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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LindyBill who wrote (30552)	2/20/2004 9:05:35 AM
From: LindyBill	Respond to of 793891

Chasing the nuclear genie back in the bottle HELLE DALE Dale is deputy director of the Davis Institute for International Studies at the Heritage Foundation, 214 Massachusetts Ave. NE, Washington, DC 20002. It won't be easy to get the nuclear genie back into the bottle. No sooner had President Bush announced his worthy initiative to combat proliferation, in a speech at American Defense University on Feb. 11, than newspaper reports detailed disturbing findings of a trail of nuclear designs from China to Pakistan to Libya. This is one hot and scary topic. In fact, Libya has released a mother lode of information, which is being analyzed by experts from the United States and Britain as well as the International Atomic Energy Agency. The designs in question were handed over to American officials after Libya's Moammar Gadhafi decided to renounce weapons of mass destruction, presumably to avoid going the way of Saddam Hussein. Revelations about Iran's program for enriching uranium are equally disturbing. International inspectors have discovered that Iran had hidden blueprints for a highly sophisticated centrifuge, capable of producing a key element in nuclear weapons. This means that even as Iran was pretending to be cooperating with the IAEA, it was engaged in a double-cross. Who knows what else they have tucked away? And overshadowing it all are the revelations about Pakistan's black market in nuclear technology, run by the father of Pakistan's nuclear bomb, A.Q. Khan. Kahn is accused of running a veritable Wal-Mart of black-market proliferation, as IAEA chief Moammar ElBaradei has put it. Eager customers included Libya and North Korea. Do these deplorable failings of anti-proliferation measures invalidate the main point of Bush's speech that "every civilized nation has a stake in preventing the spread of weapons of mass destruction"? No. What it does is to reinforce his message that we must put teeth into the IAEA. Bush wants to give the atomic inspection agency an enforcement arm to verify compliance from member countries. He also wants known and suspected violators of IAEA rules barred from positions on its board of governors, which seems a very reasonable idea. Iran, for one, has been able to flout the rules for 18 years. Most significantly, he appealed to the Nuclear Suppliers Group, which includes the 40 countries that sell most nuclear technology, to stop selling equipment to any country not already equipped today to handle nuclear fuel. The argument could well be made that our best defense against the proliferation of nuclear weapons is missile defense. According to this school of thought, the nuclear genie has escaped for good, which means that we might as well get used to a growing number of nuclear states. Were we dealing only with state actors, that argument might hold, but in an unpredictable world of international terrorism, even a "dirty bomb," a primitive radiation device unleashed by terrorists in a U.S. city, is a nightmare scenario. Missile defense is needed, but only goes so far. Another argument, advanced by liberal arms-control advocates, is that we must deal with our own nuclear weapons in order to occupy the high ground in the nuclear proliferation field. The U.S. stockpile is indeed shrinking, but the fact remains that we can account for our weapons and our nuclear fuel. They are not likely to end up in terrorist hands. The approach suggested by the Bush administration falls into the realm of the realistic, somewhere between idealism and despair. Proliferation takes place mainly within a loop of rogue nations, Iran, North Korea, formerly Libya and Iraq, and is fed by scientists and material from Pakistan, China and Russia. Looked at this way, it is still a deeply troubling, but not unmanageable, phenomenon. Our focus needs to be on effectively cutting that loop, and on disrupting the work of the merry band of rogue states. That is not an impossible aspiration — provided the political will is there. twincities.com