Most media attention to Barack Obama's speech on foreign policy yesterday focused only on Iraq and Afghanistan--two of the five priorities he outlined, in a comprehensive vision that linked foreign policy to the health and safety of America.

The third element--which is also the subject of Obama's latest campaign ad is the control of nuclear weapons.

Today is the 63rd anniversary of the first explosion of an atomic bomb, yet these apocalyptic weapons are still at large, and nothing has been done in the past eight years to control them.  We are in danger of forgetting how dangerous they are--but fortunately, Barack Obama has not forgotten, and he has the courage to make this a priority.

You may have heard, "truth is stranger than fiction," and indeed, that often seems the case.  While that strange truth is usually just entertaining and innocuous, there are times when it is exactly the opposite... stupefying, shocking, even threatening.

Mimicking Ripley is not the intent here, though.  It is simply to point you to a variety of recent articles, some of which just bring a smile, some that give pause for thought, and some that deal with very serious issues.  Not surprisingly, many involve government and elected officials at various levels.

Aside from the trivial 'fun' articles, many are important but have been beneath the radar for whatever reason.  They need greater exposure, for they often have implications that scream for attention.

The entries here do not comprehensively quote their referenced sources, except for maybe a one or two line teaser that might pique your interest, and, of course a link, along with maybe short comment. Better that you follow the links and look in the horse's mouth yourself:)   Hope you enjoy.

Cheers:)

Thorium doesn't get mentioned much these days, but it is a great solution to the energy problems that we are facing as a world.

Of course, nuclear energy has a bad name in America, because of nuclear waste, potential for accidents, proliferation issues.

What if there was a fuel that didn't have the problems that uranium has?

What if there was a fuel that was more abundant that uranium?

What if there was a fuel that America has in plenty, enough to last thousands of years?

When it comes to his foreign policy, John McCain is a revisionist historian and a particularly clumsy one at that.  Having asked Americans to ignore his record as the master of disaster on Iraq, John McCain similarly underwent an election-year transformation from rabid France-basher to born-again multilateralist and fawning Francophile.  Now, the McCain campaign is hoping to erase any vestiges of John McCain's 2007 pledge to expel Russia from the G8.

    According to published reports Pakistani nuclear scientists have been shopping around advanced nuclear technology to the highest bidders. Advanced blueprints have been found on computers that belonged to these scientists that were part of a nuclear smuggling network headed by Abdul Qadeer Khan. Our government has a knack of creating these madmen through a deliberate policy of benign neglect and a policy of supporting tyranny for the sake of political expediency. This is another example of how our unwillingness to gauge the world realistically and inability to access friends and foes has created a possible nightmare scenario in the near future.

The New York Times is trying to sell the story that Iran was the primary client of the A.Q. Khan nuclear network, and received miniaturized warhead designs. http://www.nytimes.com/...

That is about as accurate as Judith Miller's stories that Iraq had WMDs.

The fact is, as James Risen told us, by the late 1990s Iran caught on to the fact that Khan's network operated as a CIA front.  A failed effort to transfer bogus warhead designs to Iran was code-named Operation Merlin.

The Agency had a major role in creating and nurturing A.Q Khan's nuclear program.  It was originally part of the 1976 deal that CIA Director George H.W. Bush made with Princes Kamal Adham and Turki al-Faisal, co-heads of Saudi external intelligence, the GID. In exchange for Saudi funding of U.S. intelligence operations banned by the Democratic Congress since the Church Commmittee hearings, the Agency looked the other way as the Saudis implemented their own covert operations around the world, including Pakistan's bomb program, influence operations and financial frauds inside the U.S., which included BCCI and the S&L scandals.

MORE below . . .  

Today, the WaPost quotes a leaked, draft report due out this week, by David Albright, an American and "former top UN Weapons Inspector".    The leaked draft report  claims that countries like Iran, North Korea and Libya may have acquired designs for an "advanced nuclear weapon", which could fit on their missles.

The problem with this "evidence" is that the Swiss government destroyed the "designs" (at the direction of the IAEA), so that it cannot be further analyzed with skeptical eyes.   In other words, the claims are based on evidence which no longer exists.

This is baseless propaganda, by a Washington think-tank.

**UPDATE 9:41am EDT** The NYTimes now has the same story at the top of their front page, but with sourcing from "US Intelligence sources", and significantly more reporting.

Remember how President Bush begged the Saudis to pump more oil, and they said, wellll, maybe 300,000 barrels more? Were you wondering what we offered in return?

According to this White House fact sheet dated May 16th, the US is committing to

pave the way for Saudi Arabia's access to safe, reliable fuel sources for energy reactors and demonstrate Saudi leadership as a positive non-proliferation model for the region.

In other words, we'll be selling them nuclear fuel.

Does that seem like a good idea?

Does it seem like something that you and I should be out there clamoring against?

Does it seem like something that we should demand that John McCain either "denounce and reject" or own up to?

One of the key issues surrounding the nuclear energy debate is the proper disposition of spent fuel rods. There are numerous concerns that encompass this issue, from radioactive contamination to nuclear proliferation fears, and about the only consensus that experts can agree on is the sheer complexity of the problem.

In paying very close attention to this historic presidential primary battle and how it will wind down, a life-imitating-art moment occured.  It was brought home in the differences between John McCain and Barack Obama, and the real drama of our general election.  The fairly recent identification of the Clinton campaign to Rocky Balboa had me thinking of pop-culture characters where our candidates were concerned, but it suddenly came to me that we were being directed to think about the wrong characters and the wrong movie.

I started out looking to write on the gas tax debate. I was quickly distracted though because the repeal of that tax via the Clinton-McCain plans is so stupid and there really is no debate. I also thought that enough had been written on that already. I ended up reading an interesting OpEd in the WaPo written by The Rt. Hon. Lord Waddington QC who is currently Chairman of the European Reform Forum. He is a former UK Home Secretary under Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.  He embraces the idea that Iran is seeking nuclear weapons. What I found more interesting though is his idea about how to deal with this problem. His prescription for dealing with Iran is fomenting a popular rebellion against the Iranian government through supposedly pro democratic groups.

One of the first times that I followed Barack Obama's work in the Senate after his keynote address at the 2004 Democratic Convention was during his 2005 trip with Senator Richard Lugar to Russia, Azerbaijan, and especially Ukraine, the former Soviet republic that took the brave and admirable step of disarming its nuclear weapons in 1996.  While the objectives of their meetings in Kyiv (Ukraine's capital) and Donets'k (a prominent industrial city in eastern Ukraine) centered on issues of nuclear proliferation, Obama met with President Viktor Yushchenko and Prime Minister Yuliia Tymoshenko to facilitate, along with Lugar, an additional agreement pertaining to the threat of biological terrorism that, in Obama's words, "will help Ukraine improve its capacity to diagnose, detect, and respond to public health threats by providing Ukraine with more modern central reference libraries and a network of regional epidemiological monitoring stations."

... at 4 PM in the Diplomacy Room at McQuaid Hall! We missed the "closely timed" announcement last time they announced Grossman's presence there.

http://www.democraticunderground.com...

Don't miss the opportunity this time! It looks to be JUST announced hours ago late on "bury the news" Friday.

Let's rec this up so we can get good participation, and perhaps get some good youtubes of his responses to these questions!

Let's find out what have happened to our nuclear secrets that Sibel Edmonds as documented he's been giving to Pakistan through Turkish and Israeli moles. Let him and Seton Hall officials that they should be having teachers that teach them how to conduct REAL diplomacy, not TREASON!

Two years ago, I posted a diary on John McCain's naked political ambition extending to the point of the asburd accusation that the Clinton administration was responsible for North Korea acquiring nuclear weapons, even though Korea had acquired them five years into the Bush administration.

I was reminded of this in the context of the debate between Hillary Clinton and Obama last night on the subject of when, and whether, to negotiate with hostile foreign governments. I sort of wished at the time McCain was in on the conversation, so we could see exactly how illogical and dangerous a thinker he is in contrast to our two leading Democrats.

Follow the link to my original post above for full context, and more on the contrast to the Democrats on the flip.

This morning on American AM, a progressive talk show based in the Tampa Bay area, host Henry Raimes asked Valerie Plame Wilson some questions regarding the recent series of stories which have run in the London Sunday Times about Sibel Edmonds' story.

Brad Friedman of Bradblog blogs the story well and provides a partial transcript of the relevant portions of the interview, courtesy of VelvetRevolution.us' Emily Levy. I've included a small exerpt below. Marc Grossman's name is correctly spelled with a c on the end, but I've left the transcript as it was...

Just sixteen days after the UK Times' published a blockbuster article, For sale: West’s deadly nuclear secrets, about how certain top US government officials were enabling Turkish and Israeli interests in supplying the nuclear black market, President Bush quietly announced on Tuesday that he wants Congress to approve sales of nuclear technology to Turkey.

Is this a reaction to the Times article?  It sure looks like it. I wouldn't be surprised if we soon start hearing about retroactive immunity for the guilty parties, just as we are seeing in the illegal spying case currently in the Senate.

For those of us who grew up during the later years of the Cold War, the acronym "NATO" brings back memories of watching the evening news with our families, when most discussions of US foreign policy weren't complete without mentioning "nuclear weapons" and "the Soviets".  The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (or NATO) is a Cold War military alliance that was founded in 1949, basically as a counter-balance to the USSR, where:

The [NATO] Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them...  will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.

[NATO member countries today]

The NATO countries played an important role in the Cold War nuclear arms race by either having their own nuclear weapons (e.g. France and the UK), or allowing nuclear weapons to be stationed on their soil (e.g. Pershing nuclear missiles in West Germany).  The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists' "Doomsday Clock" is a vivid historical indicator of the Cold War nuclear tensions (click the image at right).

The Cold War ended in 1991.  The US and Russia have fewer nuclear weapons than they did, but still have far more than enough to render the Earth uninhabitable;  the US has about 9,900, and Russia has about 15,000 (pdf).  NATO has changed its mission to adapt to post-Cold War conflicts;  one of the most recent examples is the takeover of US-lead military operations in southern Afghanistan by a NATO-lead force in the south of Afghanistan.

What does the future hold for NATO?  General John Shalikashvili (former NATO commander in Europe), General Klaus Naumann (ex-chairman of Nato's military committee), General Henk van den Breemen (former Dutch chief of staff) Admiral Jacques Lanxade (former French chief of staff), and Lord Inge (former chief of the general staff and defense staff in the UK) have proposed reforms for NATO that make me wonder if they are yearning for the Cold War days.

From yesterday's UK Guardian:

Pre-emptive nuclear strike a key option, Nato told

The west must be ready to resort to a pre-emptive nuclear attack to try to halt the "imminent" spread of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction, according to a radical manifesto for a new Nato by five of the west's most senior military officers and strategists.

Calling for root-and-branch reform of Nato and a new pact drawing the US, Nato and the European Union together in a "grand strategy" to tackle the challenges of an increasingly brutal world, the former armed forces chiefs from the US, Britain, Germany, France and the Netherlands insist that a "first strike" nuclear option remains an "indispensable instrument" since there is "simply no realistic prospect of a nuclear-free world".

[snip]

"The risk of further [nuclear] proliferation is imminent and, with it, the danger that nuclear war fighting, albeit limited in scope, might become possible," the authors argued in the 150-page blueprint for urgent reform of western military strategy and structures. "The first use of nuclear weapons must remain in the quiver of escalation as the ultimate instrument to prevent the use of weapons of mass destruction."

The authors " ...paint an alarming picture of the threats and challenges confronting the west in the post-9/11 world and deliver a withering verdict on the ability to cope...", and include the following as part of the key threats:

• Political fanaticism and religious fundamentalism.
• The "dark side" of globalisation, meaning international terrorism, organised crime and the spread of weapons of mass destruction.

It's really stretching the imagination try to understand how a new doctrine of pre-emptive nuclear strikes can possibly be part of the War on Terror™.  The concept of nuclear deterrence can't apply if your perceived enemy doesn't have nuclear weapons.  "We think they might be making them," is not the same as a nation having them, and being overtly hostile toward another nation, as was the case in the Cold War.  There are no clear targets;  we're talking ideologies and small groups of people.  And, let's quit waxing theoretical:  the use of a nuclear weapon period is a horrific proposal.

Andy Grotto at Arms Control Wonk points out something even more important:

The goal of the manifesto, according to its authors, is to revive the troubled trans-atlantic alliance.

Huh?!? How could a renewed emphasis on the preemptive use of nuclear weapons possibly promote NATO unity?!? The authors apparently missed the Schultz-Perry-Kissinger-Nunn op-eds in the WSJ endorsing the goal of a world free of nuclear weapons.

Click the link for the WSJ op-ed.  It's a great piece, and they specifically say:

Apart from the [nuclear] terrorist threat, unless urgent new actions are taken, the U.S. soon will be compelled to enter a new nuclear era that will be more precarious, psychologically disorienting, and economically even more costly than was Cold War deterrence. It is far from certain that we can successfully replicate the old Soviet-American "mutually assured destruction" with an increasing number of potential nuclear enemies world-wide without dramatically increasing the risk that nuclear weapons will be used. New nuclear states do not have the benefit of years of step-by-step safeguards put in effect during the Cold War to prevent nuclear accidents, misjudgments or unauthorized launches. The United States and the Soviet Union learned from mistakes that were less than fatal. Both countries were diligent to ensure that no nuclear weapon was used during the Cold War by design or by accident. Will new nuclear nations and the world be as fortunate in the next 50 years as we were during the Cold War?

Indeed.  NATO may need new life, but a new doctrine of pre-emptive nuclear strikes should not be part of it.

There is a famous quote from an article in the New York Times Magazine that illustrates the times in which we exist better than anything I could ever hope to delineate: