Critical times call for White House czar on WMD

ANALYSIS/OPINION:

President Bush and the Republican Party generally have made much of being champions of national security, protectors of the American people.

Then why hasn’t Mr. Bush taken the relatively simple step of appointing a White House coordinator to prevent the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and terrorism?

Congress passed legislation last year establishing the position within the executive branch, and Mr. Bush signed it into law.

The president may be forgiven for having such pressing issues on his mind as the oil crisis, the housing crisis, the credit crisis, the banking crisis and other crises, but defending the United States must come first.

He has said as much and campaigned on that theme, and the 2004 Republican National Convention even adopted the slogan “A Safer World and a More Hopeful America.”

Although it was in another context - his administration’s perceived threat of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction - Mr. Bush said on Oct. 7, 2002, “America must not ignore the threat gathering against us. Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof, the smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.”

There were no Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and Saddam Hussein no longer is with us, but the threat of a mushroom cloud remains, ignited by terrorists bent on destroying the United States.

Sen. Susan Collins, Maine Republican, said earlier this year, “A terrorist attack with a nuclear device would have catastrophic consequences for our nation.”

She made the comment during a Feb. 8 hearing of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, of which she is the ranking member. The panel has been investigating the nation’s readiness to confront nuclear terrorism.

Nuclear terrorism is serious stuff. No less an expert on the subject than Graham T. Allison, director of Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, has warned that there’s a better than 50 percent chance of a terrorist nuclear strike on U.S. soil in the next decade.

The end of the Cold War freed us from the threat of nuclear annihilation. Or so we thought.

But the proliferation of nuclear know-how - both in weapons and, because of the worldwide spread of nuclear energy, fissile materials - has made this a far more dangerous world than when responsible political leaders kept locked away the keys to the silos and bomb bays that held the tools of atomic devastation.

“The greatest threat we face is not of a determined adversary willing to use nuclear weapons against us or our allies,” Ivo Daalder, a staff member of the Clinton administration’s National Security Council, told McClatchy Newspapers on June 1. “It’s some determined terrorist group trying to get its hands on a nuclear weapon and using it against us.”

“Nuclear terrorism remains a real and urgent danger,” said a report titled “Securing the Bomb 2007,” sponsored by the Nuclear Threat Institute. “In the aftermath of a terrorist mushroom cloud over the cinders of a major city, America and the world would be changed forever.”

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