Not Much of a Summit
With the two greatest threats off the table, the nuclear
summit was bound to fizzle.
By Charles Krauthammer
NationalReview.com
There
was something oddly disproportionate about the just-concluded nuclear
summit to which President Obama summoned 46 world leaders, the largest
such gathering on American soil since 1945. That meeting was about the
founding of the United Nations, which 65 years ago seemed an event of
world-historical importance.
But this one? What was this great
convocation about? To prevent the spread of nuclear material into the
hands of terrorists. A worthy goal, no doubt. Unfortunately, the two
greatest such threats were not even on the agenda.
The first is
Iran, which is frantically enriching uranium to make a bomb, and which
our own State Department identifies as the greatest exporter of
terrorism in the world.
Nor on the agenda was Pakistan’s
plutonium production, which is
adding to the world’s stockpile of fissile material every day.
Pakistan is a relatively friendly power, but it is the most unstable
of all the nuclear states. It is fighting a Taliban insurgency and is
home to al-Qaeda. Suicide bombs go off regularly in its major cities.
Moreover, its own secret service, the ISI, is of dubious loyalty, some
of its elements being sympathetic to the Taliban and thus, by extension,
to al-Qaeda.
So what was the major breakthrough announced by
Obama at the end of the two-day conference? That Ukraine, Chile, Mexico,
and Canada will be getting rid of various amounts of enriched uranium.
What a relief. I don’t know about you, but I lie awake nights
worrying about Canadian uranium. I know these people. I grew up there.
You have no idea what they’re capable of doing. If Sidney Crosby hadn’t
scored that goal to win the Olympic gold medal, there’s no telling what
might have ensued.
Let us stipulate that sequestering nuclear
material is a good thing. But, it is a minor thing, particularly when
Iran is off the table and Pakistan is creating new plutonium for every
ounce of Canadian uranium shipped to the U.S.
Perhaps calculating
that removing relatively small amounts of fissile material from stable
friendly countries didn’t quite do the trick, Obama proudly announced
that the U.S. and Russia were disposing of 68 tons of plutonium.
Unmentioned was the fact that this agreement was reached ten years ago —
and, under the new protocol, doesn’t begin to dispose of the plutonium
until 2018. Feeling safer now?
The appropriate venue for such
minor loose-nuke agreements is a meeting of experts in Geneva who, after
working out the details, get their foreign ministers to sign off. Which
made this parade of world leaders in Washington an exercise in
misdirection — distracting attention from the looming threat from Iran,
regarding which Obama’s 15 months of terminally naïve “engagement” has
achieved nothing but the loss of 15 months.
Indeed, the
Washington summit was part of a larger misdirection play — Obama’s
“nuclear spring.” Last week, a START treaty, redolent of precisely the
kind of Cold War obsolescence Obama routinely decries. The number of
warheads in Russia’s aging and decaying nuclear stockpile is an
irrelevancy now that the existential U.S.-Soviet struggle is over. One
major achievement of the treaty, from the point of view of Russian
president Dmitri Medvedev, is that it could freeze deployment of U.S.
missile defenses — thus
constraining the single greatest anti-nuclear breakthrough of our
time.
This followed a softening of the U.S. nuclear-deterrent
posture (sparing nonproliferation-compliant states from U.S. nuclear
retaliation if they launch a biochemical attack against us) — a change
so bizarre and literally unbelievable that even Hillary Clinton couldn’t
get straight what retaliatory threat remains on the table.
All
this during a week when top U.S. military officials told Congress that
Iran is about a year away from acquiring the fissile material to make a
nuclear bomb. Then, only a very few years until weaponization.
At
which point the world changes irrevocably: The regional Arab states go
nuclear, the Non-Proliferation Treaty dies, the threat of nuclear
transfer to terror groups grows astronomically.
A timely
reminder: Syria has just been discovered transferring lethal Scud
missiles to Hezbollah, the Middle East’s most powerful non-state
terrorist force. This is the same Syria that was secretly building a
North Korean–designed nuclear reactor until the Israeli air force
destroyed the facility three years ago.
But not to worry.
Canadian uranium is secured. A nonbinding summit communiqué has been
issued. And a “Work Plan” has been agreed to.
Oh, yes, and there
will be another summit in two years. The dream lives on.
— Charles
Krauthammer is
a nationally syndicated columnist. © 2010, The Washington Post Writers
Group.