep at the wheel as A.Q. Khan, the father of the Pakistani bomb, ran his own nuclear Wal-Mart. "Our intelligence either didn't pick it up, or didn't act on it," Milhollin says. "It was a very effective nuclear smuggling operation."
Bush finally put pressure on Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf to cashier Khan. But when Musharraf then pardoned Khan in an elaborate charade that shielded the Pakistani government from blame, Bush did not utter a word of criticism, even though Musharraf is not letting Washington ask Khan who his nuclear customers were.
This is irresponsibility of the highest order, and it undermines Bush's claim that he is keeping the United States safe from nuclear terror.
-- Matthew Rothschild
May 12-13: Sowed Hemp at Muddy hole by Swamp. August 7: Began to separate the Male from the Female at Do - rather too late.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/188301123X/circlofmiamithem' target='_new'>George Washington (Diary)
