Andy McCarthy argues that the “president must withdraw the U.S.-Russia civil-nuclear cooperation agreement, submitted in all its naïveté to an appropriately hostile Congress back in May.”
In small compass, Russia tells the sorry story of Secretary Condoleezza Rice’s Carteresque turn at the State Department. The President Bush of the first term – you remember, the guy who announced the Bush Doctrine, smashed al-Qaeda, isolated Arafat’s nascent terror state, ousted Saddam, inspired Qaddafi to forfeit his nukes, squeezed Kim Jong Il – strongly condemned Russia’s facilitation of the Bushehr nuclear facility in Iran. With good reason. Purportedly dedicated to peaceful civilian energy development, Bushehr gives the oil-rich Khomeinists all the cover they need to build atomic weapons. Let’s consider for a moment only the low enriched uranium Russia delivers to Bushehr every 12 to 18 months. In June, Henry Sokolski, executive director of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center, told a House committee that, at the start of the fueling cycle, Iran could divert the fresh uranium to feed its centrifuge enrichment plant. If they did, they’d have “a bomb’s worth of weapon uranium” within about eight weeks. Alternatively, if Iran waited until refueling is next due in 2010, it could seize the spent fuel and “gain access to 30 crude bombs worth of near-weapons grade plutonium to make plutonium weapons.” Would the Russians really tolerate such a thing right across the Caspian Sea? At the right price, Putin would tolerate anything.
