The Greatest Threat to Us All
New York Review of Books
By Joseph Cirincione
Arsenals of Folly: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race
by Richard Rhodes
Knopf, 386 pp., $28.95
The Seventh Decade: The New Shape of Nuclear Danger
by Jonathan Schell
Metropolitan, 251 pp., $24.00
Deception: Pakistan, the United States, and the Secret Trade in Nuclear Weapons
by Adrian Levy and Catherine Scott-Clark
Walker, 586 pp., $28.95
America and the Islamic Bomb:The Deadly Compromise
by David Armstrong and Joseph Trento
Steerforth, 292 pp., $24.95
1.
Charles Gibson of ABC News began the New Hampshire debate among the Democratic presidential candidates with a question on nuclear terrorism. Though not discussed in any detail in the campaign, he said, it remains "the greatest threat to the United States today." He was right and, as some of the candidates noted, the threat has grown worse during the Bush administration as terrorist groups have thrived while efforts to lock up vulnerable nuclear materials have languished. The resulting discussion confirmed both the collapse of Bush's security strategy and the need for clear conceptions to replace it.
Announced in Bush's "axis of evil" speech, his 2002 State of the Union address, the Bush Doctrine held that the main danger to the United States came from the nexus of hostile regimes, terrorist groups, and nuclear weapons. One solution was preventive war. The Iraq invasion was the first attempt to carry out this radical strategy, but it was intended to be just the start of a series of regime changes in the Middle East, with Syria and Iran to follow.
The disastrous conflict in Iraq has long since shown how misguided the Bush Doctrine was; recently its deeper flaws have been exposed by the new National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran and by such events as the assassination of Benazir Bhutto and the intensification of the crisis in Pakistan. The new NIE—representing the unanimous opinion of all sixteen US intelligence agencies—concluded that Iran had ended its work on building a nuclear weapon in 2003. "Tehran's decision to halt its nuclear weapons program suggests it is less determined to develop nuclear weapons than we have been judging since 2005," the agencies said. "We do not know whether [Iran] currently intends to develop nuclear weapons."
(Continued here.)
By Joseph Cirincione
Arsenals of Folly: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race
by Richard Rhodes
Knopf, 386 pp., $28.95
The Seventh Decade: The New Shape of Nuclear Danger
by Jonathan Schell
Metropolitan, 251 pp., $24.00
Deception: Pakistan, the United States, and the Secret Trade in Nuclear Weapons
by Adrian Levy and Catherine Scott-Clark
Walker, 586 pp., $28.95
America and the Islamic Bomb:The Deadly Compromise
by David Armstrong and Joseph Trento
Steerforth, 292 pp., $24.95
1.
Charles Gibson of ABC News began the New Hampshire debate among the Democratic presidential candidates with a question on nuclear terrorism. Though not discussed in any detail in the campaign, he said, it remains "the greatest threat to the United States today." He was right and, as some of the candidates noted, the threat has grown worse during the Bush administration as terrorist groups have thrived while efforts to lock up vulnerable nuclear materials have languished. The resulting discussion confirmed both the collapse of Bush's security strategy and the need for clear conceptions to replace it.
Announced in Bush's "axis of evil" speech, his 2002 State of the Union address, the Bush Doctrine held that the main danger to the United States came from the nexus of hostile regimes, terrorist groups, and nuclear weapons. One solution was preventive war. The Iraq invasion was the first attempt to carry out this radical strategy, but it was intended to be just the start of a series of regime changes in the Middle East, with Syria and Iran to follow.
The disastrous conflict in Iraq has long since shown how misguided the Bush Doctrine was; recently its deeper flaws have been exposed by the new National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran and by such events as the assassination of Benazir Bhutto and the intensification of the crisis in Pakistan. The new NIE—representing the unanimous opinion of all sixteen US intelligence agencies—concluded that Iran had ended its work on building a nuclear weapon in 2003. "Tehran's decision to halt its nuclear weapons program suggests it is less determined to develop nuclear weapons than we have been judging since 2005," the agencies said. "We do not know whether [Iran] currently intends to develop nuclear weapons."
(Continued here.)
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