Monday, 24 May 2004
Serious Sam. Meanwhile, here's the man who should be our Secretary of Defense, if not Kerry's choice for Vice President (link via the DNC's Kicking Ass):
For a president who claims that everything changed after September 11, how can George W. Bush fail to take the gravest threat to national security — a terrorist acquiring fissile nuclear material — seriously?
"What's missing is a sense of urgency," said former senator Sam Nunn (D-Ga.), who heads the nonprofit Nuclear Threat Initiative, which funded the 111-page study. Nunn believes President Bush must focus on removing bureaucratic hurdles and work more pointedly with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
"If one of the great cities of the world goes up in smoke, and you look back on these obstacles, it will make our retroactive rear-view mirror look at September 11th look like a waltz," Nunn said yesterday in an interview. "It would be so obvious that the obstacles should have been overcome by the presidents."
Instead of making up threats that don't exist, the administration ought to be doing something about the real ones. It's time for a president who takes national security seriously.
Nunn, the Democratic co-sponsor of 1991's Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction Program, has been out in front sounding this alarm for over a decade: The former Soviet Union has dozens of storage facilities containing weapons-grade uranium, plutonium, sarin, and other chemical and biological weapons, most of them secured with a chain-link fence and maybe a security guard.
We've spent billions searching for Iraqi WMDs when the world's largest inventory of WMDs is sitting in unsecured warehouses, waiting to see whether America will overcome its own bureaucratic inertia… or whether the terrorists will get there first.
This is one of these issues that, if you have all the facts, will drive you stark raving mad: We have a plan to destroy 68 metric tons of plutonium that would otherwise be at risk of falling into the hands of terrorists — but we've never gotten around to carrying it out, because we're still haggling over insurance issues. As in, who'll pay for the Superfund cleanup if there's an accident in Russia while we're destroying the plutonium.
Hello?
Plutonium! Sixty-eight TONS of plutonium! Why are we wandering around Iraq with tweezers and a magnifying glass when there's — I can't even talk about this without losing it completely, but Sam Nunn can, and for that I thank him. Make Sam our VP. Make him our Secretary of Defense. But, for goodness' sake, listen to him. Get those nukes under lock and key.- Posted by Scott Forbes at 10:45 pm. comments.
