Yesterday President Bush toured a facility at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory where processing equipment for Libya's recently abandoned nuclear weapons program is being stored, and proclaimed his administration's war on terrorism an ongoing success, especially in terms of preventing the spread of weapons of mass destruction.
There were plenty of strange passages in the president's speech. One was his depiction of Afghanistan as a happy, democratic land no longer under Taliban or al Qaeda threats, right after Afghan President Karzai postponed parliamentary elections and called the country's armed militias a worse threat than the Taliban. A second odd statement was Bush's touting of the administration's homeland security efforts as an unqualified success -- this on the same day as the General Accounting Office released a report dismissing the color-coded threat-level system as pretty much a bad joke.
But the real howler in Oak Ridge was Bush's claim of a strong record on nuclear nonproliferation. In fact, this is an area where the administration has been dangerously indifferent and inept from Day One.
Yes, Libya's decision to dismantle its nuclear program has been a good and important development. But that decision was attributable to negotiations dating well back into the Clinton administration, which the president did not deign to note. He suggested instead that his administration's tough post-9/11 posture toward Middle Eastern bad guys suddenly convinced Moammar Khadafy he'd better disarm. If that were the case, then it's hard to explain why North Korea and Iran have actually accelerated their nuclear programs after the president memorably singled them out as members of the "axis of evil," which the United States was targeting with a threat of preemptive military action.
More generally, the administration has made international action to deal with "loose nukes" -- either those in the hands of rogue states, or those in danger of falling into the hands of global terrorist networks -- a remarkably low priority. We've known since the day the Cold War ended that poorly guarded nuclear materials and nuclear weapons processing sites in the former Soviet Union posed the single largest "loose nuke" threat. That's why Republicans and Democrats, and the Clinton administration, came together to support the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction initiative aimed at working with Russia and other former Soviet states to secure these sites, destroy weapons-grade nuclear materials, and continue the progress begun during the Reagan administration to reduce Cold War nuclear weapons stockpiles.
Prior to 9/11, the Bush administration sought to slash funding for the Nunn-Lugar initiative, calling it a waste of money. Since 9/11, the administration has prudently reversed that posture, but despite his claim of a close personal relationship with Russian president Vladimir Putin, it's hard to find any evidence that Bush has made nuclear threat reduction a particularly high priority in U.S.-Russia relations. After the last Bush-Putin summit, the subject wasn't even mentioned in the two leaders' public declarations. Meanwhile, the administration's vaunted homeland security effort has placed an equally low priority on ensuring systematic inspection of cargos entering our country via sea, land, or air for nuclear materials.
As it happens, Bush's rival, Sen. John Kerry, who has a strong record on proliferation issues, has made aggressive international action on nuclear nonproliferation the centerpiece of his plan for a new collective security system to meet 21st century threats to America and world peace and order. Aside from promising to make the "loose nuke" threat in the former Soviet Union the top item on the agenda in every discussion with Russia, Kerry has called for repealing the loophole in international nonproliferation treaties that allows countries to obtain and process nuclear materials for "peaceful energy uses." That's the guise under which North Korea has created its nuclear weapons program, and the excuse Iran is using to explain its equally aggressive drive to obtain nuclear materials and build enrichment and reprocessing plants. Kerry wants to offer such states and others a simple deal: We will give you the nuclear fuel you need for energy use so long as you agree to let us recapture the spent fuel so it cannot be redirected to a secret weapons program. He has also called for steps to make prevention of nuclear terrorism a central preoccupation of every federal agency involved in national security or international diplomacy.
Preventing the nightmare possibility of a nuclear 9/11 is of such overriding importance that we'd love to see the president conduct one of his patented, if always unacknowledged, 180-degree flip-flops, and echo Kerry's sense of urgency on the subject. The administration's recent decision to step up U.S. support for the Proliferation Security Initiative, which provides for aggressive inspection of large cargo ships that might carry nuclear materials on the high seas, was a good sign. But the kind of complacency and self-congratulation reflected in the president's speech yesterday is the worst possible sign of an administration that cannot admit its mistakes, even when they are potentially catastrophic.
