Lugar Warns of Al Qaeda Nuclear Counterstrikes

May 3, 2011

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Today's top nuclear policy stories, events, and analysis with excerpts in bullet form.

Stories we're following today - Tuesday, May 3, 2011:

Next Threat? Counterstrikes with Nukes, Bioweapons - Sen. Richard Lugar in The Washington Times [link]

More than 10 years ago, bin Laden declared, “Acquiring nuclear and chemical weapons is a religious duty.” Our top military leaders have said that the biggest threat to U.S. security, both short-term and long-term, would be the possibility of a terrorist organization obtaining a nuclear weapon.
The United States should continue with the Nunn-Lugar program, which conducts an ongoing effort to eliminate nuclear, chemical and biological weapons in Russia, the other former Soviet states and other countries where they are discovered.
Our military and intelligence personnel deserve high praise for killing bin Laden, but the fact that it took nearly 10 years illustrates the difficulty in containing and capturing individual terrorists. That makes it all the more important that we do everything we can to deprive terrorists of access to deadly materials that could be used to carry out a devastating attack in the United States.

A Major Victory, But Not End of War - North West Indiana Times [link]

President Barack Obama must be commended for following through on his campaign promise to make hunting down bin Laden a priority. The Bush administration began that crusade, but in 2006 it closed down its unit that had been searching for bin Laden.
That search for Public Enemy No. 1 is finally over. But there is much more work to do.
U.S. Sen. Dick Lugar has been tireless in pushing the nation, and the world, to secure stray nuclear weapons and components so they don't fall into the hands of terrorists. That effort must continue. As we have seen, the terrorists hate everything the United States stands for -- liberty, civil rights and more. Lugar's mission must not be sacrificed in the name of budget cuts. It is a vital national security effort.

EVENT: "Playing the Nuclear Numbers Game: Strategic Stability and Deep Reductions"

US, Romania Announce Missile Defense Site Plans - The Associated Press

The United States and Romania have agreed on a site to install missile interceptors as part of a planned U.S. shield over Europe.
The Romanian site is part two of a four-part plan that the Obama administration outlined in 2009, when it shelved a Bush administration plan to use long-range interceptors based in Poland to counter any threat from Iran and North Korea.
Each phase of the plan calls for a more sophisticated and capable interceptor, culminating at the end of the decade with the deployment in Poland of more advanced interceptors that still are in development.

U.S. Faces Bigger Mideast Challenges Than al Qaeda - Gerald Seib in The Wall Street Journal [link]

The al Qaeda question that burned so deeply into America's soul a decade ago has been overtaken by three more pressing problems: getting Pakistan right, getting the Arab spring right and containing Iran.
The danger is that Iran's leaders are concluding that the lesson to be learned from Syria and Libya is that the way to deal with dissidents is to crush them ruthlessly, and that the way to prevent the Western military intervention now plaguing Libya is to finish developing a nuclear weapon to deter it.
The challenge for the U.S., in turn, is to use bin Laden's death to make the opposite point to the Iranian people—that time isn't on the side of extremism or extremists, and that America hasn't lost its ability to push events in the opposite direction.

Fate of LANL Building Rests in Judge's Hands - Roger Snodgrass in The New Mexican [link]

National security met environmental protection in a crossfire Monday, as a federal legal team wrapped up its defense on behalf of the largest construction project in New Mexico history, aside from the interstate highway system.
The Los Alamos Study Group, a nonprofit public-interest organization, presented their case for stopping all work on a $4 billion to $6 billion proposed Chemistry and Metallurgy Research Replacement Nuclear Facility at Los Alamos National Laboratory while a new environmental impact statement is prepared.
Sharp upward projections in the construction cost estimates, a result of protecting the building against the possibility of a 7.3 magnitude earthquake, were followed by the plaintiffs' notice of the pending legal complaint.