The War on Terror

For its own and everyone else's sake the U.S. must change its priorities in the war on terror. It must clarify its objectives and devote much more of its resources to preventing nuclear attacks. It must provide decisive leadership so that others will follow. There is no scarcity of good proposals on how the U.S. in partnership with the other nuclear states and the international community could effectively tackle the risk of nuclear terrorism. One sound example is provided by the Nuclear Threat Initiative, an organization founded in 2001 by Ted Turner and former Senator Sam Nunn. The NTI calls for every nuclear weapon and every kilogram of nuclear material worldwide to be secured and accounted for as soon as possible. For this to happen the U.S. would have to build an effective global nuclear security partnership, including an accelerated alliance-based approach with Russia , as well as develop a stringent global nuclear security standard and provide assistance to any state willing to meet this standard but lacking the means to do so. It would have to lead the effort to combat nuclear smuggling, and it would have to agree to and implement a program to blend-down highly enriched uranium, rendering it useless for bomb making.

A plan like the NTI's should be only the first major step in dissipating the risk of a nuclear holocaust. Practically from the first atomic explosion, wise statesmen and thinkers have asserted that the abolition of the nuclear bomb is mankind's only way to ensure the prevention of the ultimate calamity. When Mohamed ElBaradei, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, received the 2005 Nobel Peace Prize, he affirmed that position: "I have no doubt that, if we hope to escape self-destruction, then nuclear weapons should have no place in our collective conscience, and no role in our security. ... Imagine if the only nuclear weapons remaining were the relics in our museums."