Three Minutes to Midnight:
NPRI Symposium on the Impending Threat of Nuclear War
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Dr. John G. Duesler, Jr. comments on Bush’s speech yesterday at Washington’s National Defense University.
What Mr. Bush says and what he does, however, do not always coincide. At that same time that Mr. Bush is proposing containment of nuclear fuel supplies, his FY2005 budget now submitted to Congress is seeking funding to escalate the size and scope of the U.S. nuclear stockpile. Additionally, Mr. Bush will today call for an expansion of the Nunn-Lugar Program that seeks to secure and destroy much of Russia’s remaining fissile materials and nuclear stockpile. However, his budget provides no new financial support towards these ends. Moreover, President Bush is now emphasizing funding for the Proliferation Security Initiative, a non-United Nations program, that is a loose affiliation of nations aligned with the United States whose mission it is to interdict unconventional weapons that are being transported between nations.
So while the President is rightly denouncing the spread of nuclear technologies to nations whose intentions might be questionable, Mr. Bush is also supporting initiatives to further escalate U.S. hyper-dominance in the nuclear weapons arena. This discrepancy does not sit well with Russia, China, or other nations with which the President might be concerned.