Sam Nunn: Terrorists Winning Nuclear Race
By Montag | Related entries in Foreign Policy, The War On TerrorismWASHINGTON — The government is losing the battle to keep the world’s most dangerous weapons away from the world’s most dangerous terrorists, largely because of a failure to monitor nuclear materials at the source, former Sen. Sam Nunn said Monday.“We are in a race between cooperation and catastrophe, and the threat is outrunning our response,” said Nunn, a former Armed Services chairman who now leads the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a group that promotes nonproliferation issues.
And later on in the story, we get this fun little nugget about Nunn’s aforementioned “cooperation”:
President Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin have agreed in principle to work together on harnessing these materials, but Nunn said the negotiations have been scuttled by far lesser concerns, such as deciding who would be liable should something go wrong.
Uhh, guys…who cares who’d be liable! Anybody with the means to do so is obligated to secure this stuff. Did somebody forget what he said on October 8, 2002?
“Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof — the smoking gun — that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.”
-George W. Bush
Again, let’s not lay blame and start working to get those weapons out of the wrong hands. We simply can’t wait.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 28th, 2005 and is filed under Foreign Policy, The War On Terrorism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
August 9th, 2005 at 1:30 pm
[...] What was the purpose? To send a message to the rest of the world? We know that the Russians got the message very clearly, as it can be said that the use of the A-bomb on Japan marked the beginning of the nuclear arms race and cold war. Today we still feel the reverberations of those explosions as we struggle to deal with the former Soviet Union’s unsecured nukes, concerns of nuclear terrorism, the proliferation of weapons in states such as Pakistan and North Korea, and the unknown ambitions of states such as Iran. What can the US do to lead the world away from the precipice of nuclear disaster? [...]
August 9th, 2005 at 1:40 pm
[...] What was the purpose? To send a message to the rest of the world? We know that the Russians got the message very clearly, as it can be said that the use of the A-bomb on Japan marked the beginning of the nuclear arms race and cold war. Today we still feel the reverberations of those explosions as we struggle to deal with the former Soviet Union’s unsecured nukes, concerns of nuclear terrorism, the proliferation of weapons in states such as Pakistan and North Korea, and the unknown ambitions of states such as Iran. What can the US do to lead the world away from the precipice of nuclear disaster? [...]