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| Bush's record on nuclear threats |
| 2004-10-26 |
| Really long, so trim as needed, but it sheds quite a bit of light on a lot of details we didn't know until now. In the tumultuous first year after Sept. 11, 2001, President Bush confronted a deluge of classified threat reports about the spread of nuclear weapons technology to unfriendly hands. An atomic black market, operating on three continents, was funneling bomb-making equipment to Libya — and to customers unknown. Iran had made unexpected strides toward a weapon along a route concealed for more than a decade. North Korea, judged in June 2002 to be years away from domestic uranium enrichment, was discovered a month later to be on the brink of it. The National Intelligence Council assessed that there was "undetected smuggling" of "weapons-grade and weapons-usable nuclear materials" known to have been stolen in Russia on four occasions between 1992 and 1999. And two senior figures from Pakistan's nuclear establishment, who met with Osama bin Laden a month before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, were failing polygraph tests about the purpose of their trip. No president before Bush faced such a diversity of nuclear dangers. Some threats came from hostile nations. Others were stateless: a business underworld that supplied the makings of a nuclear weapon, and a jihadist underworld that sought to buy one. The profusion of threats laid competing demands for Bush's attention in a climate of uncertainty and rapid change. |
| Posted by:Dan Darling |