Posted on 09/26/2001 8:20:58 AM PDT by toenail
Perhaps it bothered you more than somewhat that, after the CIA gave Gov. George W. Bush several days of briefings on the world situation last week, he felt compelled to issue a warning to terrorists not to view the extended delay in the transfer of presidential power as an opportunity to attack U.S. interests at home or abroad. "I have all the confidence in the world that the Clinton administration and the next administration, which I hope is the Bush administration, would do whatever it takes to send a chilling signal to terrorists that we'll protect our property and our people," he said.
Think about it. When Clinton-Gore wrested power away from him, President George Bush -- supported by a Democrat-controlled Congress -- had been moving at unprecedented speed to address, unilaterally, the consensus No. 1 threat to our national security -- namely, terrorists and rogue states getting their hands on nukes. Now, after eight years of Clinton-Gore stewardship, after their essentially abandoning the Bush-Nunn-Lugar unilateral approach, the CIA evidently assesses the loose nuke threat to be much worse now than when Clinton-Gore took office.
How could that be? Well, if you've been a faithful reader of these columns, you know the answer.
The goal of the Bush-Quayle administration had been to prevent the proliferation of nukes -- the goal of the Clinton-Gore administration has been nuke disarmament.
Bush-Quayle had focused on preventing terrorists and rogue nation-states from getting their hands on nukes. Clinton-Gore focused, instead, on getting nation-states to get rid of the nukes they already had. As ought to be intuitively obvious to the most casual observer, complete success -- even had it been obtained -- by Clinton-Gore would not have reduced one iota the threat of loose nukes to those assembled on the West Front of the Capitol next Jan. 20.
Bush-Quayle and the Nunn-Lugar-Domenici Congress had focused on preventing the proliferation of Russian nukes, fissile materials, nuke technologies and nuke technologists to terrorists and rogue states. To prevent the theft of Russian nukes, the Pentagon and DOE weapons-labs provided the Russians with U.S. armored rail-cars to transport Soviet nukes back into Russia and U.S. armor blankets to cover them when not yet in armored rail-cars. We provided them with thousands of U.S. "bird cages" to safely store the fissile materials recovered from thousands of dismantled Soviet nukes. We provided them with many millions of dollars worth of U.S.-style fissile material protection -- control and accounting equipment -- then helped them install it and trained them how to use it.
In order to reduce the loose-nuke threat, Bush-Nunn-Lugar offered to purchase excess Russian fissile materials, including the plutonium and highly-enriched uranium (HEU) recovered from the thousands of Soviet nukes being dismantled. An almost unbelievable offer. Unbelievably, the Russians accepted our unbelievable offer.
Here is the point that seems to have been lost on Clinton-Gore: The Russians realized that it was their fissile materials that were the loose-nuke threat to themselves, to us, and the world -- not ours. They realized that it was in their best interests to sell their fissile materials to us. They certainly knew that we wouldn't make new nukes out of the Russian fissile materials. As they well knew, we already had tons of plutonium and HEU that we had recovered from the thousands of battlefield nukes the Bush-Quayle administration had already begun dismantling upon winning the Cold War.
Seemingly oblivious to all that, Clinton-Gore came to power and focused not on the safe and secure disposition of the HEU and plutonium being recovered from dismantled Russian nukes -- the administration focused, instead, on negotiating the dismantlement of more and more Russian and U.S. nukes. Instead of continuing to provide the Russians U.S. equipment and technical assistance to prevent Russian nukes from getting loose, Clinton-Gore set about getting the Russians -- and in the process, the United States -- to disarm. They actually used Nunn-Lugar-Domenici loose-nuke assistance as a negotiating tool, withholding it until the Russians agreed to dismantle yet more nukes. (Of course, the Russians were already dismantling faster than the Clinton-Gore administration could negotiate.)
Clinton-Gore should have realized that the Russians had no intention -- then or now -- of disarming. (And, apparently, neither does President-elect George W. Bush.) But the Clinton-Gore-Greenpeace Administration was hell-bent on nuke disarmament by the five Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) nuke states -- U.S., UK, France, Russia and China -- from the get-go. The nuke disarmament process was to be presided over by the United Nations through the subsidiary International Atomic Energy Agency.
Now, the IAEA was originally established in 1957 to provide the benefits of nuclear energy to the world. In 1977, the IAEA took on the job of "policing" the NPT membership. The IAEA was supposed to ensure that those NPT signatories not already having nukes, did not -- in the process of acquiring peaceful nuclear energy technology -- deliberately or inadvertently acquire the materials or technologies necessary to make nukes. That is, a collateral IAEA duty was to "monitor" NPT nation-state adherence to the NPT, to help prevent nuke proliferation.
But, as we now know, when Bill Clinton says "prevent nuke proliferation," he doesn't mean that -- he means "disarm."
In particular, in April 1996, after stalling for three years on Bush-Nunn-Lugar initiatives to unilaterally purchase outright excess Russian HEU and plutonium, President Clinton met with Boris Yeltsin and the G7 Group of Industrialized Nations (U.S., UK, France, Germany, Japan, Canada and the European Union) at the Moscow Nuclear Safety and Security Summit. How did the G7 get into the loose-nuke act? Well, the Clinton "spin" for involving the G7 in Nunn-Lugar-Domenici loose nuke programs was to focus "new international attention on the pressing international security problem posed by the excess stocks of fissile material."
But, their attention wasn't focused on the "excess stocks." Clinton-Gore wasn't primarily concerned about a rogue state or a terrorist group acquiring the "excess stocks." Clinton-Gore was primarily concerned about the Russians making new nukes out of the "excess" materials. The presidents of the United States and Russia, together with the finance ministers of the G7, gave the game away when they expressed their determination to ensure that "fissile material designated as no longer required for defense purposes will never again be used for nuclear-explosive purposes."
And the next year, when the U.S. and Russia finally got around to signing the U.S.-IAEA-Russia Trilateral Agreement on disposing excess Russian and U.S. plutonium recovered from dismantled nukes, Clinton-Gore intentions were further revealed:
Creating confidence that these large stockpiles of excess fissile materials will not be re-used for weaponry by our two countries is critically important to enhance the prospects for agreement on deeper cuts in our nuclear arsenals, to help induce the other nuclear-weapon states to join the nuclear disarmament process, and to reinforce the global nonproliferation regime by indicating that the ongoing U.S. and Russian nuclear-disarmament process is genuine and not likely to be reversed.
That's disarmament talk, folks, pure and simple.
So, Bush-Nunn-Lugar started out eight years ago to assist -- unilaterally -- the Russians deal with the No. 1 threat to our national security -- their nukes getting loose. But the Clinton-Gore administration hijacked those unilateral Nunn-Lugar loose-nukes programs, subverted them, and turned them into international disarmament programs. The Clinton-Gore administration placed all its faith -- to prevent nuke proliferation as well as to disarm -- in the United Nations and its enforcement, by moral suasion, of the Nonproliferation Treaty and Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. Seldom has so much faith been so misplaced.
It wouldn't be quite so bad if Clinton-Gore had managed -- through the United Nations -- to get the Chinese and the Russians to disarm. But the administration hasn't. The Russians are dismantling nukes just as fast as they can because they want to, not because Clinton-Gore made them. But the Russians are not actually disarming. Both the Russians and Chinese intend to keep the nuke stockpile they believe they need to keep. (That's what President-elect Bush says we're going to do, too.)
And it wouldn't be quite so bad if Clinton-Gore had managed -- through the United Nations -- to keep non-NPT states, such as India and Pakistan, from acquiring and testing nukes. But they didn't.
Now, maybe Clinton-Gore have managed -- through the United Nations -- to keep terrorist groups and rogue states such as Iraq and North Korea from acquiring nukes, after all. But if that's the case, why was Bill Clinton so anxious to get President-elect Bush "to send a chilling signal to terrorists" last week that Bubba Clinton would continue, for the rest of December and most of January, to "protect our property and our people"?
Maybe it's not such a great idea to have the entire government of the United States standing out there on the West Front of the Capitol next Jan. 20.
Physicist James Gordon Prather has served as a policy implementing official for national security-related technical matters in the Federal Energy Agency, the Energy Research and Development Administration, the Department of Energy, the Office of the Secretary of Defense and the Department of the Army. Dr. Prather also served as legislative assistant for national security affairs to U.S. Sen. Henry Bellmon, R-Okla. -- ranking member of the Senate Budget Committee and member of the Senate Energy Committee and Appropriations Committee. Dr. Prather had earlier worked as a nuclear weapons physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California and Sandia National Laboratory in New Mexico.
Good camparison Gunner, "Betrayal" is an excellent book, and really illustrates why we are in the mess we are today....Thank Clinton/Gore for that!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.