Seems that everyone is developing a nuke these days.
North Korea is threatening to make a nuclear bomb. Iran is a few years away from having a nuclear weapon of mass destruction. Pakistan wants one. Israel probably has one already.
How quaint, and a bit odd, that our Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton has once again introduced H.R. 1348, the Nuclear Disarmament and Economic Conversion Act. And that she’s crowing because the House has passed a resolution commending Kazakhstan for closing down its weapons testing site, years ago.
“Nuclear disarmament has become a dated term,” Norton told me.
But not a term that should be vaporized from public discussion. Of course it seems idealistic to the point of absurdity to be tilting at this windmill when yellowcake uranium shows up at arms bazaars for Third World thugs. Sometimes it takes a crazy idealist to remind us of what we once considered possible — and sane and sensible.
Don’t you pine away for the days when we and Russia were the only nuclear powers? When we would duck and cover under our school desks and hope that “mutually assured destruction” was just the name of a punk rock band?
“The danger that we face now is now far greater,” she says. “There are nuclear materials out there that are not guarded at all. And there’s no one single approach in the U.S. on how to deal with nuclear technology around the world.”
Norton has been introducing the disarmament bill each year since 1993, when D.C. residents passed a ballot initiative calling for the government to spend tax dollars on healing humans rather than making nuclear weapons. She has been meeting with the original group of peaceniks and reintroducing her bill year after year.
“What are we to make of this juxtaposition?” she asks. “In 2006 we spent $1.4 billion on nuclear nonproliferation and $10 billion on a missile defense system that may not work.”
The juxtaposition that worries me is that we attacked Iraq to neutralize WMD that never turned up, and now every two-bit tyrant wants WMD.
Norton sees a much more clear and present danger. She’s a member of the Prevention of Nuclear and Biological Attack Subcommittee of the Homeland Security Committee. Scientists and spies come before her subcommittee to describe the threat of someone smuggling a small nuclear weapon into New York or Washington.
Are we safe?
“No,” she says. “We lack intelligence. The only comfort is that it would be so hard to assemble such a small device. We don’t know how to prevent it. We only know that it’s too hard to make and bring in.”
Let’s put this all together. Norton introduces a bill that would direct the United States to disarm and dismantle its nuclear weapons, once all other nations do the same. And if the United States actually worked on disarmament around the world, there would be less chance that some bozo would walk a nuke into Union Station.
Doesn’t seem so quaint after all.
Harry Jaffe has been covering the Washington area since 1985. E-mail him at [email protected].
