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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Karen Lawrence who wrote (48263)	10/1/2002 7:15:02 AM
From: spiral3	Respond to of 281500

Great point thanks Karen, but it’s all a bit too troublesome for my liking, kinda like this Nuclear Materials Proliferation thing which Bilow talks about a lot and which is a real problem. The fact that the government is not even spending the money it has in the budget to destroy the sh*t they’ve found, and seems to be moving towards leaving this in the hands of private sector non profits, gives me more pause than I am comfortable with. I mean what on earth is this all about. This does not start and stop with Iraq. Look at the numbers mentioned in this article, compared to what Condor just posted, it's really not a lot of money. So much for plans, are we trying to fix this or are we not ? Nuclear Dangers Beyond Iraq New York Times, September 23, 2002 By MICHAEL LEVI snip...>>And yet our responsibilities in securing nuclear materials are being ignored. A month ago, Ted Turner and the Nuclear Threat Initiative had to pitch in $5 million to evacuate two bomb's worth of poorly secured uranium from Belgrade. House Republicans are pushing for a provision in next year's defense bill that would block the president from spending nonproliferation money outside the former Soviet Union. Over a year ago, a bipartisan commission chaired by Howard H. Baker Jr. and Lloyd N. Cutler urged that we spend $30 billion over the next 10 years to secure nuclear materials in Russia; at our current spending rate of $1.1 billion per year, we will fall miserably short. Despite inadequate funding, our programs have been very successful. We have secured the uranium that might have made thousands of bombs and we have kept numerous Russian nuclear scientists from going to work for rogue regimes. A new investment in nonproliferation would help convince a skeptical world that we're serious about nuclear proliferation — that our obsession with Iraq is about weapons of mass destruction, not domestic politics or oil or revenge. An extra billion dollars spent on nonproliferation would be a tiny fraction of the cost of war in Iraq. If nuclear terrorism visits America, will it be any consolation that the bomb was not Saddam Hussein's? Michael Levi is director of the Federation of American Scientists' Strategic Security Project fas.org