Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
On Friday, February 8, 2002, Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham spoke to the Los Angeles World Affairs Council regarding the Department of Energy's future policy direction concerning non-proliferation. Secretary Abraham emphasized the importance of securing and eliminating Russian nuclear weapons and materials. The follwoing is an except from Secretary Abraham's speech.
President George W. Bush's State of the Union remarks labeling Iran, Iraq and North Korea as an axis of evil quickly circled the globe and re-ignited fears of a more aggressive brand of U.S. unilateralism.
The United States and India have revived military-to-military ties for the first time since they were severed in the aftermath of India's nuclear tests in May 1998. For India, these ties reflect the country's growing global status, confirmed by President Bush in his State of the Union address, when he praised relations with India in the same breath as relations with Russia and China.
President George Bush has put his administration and the nation on a permanent war-footing. With an aggressive State of the Union speech, he expanded the war on terrorism to now include states suspected of developing weapons of mass destruction. In so doing he significantly exaggerates the dangers from these nations and underestimates the persistence of the proliferation problem.
"Our doomsday scheme cost us just a small fraction of what we'd been spending on defense in a single year. But the deciding factor was when we learned that your country was working along similar lines, and we were afraid of a doomsday gap." In honor of the anniversary of the debut of Stanley Kubrick's "Dr. Strangelove, Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb", the Non-Proliferation Project provides some choice quotes from this dark masterpiece.
Rhetoric and missile tests may be flying, but for many Indians nuclear war seems a remote prospect. At the height of tensions between India and Pakistan, people in the bustling city of Bangalore, India's answer to California's Silicon Valley, had decided that they were far more concerned about the dismal state of the IT economy than they were concerned about nuclear Armageddon. Fear of nuclear war in this South Indian city is conspicuous in its absence.
The Bush administration has decided to support plans to dispose of excess weapons-usable plutonium by burning it in nuclear reactors as mixed-oxide (MOX) fuel. This support comes after a year-long review and is a welcome development in efforts to secure, control and dispose of nuclear materials in the United States and in Russia. The U.S. program is part of a bilateral agreement signed with Russia, with each country committed to eliminate 34 tons of plutonium. Nevertheless, a very important question still remains: What will be done with the rest of the excess U.S. plutonium?
The Nuclear Posture Review unveiled by the Bush administration in early January continues to reduce the nuclear force from its current levels, down from their high point of some 15,000 deployed strategic warheads in 1987. The review, however, retains the basic concepts that defined the cold war nuclear arsenal and abandons plans for deeper, irreversible reductions envisioned by previous administrations.