What Iran Deal? (Ezekiel 17)

 

Obama’s Nuclear Dream Fizzles
How a Nobel Peace Prize winner president threw away an ambitious set of nonproliferation goals.
By DOUGLAS BIRCH and R. JEFFREY SMITH June 15, 2015
Even in an administration full of audacious hope, the nuclear arms agenda of President Barack Obama stood out—he came out strong in 2009, declaring America’s commitment “to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.” His energetic embrace of nuclear disarmament was cited as part of his Nobel Peace Prize that year, and his announcement in Prague of a commitment to lock down vulnerable nuclear explosives all over the world within four years, to keep them away from terrorists, was attention-getting and audacious
Six years into his presidency, though, that ambitious dream has all but disappeared. As President Obama prepares for the last of the global summits he organized to safeguard nuclear explosive materials, his aides are hoping for modest achievements rather than pressing for broad new measures to help protect the world from a nuclear terror attack, according to current and former administration officials.
Obama has instead settled for what a senior White House official publicly described in 2012 as “the incremental nature of success” on nuclear secruity rather than throwing his full weight behind the creation of global standards for nuclear materials that independent experts say could have a more lasting and significant impact.
The administration’s focus on what its officials depict as the art of the possible has provoked grumbling from outsiders that progress achieved so far could be undermined after Obama departs in 2017, unless the government mounts a last-minute push for a more sweeping agreement—even one involving only a few dozen like-minded nations instead of a global pact.
“I completely understand that putting forth ambitious ideas is putting your hand into a buzz saw,” said Kenneth Luongo, senior advisor to the secretary of energy during the Clinton administration and former director of arms control and nonproliferation at the Energy Department, referring to opposition by several nuclear-weapons states and some others to a new system of nuclear material controls.
“But you have to do it, so you can show people the scar,” he said, and demonstrate to the world that the United States is prepared to take political risks to reduce this threat.
The Obama administration since 2009 has hardly slighted nuclear security: According to the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a nonprofit group in Washington that advocates tighter control of nuclear explosive materials, the administration has invested more than $5 billion in it. That figure includes funds given to Russia and other countries to help secure their nuclear weapons arsenals, to convert research reactors so they burn fuel that cannot be used in weapons, and to improve the physical protection and accounting of nuclear explosive materials such as plutonium and highly-enriched uranium.
The summit meetings Obama led in in 2010, 2012 and 2014 about associated nuclear perils—in Washington, South Korea and the Netherlands—included 53 nations and were attended by 46 sitting presidents, prime ministers or other heads of state. Some of those leaders brought what the administration called “gift baskets” meant to highlight their commitment to nuclear security, including offers to ship nuclear explosive materials to the United States or Russia for destruction.
But Luongo, who now directs a nonprofit group called Partnership for Global Security, said the meetings left “gaps and fissures” in the patchwork of domestic regulations and international agreements designed to protect nuclear materials from falling into the wrong hands. And he urged that the United States lead an effort to transform the current system, where it is up to individual countries to decide how seriously to take the protection of their nuclear materials, into one with enforceable international standards.
Laura Holgate, the senior director for WMD Terrorism and Threat Reduction at the National Security Council and a leader of the efforts to prepare for next year’s summit, declined to address planning for the final summit. Shortly after the second summit in March 2012, however, Holgate said the administration had not sought new nuclear security treaties because too many other countries were opposed to such measures.
Instead, she said, the summit process reflected “the incremental nature of success,” adding: “That’s just the way it is in this field. You don’t have giant thunderclaps and then the world is different.”
Asked for further comment last week, a White House spokesman forwarded a copy of a speech last July in which Holgate said the summits had “built up an impressive track record in meaningful progress” and helped make it “harder than ever for terrorists to acquire nuclear weapons.” In the speech, she said “we have not yet done all that we can or need to do,” but a “comprehensive” arrangement for controlling both civilian and military stocks of nuclear explosives would be promoted “over time.”
“We also need,” Holgate said then, “to reflect the principle of continuous improvement.”
In advance of the 2014 summit, however, the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration, in a document labeled “Official Use Only,” said that while U.S. initiatives had made the world safer, there are still “serious threats that require urgent attention.” The May 2013 report, which was obtained by the Center for Public Integrity, said that terrorists were still seeking nuclear weapons, and plenty of raw materials to build them are still scattered around the world.
Hundreds of pounds of weapons-usable uranium are being stored at civilian sites, including in South Africa and Belarus, the document said. Scores of research reactors, where security is generally lower than at military sites, still operate with fuel composed of weapons-grade explosives, it said, including more than 60 in Russia alone. Meanwhile, global plutonium stocks are rising, the report said, with more than 100 metric tons produced since 1998, enough it said to build at least 20 thousand nuclear weapons.
The loss of even a small amount of this material from any of the hundreds of sites where they are stored could have catastrophic consequences, the report said. “In today’s global environment, a nuclear … device would not just impact one city or one country; it would gravely damage us all.”
The report’s depiction of the threat as an urgent problem has found resonance in a coalition of more than 80 arms control, academic, and philanthropic organizations known as the Fissile Materials Working Group. It plans to release a 16-page report Tuesday proposing what it calls “bold, new actions” to advance nuclear security at the final summit beyond what the Obama administration is presently considering, including creating a pathway toward “universal, mandatory…standards.”
The group’s membership spans the political spectrum, and includes the Arms Control Association, the Cato Institute, the Federation of American Scientists, the Stimson Center, Physicians for Social Responsibility, and the Center for Strategic and International Studies, as well as independent groups in Russia, India, Denmark and elsewhere. One of its members, the Stanley Foundation, has financially supported foreign travel by staff at the Center for Public Integrity. The working group has already given copies of its report to diplomats heading for a preparatory conference scheduled to be held in Lithuania the week of June 28.
The Working Group report calls on the nuclear weapons states to share more information about security practices and expenditures, and to support visits by foreign experts who could review the security arrangements for their fissionable materials (not the weapons themselves)—the way U.S. scientists helped their Russian counterparts in the 1990s, when the collapse of the Soviet Union left huge stores of such materials poorly guarded.
Douglas Birch is a reporter at the Center for Public Integrity, a nonpartisan, nonprofit investigative news organization.
R. Jeffrey Smith is an editor for the Center for Public Integrity. Read more of their investigations into nuclear materials and policy or follow them on Twitter.