I used to be one of those people who got really annoyed at the widespread misuse of the word "ironic," as in the Alanis Morissette song -- or in this report from the Center for American Progress into the sorry state of American security that landed on my desk last Thursday morning. They write that "the Bush administration deserves an 'F' for its weak and contradictory efforts to control the spread of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons and materials. This is ironic in light of the administration's recognition that a terrorist armed with such a weapon poses the greatest threat to the American people."
Another thing that annoys me is when people don't use serial commas, and the first sentence there is a great example of why this is a bad idea. That's also not what irony is.
Nevertheless, I don't worry about that stuff much anymore because it seems like just about everyday I learn something new about how little the government is doing to stop terrorists from killing me with a nuclear bomb.
This handy site lets me calculate various scenarios of what would happen if a nuclear bomb went off near the White House, just 2.075 kilometers from my house. At 0.025 megatons, my house will collapse, which would suck. A bigger, 0.15 megaton bomb would see me bombarded with 500 rem ionizing radiation. That's a bit like rain on your wedding day, except it kills you by stripping the electrons off the atoms of which your body is composed. It would take a 0.45 megaton bomb to just kill me straight-up with the force of the blast. You'd need a full 15 megatons for the initial fireball radius to get me, but of course the real problem with a nuclear explosion would be the secondary fires caused by all the stuff being collapsed and blown up by the much wider air blast.
It's thanks to sunny thoughts like these, no doubt, that Dick Cheney proclaimed a nuclear attack on an American city to be "the ultimate threat we face today." Unfortunately, he also implied that this was a good reason to invade Iraq, which he said gave safe haven to al-Qaeda. It didn't. What's more, Iraq didn't have any fissile material, and you need fissile material to make a nuke.
So since stopping terrorists from getting their hands on fissile material is so important, you would think the Bush administration would be enthusiastic about the Fissile Materials Cut-off Treaty which would make it harder for them to get any. And George W. Bush, at least, is prepared to sign the thing. Unfortunately, his team also scuttled the verification elements, which makes it worthless. The stated reason is that verification would be too expensive. So nuclear terrorism is the ultimate threat, but not so ultimate that it's worth spending money on. Worse, according to Darryl Kimball of the Arms Control Association, there were some other unstated reasons as well. For one thing, this administration is just generally hostile to international institutions. For another thing, the treaty could make things harder for the people who build some of the Navy's naval propulsion systems.
So nuclear terrorism is the ultimate threat, but not so ultimate that it's worth spending money on preventing, inconveniencing the Navy, or overcoming the Bush admnistration's knee-jerk prejudice against treaties. We did, however, find $200 billion to invade Iraq with, over $500 billion for a Medicare prescription drug benefit, and almost $2 trillion worth of tax cuts. It's sort of like 10,000 spoons when all you need is a knife. Or meeting the arms control treaty of your dreams and then undermining it for no good reason.
The last of the unstated reasons, however, is by far the worst. Apparently, the governments of Israel and Pakistan weren't big on making an enforceable treaty because they want to expand their arsenals and Bush wasn't too hot on putting capital into overriding their objections. Ah, Pakistan. The land of the pure. Also the land of egregious violations of non-proliferation norms, the land where the military sponsors terrorist organizations, the land that helped organize and sponsor the Taliban, the land that helped set Osama bin Laden up in Afghanistan, and the land whose intelligence services are shot through with al-Qaeda sympathizers. Just the sort of place you'd think we should be helping to get some more nuclear weapons.
As Bush tells it, there's nothing to worry about. The global nuclear arms bazaar run by A.Q. Khan, he says, is nice and shut down. Bush actually brags about his accomplishments in halting Pakistani proliferation. But it isn't so. As the CAP report says, "the Bush administration has failed to exert sufficient pressure on Pakistan to prove it has shut down the black market in nuclear weapons technology operated by A.Q. Khan, the father of Pakistan's nuclear bomb. Pakistan has refused to let Khan meet with American investigators and has denied requests for a full accounting of the countries that he dealt with or the technology they acquired." Of course Pakistan did place him under house arrest, which is kind of a bummer. Ironically, marijuana dealers get harsher punishment than that. What's more, Pakistan wants us to believe that this whole thing was put together by their chief nuclear scientist without the knowledge of any of his superiors in the military, or anyone else in the Pakistani government. It's a bit, shall we say, implausible.
One nuclear threat Bush is doing a good job of protecting us from is the risk that a rogue state will shoot a nuclear-tipped ballistic missile at the United States. His plan: build a national missile defense system. There are only two problems with this. One is that the system doesn't work. The other is that there aren't any rogue states with missiles capable of reaching the continental United States. As far as that goes, though, it's just a waste of money. The real black fly in the chardonnay here is that the plan has provoked China to upsize its nuclear program. Which will force India to do the same. Which will force Pakistan to do the same. Which would bring us back to Pakistan, which has a funny way of sneaking up on you when you talk about this stuff.
And then there's Russia. Bush signed the Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty in 2002 which will lower the number of nuclear weapons both countries have on alert. Good idea! But it's time-limited (expires in 2012), is unverifiable (there they go again), and doesn't require that the un-alerted weapons actually be dismantled. Bad idea! In general, Bush isn't big on dismantling old nuclear weapons. The Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction Program finances the control of nuclear materials and expertise in the former Soviet Union. Under the Clinton administration, this program did much good work, but did so pretty slowly because funding it wasn't a top priority. After September 11 Bush proposed cutting the program's funding in real terms. What he should have been doing was expanding it, not only to speed the work it was already doing but also to make sure it would cover Russia's 3,000 or so tactical nuclear weapons. But he didn't. He liked the cutting plan instead.
Nuclear terrorism is the most urgent threat the country faces, and the president knows it. But he isn't doing very much to stop it. Isn't it ironic . . . don't you think?
Matthew Yglesias is a staff writer for The Prospect.
