Safer Than You Were Four Years Ago?

Sign that the Bush administration doesn't actually give a damn about "homeland security" #441:

In a significant shift in U.S. policy, the Bush administration announced this week that it will oppose provisions for inspections and verification as part of an international treaty that would ban production of nuclear weapons materials.

For several years the United States and other nations have pursued the treaty, which would ban new production by any state of highly enriched uranium and plutonium for weapons. At an arms-control meeting this week in Geneva, the Bush administration told other nations it still supported a treaty, but not verification.

Administration officials, who have showed skepticism in the past about the effectiveness of international weapons inspections, said they made the decision after concluding that such a system would cost too much, would require overly intrusive inspections and would not guarantee compliance with the treaty. They declined, however, to explain in detail how they believed U.S. security would be harmed by creating a plan to monitor the treaty.

Arms-control specialists reacted negatively, saying the change in U.S. position will dramatically weaken any treaty and make it harder to prevent nuclear materials from falling into the hands of terrorists. The announcement, they said, also virtually kills a 10-year international effort to lure countries such as Pakistan, India and Israel into accepting some oversight of their nuclear production programs [Emphasis mine].

For the record, a nuclear war between India and Pakistan means it's all over for the rest of us. Pakistan's official policy is to keep open the first-strike option, and aside from Darfur (maybe), the most underreported story of the last five years has been a succession of Cuban-Missil-Crisis-events between India and Pakistan over Kashmir. The consequences of a full-scale nuclear war with fusion weapons are at this point purely theoretical. Nuclear winter is a definite possibility, and global environmental devastation is practically assured. But who needs inspections and verification? The administration has bigger things to worry about, like suddenly elevating the terror alert in response to pre-9/11 intelligence (apologies to Howard Dean are forthcoming, I'm sure). Nobody needs to worry about unaccounted stockpiles of nuclear weapons and materials within the highly al-Qaeda-infiltrated Pakistani nuclear program, so long as we have a president who has "moral clarity." Besides, Star Wars will protect us, right? [Nope--ed.]

Joking aside, my guess is that this move was a visceral reaction based on Cold War era anti-arms-control ideology. Which means that for the sake of our safety and security, we need a government that has a post-1989 view of the world [talk about pre-9/11!--ed.].