You have to wonder about what passes as a National Security Council in the White House these days. Word this week that not only is Pakistan building a plutonium reactor that could make many, many nuclear weapons, but that the White House has known about this, perhaps for years. It's almost amusing to see this quote in the Washington Post yesterday:
Weapons experts worried yesterday that Pakistan's expanded nuclear capabilities would lead countries in the region -- other than India -- to follow suit.
"There are makings of a vigorous competition in fissile material production in South Asia -- between India and Pakistan in the first instance but also China as well," said Robert Einhorn, formerly the State Department's chief nonproliferation official and now a senior adviser to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank. "It would be one thing if we were talking just about well-secured nuclear bombs. A larger concern is the greater amounts of fissile material, which create more opportunities for terrorists to get their hands on it."
One might imagine Jon Stewart leaning forward and saying, "Oh REAAALLLLLY...." Not our friends, not our allies, the Pakistanis... But even more mystifying then is how the Bush administration would assist India in maintaining the quid pro quo by allowing that nation to continue, nay, accelerate its nuclear weapons program in the pursuit of increased global business prospects.
Supporters say the deal provides crucial energy to a friendly country that has a strong nonproliferation record, and it allows U.S. companies to crack a lucrative market. Critics say it ruins the global nonproliferation treaty and could start a nuclear arms race between India and its rival and neighbor Pakistan.
Speaking Monday night in New Delhi, Indian Defense Minister Pranab Mukherjee said: "Our nuclear doctrine affirms that India will not resort to [a] first strike and never use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear weapon states. India's nuclear doctrine has a purely defensive orientation."
Oh well, then, I'm satisified. I mean, as long as China and Iran and Pakistan all agree to no first use also, then it's a perfectly healthy nuclear club. But why do I get the feeling that the U.S. government is absolutely impotent in any desire or quest to reduce the threat of nuclear weapons use? All our government seems to want to do is stay ahead of the pack and ensure that our weapons are the best, most modern destructive systems in the world. Relying solely on deterrence through strength is not good enough.
http://www.strategycenter.net/research/pubID.117/pub_detail.asp> this plays a role in Lebanon. There are several nations playing proxy. Pakistan is planning to manufacture more than a hundred nukes a year and our friends the Russians are speeding up the deployment of their Tor system to Iran. Bush is certainly right that without a regional solution, asking Israel to live with terror missiles is absurd. I wonder how prepared American forces are ready for the unknown in the Gulf.
The UN declaration that Hezbollah was nowhere near their outpost shows the politics of this. The now dead Canadian observer emailed command that Hezbollah was 3 meters from them. At least that might have been one of their more accurate "observations". I wonder what you think of Counterterrorism Blog's assertion that only a 1 kilometer buffer zone is a "Hezbollah victory." And why has Bush and Israel not made public the irrefutable evidence of Iranian participation in Lebanon. Many sources like Defence Tech and Global Security have confirmed such evidence. The reason? Shouldn't the New York Times have leaked this intel by now?
Max NYC
Posted by: Maxtrue | 29 July 2006 at 12:06 AM