Modbert
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- Sep 2, 2008
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Will Obama End the Nuclear Era? - Page 1 - The Daily Beast
Barack Obama is going to pull off something with other world leaders that Ronald Reagan or Bill Clinton could not accomplish in their eight years in office each in only a year and a half. Congratulations Mr. President.
Today, Obama took a big step toward his goal of locking down all vulnerable nuclear materials. In a document to be released later Tuesday, the final communiqué of the president’s 47-nation nuclear summit will commit all those countries to securing their nuclear material within four years. The Washington Post obtained a draft of the final plan, and the paper reports that the document details 12 obligations of all 47 attending nations and a work plan that encourages investing in nuclear-security measures. "Our objective is clear,” the statement says: “to ensure that terrorists never gain access to plutonium or highly enriched uranium—the essential ingredients of a nuclear weapon.”
The Daily Beast's Joe Cirincione says we're witnessing the end of the Dr. Strangelove world of mutual annihilation.
There are times when you can feel the hinge of history moving. This is one of them.
This week, heads of state fly from Beijing, Moscow, London, Brasilia, Islamabad, Ankara, Kuala Lumpur, Tokyo, and dozens of other capitals for the largest summit of world leaders called for by a president since the founding of the United Nations. Why?
The short answer is to stop nuclear terrorism. The goal is to forge a new global plan to stop al Qaeda or any other terror group from getting the one part of a nuclear weapon they cannot make themselves: the uranium and plutonium cores.
There is more at the summit than pieces of paper. We may be witnessing the creation of a new global nuclear-security agenda.
On day one of the nuclear summit, Ukraine committed to getting rid of its weapons-grade uranium by 2012—something the U.S. has been seeking for more than a decade. It is expected that countries will leave the summit sharing President Obama’s goal of locking down all vulnerable nuclear materials within four years. The true test will be if countries firmly commit to that goal and build on the summit’s momentum for the years to come. The signs are trending positive.
The problem is simple. There is enough nuclear material in the world to make 120,000 more nuclear bombs. It is stored in buildings in 40 nations—from Argentina to Vietnam—and often guarded with little more than a chain link fence. Al Qaeda has declared it the duty of its followers to get a nuclear bomb. Over a dozen petty thieves have been caught trying—and those are the ones we know of.
Even modest attempts to reduce these arsenals by a few hundred weapons—as the U.S.-Russian agreement does—provoke hysteria. Paleo-conservatives denounce it as appeasement and weakness. Senators pile on demands for nuclear pork as the price of their vote for the treaty. Conservative commentators compare it to a schoolyard fight, seemingly unaware that the bully we built the weapons to defeat is long gone.
Domestically, Obama has the backing of a broad, bipartisan movement of centrist security leaders. He has taken their best ideas and created a comprehensive plan to reduce existing arsenals, secure all weapons materials, and prevent new nuclear-armed states.
Polls show that 84 percent of Americans would feel safer in a world where no one had nuclear weapons, including the United States. No one treaty, or speech, or review can make this shift. It requires multiple moves on several levels at once. It is three-dimensional chess. Together, however, the moves make a difference, says New America Foundation’s Jeffrey Lewis:
This is a fight that many administration political advisers are beginning to see as a winning issue for the president. Republicans will have to decide whether to join in the effort and share in the win or play the nuclear Neanderthals, frozen in a previous age.
Barack Obama is going to pull off something with other world leaders that Ronald Reagan or Bill Clinton could not accomplish in their eight years in office each in only a year and a half. Congratulations Mr. President.
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