The Most Horrific Threat: Democrats and the Prevention of Nuclear Terror
In the 2004 presidential campaign, George W. Bush and John Kerry agreed on one big thing: The greatest single threat to America’s national security is a terrorist with a large-scale weapon of mass destruction, particularly a nuclear bomb.
While such a scenario is grim to think upon, it is one that demands the attention of candidates and voters alike. The detonation of an atomic weapon in an American city would represent an unprecedented challenge for the nation - and for its commander-in-chief.
So far, the issue of atomic terrorism has received relatively little public attention in this campaign. In part, this is due to the simple fact that the Iraq war has dominated the debate, apparently leaving little room for other security issues. Then there’s the inherent challenge of raising the issue of nuclear terror without looking like some kind of apocalyptic fearmonger.
A couple of the candidates have embraced the challenge, addressing the issue directly on the stump. Bill Richardson, a former secretary of energy and present governor of a state that hosted the dropping of the first atomic bomb, gave a speech in March titled “Preventing a Nuclear 9/11.”
Emphasizing the threat of nuclear theft from vulnerable sites in the former Soviet Union, Richardson calls upon Congress and the president to fund a $200 million program he negotiated as energy secretary to dispose of 34 tons of Russian plutonium (as little as nine pounds of plutonium can suffice to make an atomic bomb). He also emphasizes the need to consolidate weapons-grade nuclear materials worldwide into a smaller number of tightly secured locations.
Richardson seeks a Russian-American moratorium on all new nuclear weapons, and the establishment of a fuel bank that would provide nuclear material for peaceful energy purposes - a measure that would “eliminate the economic rationale for non-nuclear weapons states to enrich their own uranium.”
The fuel-bank idea, advocated by former senator Sam Nunn’s highly respected Nuclear Threat Initiative, also wins plaudits from Senator Barack Obama. In a Foreign Affairs article laying out his foreign-policy vision, Obama wrote that his administration would immediately spend $50 million to help create such a reserve - an amount equal to what super-investor Warren Buffett has already pledged to the effort.
In both the Foreign Affairs piece and his April speech to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, Obama invoked legislation he co-authored with Indiana Republican Richard Lugar that would - among other things - bolster international efforts to intercept nuclear materials and other potential weapons of mass destruction. At the Chicago Council, he also called for “a verifiable global ban on the production of new nuclear weapons material.”
Most recently, on June 27 Senator Hillary Clinton introduced Senate Bill 1705, the Nuclear Terror Prevention Act of 2007, which states in its findings that “The possibility that terrorists may acquire and use a nuclear weapon against the United States is the most horrific threat that our Nation faces.”
Clinton’s proposed legislation calls for action on numerous fronts, including the establishment of a senior adviser to the president for the prevention of nuclear terrorism; $200 million for conversion of uranium in Russia; $100 million for nuclear-facility security upgrades worldwide; and a $40 million appropriation to improve forensic identification of the origin of any nuclear-weapons material.
If nothing else, perhaps this proposal will help draw greater attention to the nuclear-terror prevention issue - a truly urgent topic that deserves greater consideration in this campaign.