This is one of the things that frustrates me about you "conservatives". We had a program from prior Administrations [that's plural] to suck up some of the excess weapons grade material from places like Russia and the Ukraine. Certain conservatives [named by Sen Lugar] were obstacles. When Dubya took office, he put a stop to the program altogether and only after 9/11 did Bush even thinks of re-starting the program and we still have conservatives in Congress that are blocking it.
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WASHINGTON -- Eleven years after the United States committed to helping the former Soviet Union secure and destroy its weapons of mass destruction, and 14 months after President Bush made it a priority to keep them out of terrorists' hands, vast and lethal stockpiles remain ripe for plucking, officials and nonproliferation experts say.
Although Bush and other world leaders have become ardent about the need to secure stockpiles and crack down on proliferators, implementation is snarled in bureaucratic and political wrangling in the U.S., Russia, Europe and Japan, arms control experts say.
As a result, even while the U.S. talks about a dangerous new arms race — between terrorists determined to get weapons of mass destruction and governments desperate to stop them — progress on taking deadly material out of circulation is slow and sometimes stymied.
And the proliferation threat, U.S. officials say, is getting worse, not better. Potential buyers are believed to include Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, who has said it is the duty of Muslims to acquire nuclear weapons.
Last week's terrorist attacks in Kenya underscore the proliferation threat from Soviet-made weapons. The shoulder-fired missile that just missed an Israeli passenger jet appears to have been Soviet-made, and Al Qaeda is believed to have fired several more surface-to-air missiles at American targets in Afghanistan and the Middle East in the last several years.
If U.S. lawmakers of both major parties are frustrated by the delays in securing or destroying the former Soviet Union's arsenals, arms control advocates are apoplectic. Former Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev came to Washington this spring to urge Bush and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice to move faster, before disaster strikes. Even billionaire investor Warren Buffett has weighed in, paying millions to do what the U.S. government cannot.
A small number of conservative House members and Pentagon hard-liners who are suspicious of Russian intentions have put key nonproliferation programs in handcuffs.
The issue has caused divisions among Republicans in Congress. During recent Senate hearings, the gentlemanly Sen. Richard G. Lugar (R-Ind.), in a rare breach of protocol, began to name names. He blamed California Rep. Duncan Hunter of Alpine and Rep. Curt Weldon of Pennsylvania for blocking funding of anti-proliferation programs.
Hunter did not return repeated telephone calls to his office. Weldon, in a telephone interview, insisted that he supports nonproliferation programs and would be willing to spend more if the money did not come out of the U.S. defense budget.
But sources say that behind closed doors, Weldon, Hunter and other conservatives on the House Armed Services Committee have for years sabotaged the programs by attaching numerous conditions that are all but impossible for the Russians to fulfill.
Opponents say every dollar given to the Russians to destroy obsolete weapons is a dollar freed up for them to use for other military spending. They also have raised concerns that disarmament funds are used to solve environmental problems that are not security threats...........
latimes.com |
