A Real Nuclear Danger

While the Bush administration has been distracted by the invasion and occupation of Iraq, it has neglected the far more urgent threat to American security from dangerous nuclear materials that must be safeguarded before they can fall into the hands of terrorists. That is the inescapable conclusion to be drawn from a new report that documents the slow pace of protecting potential nuclear bomb material at loosely guarded sites around the world.
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The most plausible explanation is that the administration has focused so intensely on Iraq, which posed no nuclear threat, that it had little energy left for the real dangers. Indeed, the Harvard researchers said that if a tenth of the effort and resources devoted to Iraq in the last year was devoted to securing nuclear material wherever it might be, the job could be accomplished quickly.

Fortunately, the administration has begun accelerating its efforts in at least one critical area. This week, the energy secretary, Spencer Abraham, announced a $450 million campaign to retrieve nuclear materials that the United States and the Soviet Union had sent around the world for research purposes. Highly enriched uranium is scattered at some 130 research reactors in more than 40 countries, often guarded by little more than a night watchman and a chain-link fence. Dozens of these sites have enough material to make a bomb. The accelerated retrieval effort has rightly been praised by groups seeking to control nuclear proliferation, but many experts warn that more needs to be done to speed up a process that will take years to complete.

The biggest danger point remains Russia, where huge stockpiles of nuclear weapons and materials usable in weapons became vulnerable to theft and smuggling with the breakup of the Soviet Union. Although the United States and Russia are cooperating on a program to safeguard dangerous materials and have fixed some of the most glaring vulnerabilities, only a fifth of the dangerous nuclear material not in weapons has been protected by comprehensive security upgrades, an appallingly sluggish performance. The effort has been slowed by clashes over American access to critical sites and arguments over who would be liable in an accident. Meanwhile, an ambitious campaign begun by the G-8 nations to prevent the spread of weapons of mass destruction has been slow to get off the ground, despite pledges of $10 billion from the United States and $7 billion from other nations.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/28/opinion/28FRI1.html

Had the boy king and his merry band of henchmen, divided the
$200,000,000,000.00 or so they have wasted and stolen in Iraq along the lines of say

30 bil for rounding up all the loose fissile material lying around
20 bil to education both in America and some of the sadder parts of the world.
50 bil for renewable energy wind ,otec, solar,
100 bil for healthcare for everyone in America
would we be safer or less safe from terrorists? Geese f&*%ing idiots.

http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0415/p06s02-woeu.html

The sobering results of the still- classified work by a Pentagon "Commission on Nuclear Fail-Safe" - to which Mr. Blair testified about Soviet nuclear safeguards, inside a vault at the Pentagon around 1992 - point to US vulnerabilities that could also apply to Russian systems today. Investigators found an "electronic back door" into the US Navy's system for broadcasting nuclear launch orders to Trident submarines.

"This deficiency allowed unauthorized hackers, which could be terrorists or high school mischief makers, to potentially insert a launch order and transmit it to the Trident," Blair says. The gap was so serious that Navy launch order verifications had to be revised.


http://www.coopcomm.org/nonukes/library/weinberg_on_nuclear_danger.htm

The danger is not that the Russians will get angry with us, or plan to attack us. The danger is that they will quietly adopt a cheap and easy defense against a preemptive American attack, by keeping their forces on a hair-trigger alert. This presents the US with the threat of a large-scale Russian attack by mistake during some future crisis; for instance, the Russians may receive misleading warnings of an imminent American attack and launch their own nuclear weapons before they can be destroyed on the ground. (According to Russian sources, it now takes fifteen seconds for the Russians to target their ICBMs, and then two to three minutes to carry out the launch.) This danger is exacerbated by the gradual decay of Russia's capabilities for surveillance of possible attacks and control of their own forces, a decay that has already led them on one occasion to mistake a Norwegian research rocket for an offensive missile launched from an American submarine in the Norwegian sea.

Even though the threat of a large Russian mistaken attack is not acute, it is chronic. It is also the only threat we face that could destroy our country beyond our ability to recover. Compared with this threat, all other concerns about terrorism or rogue countries shrink into insignificance.

This brings me to the one real value of our large nuclear arsenal: we can trade away most of our arsenal for corresponding cuts in Russian forces. I don't mean cuts to about two thousand deployed weapons, but to not more than a few hundred deployed weapons on each side, and with each side having not more than a thousand nuclear weapons of all sorts, including those in various reserves, as called for by a 1997 report of the Committee on International Security and Arms Control of the National Academy of Sciences.<6> In that way, although the danger of a mistaken Russian launch would not be eliminated, the stakes would be millions or tens of millions of casualties, not hundreds of millions.

Such cuts would also reduce the danger that Russian nuclear weapons or weapons material could be diverted to criminals or terrorists. Instead of seeking the maximum future flexibility for both sides in strategic agreements with the Russians, we should be seeking the greatest possible irreversibility on both sides, based on binding ratified treaties. We ought also to be spending more on the program, originally sponsored by former Senator Sam Nunn and Senator Richard Lugar, that assists the Russians in controlling or destroying their excess nuclear materials. At this moment, when the Russians are eager to improve relations with the West, when considerations of economics provide them with a powerful incentive to reduce their nuclear forces, and when for the first time they have a president powerful enough to push such reductions through their military and political establishments, we have an unprecedented opportunity to begin to escape from the risk of nuclear annihilation. It is tragic that we are letting this opportunity slip away from us.

discussed.

The Clinton-Gore had a very well thought out program. I suppose that politically they were unable to promote it too loudly since it involved commercial nuclear fuel, but they were at least proposing a workable swords-into-ploughshares strategy.

The reversal of the world effort to turn away from nuclear weapons may well be the worst long term effect of the Bush usurpation.

Bushco-Arrogant, self absorbed and focused and gathering money and power.