Nunn: A Voice Worth Listening To!

I have invited Sam Nunn to appear at our Speaker Series next year. Whether he will accept is another matter. Read the article on Nunn's efforts and then watch this (HTTP://WWW.TerrorismAwareness.ORG/Files/IslamicMeinKampf-Final.SWF)(See 1 below.)

Sam spoke for me in Richmond at a small gathering of investors in 1967. One of the attendees asked him what was his greatest concern when he awoke each morning. Back then even Sam said: "Nuclear Proliferation."

The IDF keeps uncovering Palestinian terrorist bomb making facilities. (See 2 below.)

Meshaal minces no words and his comments should open the eyes of those who believe you can appease Hamas with half measures or rational discourse. It is not worth wasting a cup of spittle on terrorist fanatics and religious zealots. (See 3 below.)

The pros and cons of sanctions but according to Kfir they will not work regarding Iran. (See 4 below.)

Dick



1) The Stuff Sam Nunn’s Nightmares Are Made Of
By MICHAEL CROWLEY

By now we can too readily imagine the horror of terrorists exploding a nuclear weapon in a major American city: the gutted skyscrapers, the melted cars, the charred bodies. For Sam Nunn, however, a new terror begins the day after. That’s when the world asks whether another bomb is out there. “If a nuclear bomb went off in Moscow or New York City or Jerusalem, any number of groups would claim they have another,” Nunn told me recently. These groups would make steep demands as intelligence officials scrambled to determine which claims were real. Panic would prevail. Even after the detonation of a small, crude weapon that inflicted less damage than the bomb at Hiroshima, Nunn suggested, “the psychological damage would be incalculable. It would be a slow, step-by-step process to regain confidence. And the question will be, Why didn’t we take steps to prevent this? We will have a whole list of things we wish we’d done.”

Nunn thinks of those things every time he picks up a newspaper. When, for instance, he reads about the arrest of a Russian man who, in a sting operation, tried to sell weapons-grade uranium — a reminder of a possible black market in nuclear materials and of the poor security at facilities in the former Soviet Union. Or when he sees news about Iran’s efforts to build a nuclear bomb, which could set off a wave of nuclear proliferation in the Middle East and thus significantly raise the possibility that terrorists will someday acquire a bomb. And despite the apparent diplomatic breakthrough with North Korea earlier this month, in which the North Koreans agreed to begin dismantling their nuclear facilities in return for fuel and other aid, Nunn, who finds the deal encouraging, remains concerned since North Korea’s unpredictable, cash-starved dictatorship still retains perhaps half a dozen nuclear bombs, and the ingredients to make more.

A decade after leaving the United States Senate, where he spent years as chairman of the Armed Services Committee, Nunn posed one, overriding question about his list of things we’ll wish we had done if a doomsday should ever come: “Why aren’t we doing them now?” In a sense, his own answer has been to help found and run the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a Washington-based foundation largely bankrolled by Nunn’s friends Ted Turner and Warren Buffett. In what may be the most ambitious example of private dollars subsidizing national security, the N.T.I. is trying to fill in the gaps where government is failing to reduce nuclear threats. In other words, to do the things now that we would otherwise wish we had done.

The war in Iraq has understandably consumed America’s foreign-policy energies. But it occludes what Nunn and many others, on both the right and left, regard as a deepening worldwide nuclear crisis. Despite its willingness to confront North Korea, the U.S., Nunn insists, still does not fully grasp the nuclear dangers it faces. “We are at a tipping point,” he says. “And we are headed in the wrong direction.” As he sees it, the trouble is, in a defense establishment that once war-gamed the end of the world a thousand different ways, there has been a shortage of thinking about what the right direction looks like or how to take it. It is a situation that has led Nunn, who once extolled nuclear weapons as a guarantor of American safety, to reassess decades of hawkish cold-war thinking, to reconsider his most fundamental beliefs about whether the country would be safer in a world with any nuclear weapons at all.

Sam Nunn’s nuclear nightmare begins with a character like Oleg Khinsagov. Last month, the International Atomic Energy Agency revealed that officials in the former Soviet republic of Georgia had arrested Khinsagov, a 50-year-old Russian fish and sausage trader, for attempting to sell 100 grams of highly enriched uranium to a Muslim buyer who, Khinsagov had been told, represented “a serious organization.” The price: $1 million. Khinsagov, who was caught in a sting operation, had nowhere near enough material for a bomb, but he claimed to have far more at his apartment. (Whether he actually did is unclear.) An American laboratory analysis indicates that the material most likely originated at a Russian nuclear facility.

To some, Khinsagov’s arrest was a success story, a sign that recent efforts to crack down on nuclear smuggling are producing results. Nunn is not so sanguine. He says that nuclear smugglers who get caught — the international agency counts 18 confirmed cases involving highly enriched uranium and plutonium since 1993 — are usually unsophisticated amateurs. “It’s the ones we don’t see that worry me,” he says.

It is a worry that he shares with Ted Turner, the billionaire philanthropist and founder of CNN whose donation of $250 million in Time Warner stock enabled the Nuclear Threat Initiative to open for business in 2001. Turner long dreaded a nuclear holocaust, but he assumed the threat had fizzled out with the end of the cold war. “I was getting ready to celebrate the millennium in 2000 because it looked like humanity was going to make it,” he told me, when we spoke last month. “And if we could do that, maybe we could make it to 3000. I figured that we had nuclear disarmament.” And then he saw a report on “60 Minutes” about lax security in the former Soviet Union. There were 20,000 warheads and stockpiles of uranium and plutonium capable of making another 40,000 or more warheads scattered across 11 time zones, whose safety too often depended on lackadaisical guards, shabby locks and defective security cameras. There was another related problem: large quantities of uranium that could be used to make bombs were being stored at some 130 civilian nuclear reactors around the world, often under even more slipshod security. A small group of terrorists might break into such a facility and if they had basic engineering and chemistry skills could probably forge a crude nuclear bomb out of a grapefruit-size 30-pound lump of highly enriched uranium (to say nothing of a much simpler radioactive “dirty” bomb).

Turner considered establishing an organization to revive the dormant nuclear-disarmament movement. But foreign-policy specialists he met with persuaded him to focus on more realistic, incremental change. A mutual friend connected Turner with Nunn, who was then practicing law at an Atlanta firm. According to one person familiar with N.T.I.’s founding, who does not want to be named because he works with N.T.I. and does not have permission to speak on its behalf, “There was this very prolonged dance where people were trying to come up with ideas that were exciting enough for Turner but sensible enough for Nunn,” who was uncomfortable with Turner’s passion for disarmament, a movement Nunn had long considered irresponsible.

Nunn and Turner found common ground, however, in a narrower mission: responding to the threat of “loose nukes,” or the possibility that nuclear weapons and materials might be smuggled out of the former Soviet Union and find their way into malevolent hands. They settled on having the Nuclear Threat Initiative spend millions of dollars on everything from annual reports written by Harvard academics on the loose-nukes problem to filming a docudrama about a nuclear-terrorism crisis. Above all, the foundation would finance direct-action programs to secure nuclear materials around the world, in coordination with the U.S. and foreign governments.

It was one such program that led Nunn and Turner to a warehouse in Ust-Kamenogorsk, an industrial city in eastern Kazakhstan, in October 2005. They were there to size up an effort, paid for in part by N.T.I., to “blend down” 6,400 pounds of highly enriched uranium — enough to make dozens of bombs — into a form that couldn’t be used in weapons. The uranium was spent fuel from a decommissioned nuclear power plant situated near the Iranian border. A few years earlier, he had made the following offer to Kazakhstan’s president: N.T.I. would provide its expertise to relocate and then blend down the uranium, and it would pay half of the $2 million cost to do so. By the time Nunn and Turner toured the Ulba Metallurgical Plant, the project was close to completion. A portion of the uranium had not yet been blended down, however, and it lay stored in 20 or so tubes in a corner of the warehouse. Nunn and Turner stood and gazed solemnly at it. “Here was the potential, right there in that little corner, in the hands of the wrong people, to wipe out cities around the world.” Nunn says. “That’s a pretty stark realization.”

N.T.I. intervened in Kazakhstan, Nunn explains, because the U.S. government did not act first. It’s not the only such example: in mid-2002, more than 100 pounds of highly enriched uranium — stored in portable canisters that emit little radiation — was lying at the Vinca Institute of Nuclear Sciences, a civilian research reactor in Belgrade. The security there would have been no match for even a small terrorist squad. And Islamic militants operated in the region. Clearly Vinca was a high-priority problem. Yet even though the first American plans to rescue the material were drawn up during the Clinton administration, no action had been taken a year after Sept. 11. The obstacle was bureaucratic: in return for giving up the uranium, the Serbian government demanded help cleaning up Vinca’s spent reactor fuel. That qualified as an environmental cleanup, however, which the U.S. lacked the authority to pay for. So N.T.I. stepped in and covered the $5 million cleanup fee. It wasn’t until August 2002 that a motorcade of technicians and machine-gun-toting commandos finally transferred the uranium from the Vinca Institute to a cargo plane that flew it to Russia to be blended down.


“If there’s anything that most Americans would think the government would happily chip in for, it’s getting highly enriched uranium out of a place where it could fall into terrorist hands,” says Matthew Bunn, a former nuclear-arms official in the Clinton administration who is now at Harvard and whose work is partly financed by N.T.I. “Yet” — in Vinca — “the government could not get this done without N.T.I.’s money.”

A small-town lawyer and politician who won an underdog campaign in Georgia in 1972, Nunn quickly made his name in Washington as a defense-policy wonk. Thanks to an intimidating expertise on defense affairs and a bespectacled air of judicious authority, Nunn was “looked upon with awe” by colleagues in both parties, says Pete V. Domenici, the Republican senator from New Mexico. Such was his authority, in fact, that he comfortably rebuffed offers from George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton to serve as secretary of defense, knowing that he wielded even more power from his longtime perch as chairman of Senate Armed Services. Nunn used that influence to consistently pro-military ends. During the 1970s, he fought with liberal Democrats seeking to cut defense budgets and ultimately forced Jimmy Carter to accept substantial increases in defense spending. Nunn also strongly defended the value and morality of nuclear weapons. The nuclear-freeze movement, in his mind, was naïvely utopian. “We had to have a nuclear deterrent,” he says today. “Not only that, but a first-use policy,” which refers to the U.S.’s stated willingness in certain circumstances to strike first with nuclear weapons.

Nunn considered a run for president in 1988, and his name surfaced again after Michael Dukakis’s crushing defeat in November of that year, which further persuaded centrist Democrats that they needed a Southern moderate as a candidate. But that talk ground to a halt after Nunn opposed the first gulf war. He urged at the time that sanctions and diplomacy be given more time and, in January 1991, voted against the Senate’s war resolution. A sign went up on a Georgia highway calling him “Saddam’s Best Friend,” and some suggested that he was cynically appealing to liberal Democratic primary voters. As it happened, however, opposing such a short and easy war probably ruined Nunn’s shot at the White House. In Washington, his vote was considered a colossal political blunder. “He got a lot of political flak,” says his friend Al From, the chairman of the moderate Democratic Leadership Council. “It probably hastened his decision to retire from politics.” (Nunn’s vote “profoundly influenced the next generation of senators that confronted plans for the second invasion” 11 years later, says a former Clinton defense official who advises Congressional Democrats. White House officials even invoked Nunn’s “mistake” as they lobbied Congress to vote for war.)

By the mid-1990s, the cold war was over and the stature of defense gurus diminished. Moreover, politics on Capitol Hill were changing. The rise of fierce, Gingrich-style cultural politics made life uneasy for all Southern Democrats. In 1993, Nunn resisted Bill Clinton’s attempt to allow gays to serve openly in the military, prompting a gay-rights spokesman to brand him a “Jesse Helms Democrat.” Washington was growing far less hospitable to a moderate with little taste for the blood sport of partisan politics. “The premium is on stirring up your base,” he says now. When Nunn announced his retirement in 1995, even the Republican Strom Thurmond urged him to stick around. Nunn was just 58 when he left the Senate. For more than 20 years, his life had been defined by the cold war and the fight against Communism. That cause was over.

Nunn first became alarmed by the threat of loose nukes during his last Senate term. A year after the Soviet Union began to collapse in 1990, he passed legislation with his friend Richard Lugar, the Republican from Indiana, that dedicated hundreds of millions of dollars annually in the Pentagon budget to the dismantling of surplus Soviet nuclear weapons, upgrading security at nuclear sites in the former Soviet Union and finding jobs for its nuclear scientists lest they be tempted to work for terrorists or would-be nuclear powers. Since 1991, the Cooperative Threat Reduction program — or simply Nunn-Lugar, as it is generally known — has spent more than $10 billion on its mission, and it is considered a triumph of forward-looking lawmaking.

Even so, huge quantities of weapons and material remain in what Nunn considers perilously unsafe conditions. Only about half of the buildings containing nuclear material in the former Soviet Union have undergone post-1990 security upgrades to install things like perimeter fences, cameras and radiation-monitors to prevent theft. And 134 tons of excess plutonium, which the Russians are willing to destroy, are just sitting in storage. Progress in addressing these problems has been stymied in part by conservatives in the last Republican Congress who bristled at the notion of sending American tax dollars to a Russian military that, they said, should pay for its own fences and cameras. Cooler relations between Russia and the United States have stalled matters further. Russian military officials are less willing to let Americans poke around their nuclear sites and assess security conditions. And the uncompromising diplomacy of the Bush administration has played a role too. American and Russian officials recently fought over arcane rules that would govern a program to dispose of that 134 tons of excess plutonium. The lead United States negotiator demanded extremely broad guarantees for U.S. contractors involved in the work, including freedom from liability even in the event of intentional spillage of nuclear material. The standoff delayed the program for more than a year, until Bush and Vladimir Putin finally hammered out a solution at a summit last fall.

One of the few points of agreement between George Bush and John Kerry during the presidential campaign in 2004 was that preventing a terrorist nuclear attack is among America’s very highest priorities. But many critics on both the left and right argue that the Bush administration has lacked a sense of urgency toward the threat of loose nukes. Kenneth Adelman, a former Reagan-era arms-control official and a Pentagon adviser under George W. Bush, recently recalled a private meeting with Donald Rumsfeld days after his swearing in as defense secretary. “He was very skeptical of the Nunn-Lugar program,” Adelman told me. “That wasn’t the kind of thing he thought the Department of Defense should be doing. He had it in his head that it was a wimpy thing to have the Pentagon involved in.”

Some Bush allies maintain that the real blame lies with Russia’s increasingly belligerent leader. “I believe there are still many installations where the security of materials is still not to the high level that we would hope,” John Wolf, who served as assistant secretary of state for nonproliferation in Bush’s first term, told me. “Somebody ought to look into Mr. Putin’s eyes and down to his soul and say, ‘You’re putting the fate of the world at risk by your unwillingness to take action.’ ”

Last September, Nunn and N.T.I.’s president, a former Energy Department official in the Clinton administration named Charles Curtis, flew to Vienna to meet with Mohamed ElBaradei, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency. ElBaradei admires Nunn, whom he calls “a shining example” in the fight against a potential nuclear catastrophe — presumably not least because N.T.I. has given ElBaradei’s agency more than $1 million to upgrade its monitoring of nuclear material worldwide. Part of the reason for Nunn’s visit was to discuss a major new N.T.I. proposal: the creation of an international nuclear fuel bank.

This was the foundation’s response to an unsettling wave of countries showing interest in new or expanded nuclear capabilities. Several nations, including Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Morocco and Algeria, say they might want to develop civilian nuclear power. Meanwhile, South Africa, Brazil, Canada, Argentina and Australia all talk of creating home-grown uranium-enrichment programs — ostensibly for power but potentially also for military ends. “What I see is a new wave of countries not necessarily trying to develop nuclear weapons but nuclear-weapons capability — the ability to process or enrich plutonium or uranium,” ElBaradei told me recently. “And I know, and you know, that if a country is capable of doing that, they are virtually a nuclear-weapon state.”

The idea behind an international fuel bank is to make it possible for nations to generate nuclear power without developing a nuclear-weapons capability. Iran, for instance, has rejected offers from Russia to manage its uranium supply on the alleged grounds that it doesn’t want to be dependent on Russia’s political whims for its energy needs. The fuel bank would render such complaints obsolete and make transparent who is using energy programs as a cover for military ambitions. If a country has access to a reliable fuel supply, why would it need its own enrichment program?

For Nunn, this is the logical next phase in the fight against loose nukes: preventing the creation of new nukes that could become loose someday. ElBaradei has predicted that as many as 30 or 40 countries could begin trying to develop nuclear capability in coming years. And while traditional policies of deterrence may keep future nuclear states in check, every new bomb factory necessarily means there is more dangerous nuclear material in the world. “I see the two going together,” Nunn says. “The more countries that have this fissile material, the more likely the risk of a diversion or theft of fissile material becomes.”

America was lucky to survive the cold war, Nunn told an audience in Washington last month. “I don’t believe if you get another 7, 8, 10 countries with a nuclear weapon that you’re going to be so lucky.”

It is very likely that North Korea’s success in building weapons and Iran’s steady progress toward that goal have only encouraged other nations to get into the nuclear game. But, Nunn believes, the United States, mired in Iraq and strained in its relations with former allies, has never had less leverage to counter them. Nunn says that the current Iraq war (which he also opposed) has distracted U.S. officials, undermined the credibility of any U.S. military threat it might bring to bear on North Korean or Iran and “dealt a severe blow to the leadership credibility we need in the world.”

In this view, American credibility is an essential part of persuading other nations to stop or reverse their nuclear programs. One way to enhance American credibility, according to this line of thinking, is for the United States to decrease its own nuclear stockpile. Yet the Bush administration has not only not moved to significantly reduce that stockpile, it is also exploring new nuclear technologies (like bunker-buster mini-nukes). “I think we have very badly failed to meet our responsibilities,” Brent Scowcroft, George H. W. Bush’s national security adviser and Nunn’s friend, told me. “I think it is the sort of neoconish notion that it is our job to dominate the world and that the way you dominate it is by pushing ahead on new nuclear stuff.”

Nunn complains that the Bush White House also subordinates nonproliferation to other goals. As an example, he cites the deal the administration cut with India last year. It created a legal exemption allowing American companies to conduct trade with India’s nuclear-power industry even though India is not a party to the 1968 Non-Proliferation Treaty. Nunn publicly called for Congress to impose conditions on the deal — specifically, a provision requiring that India halt production of new fissile material for weapons. A worldwide treaty barring the creation of all new fissile material is near the top of Nunn’s wish list, and he saw the deal with India as a fine opportunity. But in the end, the Bush administration, which is eager to cultivate India as a regional ally, got its way. “We missed that opportunity,” Nunn says. “We should not have entered into that agreement.”

The Bush administration is not without its achievements or its defenders. Persuading Libya to abandon a nascent nuclear program in 2003 is one of its least-heralded triumphs. The recent deal with North Korea, if it holds up, could be another success story. The Global Threat Reduction Initiative, a program set up by the Energy Department to remove nuclear material from civilian nuclear reactors around the world, has been widely commended. (Nunn, who is not prone to boasting, says people “at very high levels” have told him that the example set by the Vinca operation in Serbia was a crucial impetus behind the creation of the new program.) Meanwhile, conservatives note that the sorts of international treaties embraced by Nunn but spurned by Bush have historically failed to blunt the nuclear ambitions of states like India and Pakistan and, now, possibly Iran. Hence American power and the deterrent threat of brute force remain the best way to confront the dangers of proliferation. “If you want to discourage countries from acquiring nuclear weapons,” Richard Perle, the former Reagan arms-control official, says, “make it clear that once they get a nuclear weapon, it is something they can’t use directly because we will annihilate them.”

Nunn, for one, remains unconvinced. The North Korea deal, he says, came about after the Bush administration shifted tactics from its confrontational, axis-of-evil posture to intensive multilateral diplomacy. While Nunn says he applauds the administration for changing direction on North Korea — “You have to talk to countries unless you’re going to leave yourself with one resort, which is military force,” he says — Perle’s vision of deterrence is ineffective if a nuclear weapon is stolen or transferred from a state to a terrorist group with no fixed address to incinerate. It is potential threats like these that have led Nunn to shift his focus from locking up loose nukes to grander ideas, like the international fuel bank.

At the same time, he has had to enlist new allies. Ted Turner’s initial donation of $250 million to the Nuclear Threat Initiative came in the form of Time Warner stock, which lost 70 percent of its value before N.T.I. sold it off. N.T.I. might have gone under by now had Nunn not enlisted another wealthy angel, Warren Buffett. Nunn has known Buffett for years through his service on the Coca-Cola corporate board — Nunn estimates he spends 30 to 50 percent of his time serving on several corporate boards, including those of Coca-Cola, Dell and Chevron — and Buffett has long been concerned about the risk of nuclear terrorism.

“One thing you learn in the insurance business is that anything that can happen will happen,” Buffett told me. “Whether it’s the levees in New Orleans or the San Francisco earthquake, things that are very improbable do happen.” Buffett once gave Nunn a formula that the latter likes to repeat: assuming a 10 percent chance of a nuclear attack in any given year, the odds of surviving 50 years without an attack are less than 1 percent. If the odds of an attack can be reduced to 1 percent per year, however, the chances of making it 50 years without a nuclear detonation improve to better than even. Buffett also told Nunn that if he ever had “a big idea” for reducing the chances of nuclear terrorism, he should call. After Nunn proposed the fuel-bank project, Buffett backed the effort with a pledge of $50 million — on the condition that at least one government contributes $100 million in cash or nuclear fuel within two years. Buffett is now N.T.I.’s chief underwriter, promising to donate $7 million annually to the foundation through 2009. (Fund-raising generates the rest of N.T.I.’s money.) “I told Sam we’re not going to have something as important as his effort disappear because of the actions of a stock,” Buffett says. “As long as Sam’s involved, I’ll be involved. I promise you that.”

For his part, ElBaradei is ecstatic that Buffett stepped forward. But he also regards it as a damning reflection on the seriousness with which the world is taking nuclear proliferation. “It’s discouraging, to say the least, for my organization to go and pass the hat to seek funding for these problems when everyone agrees that this is the No. 1 security threat,” ElBaradei says. “Governments are not putting money where their mouths are.”

Last month, Nunn wrote an op-ed article in The Wall Street Journal with former Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger and George Schultz and former Secretary of Defense William Perry that sent waves through the foreign-policy establishment. Its title was “A World Free of Nuclear Weapons.” The article declared that, after the cold war, “reliance on nuclear weapons for [deterrence] is becoming increasingly hazardous and decreasingly effective.” Deterring terrorist groups has become nearly impossible, and the peacekeeping value of nuclear weapons is more and more outweighed by the risk of their possible use. Therefore, the authors wrote, it is time to pursue the goal of “a world free of nuclear weapons.” To seek abolition, in other words.

The language used in the op-ed — for example, the claim that abolition is “consistent with America’s moral heritage” — struck some as an echo of 1980s liberal critiques that treated nuclear deterrence as a moral abomination. “Many people said this was a leftist view, a pacifist view of the world, to come and say we need to move to a new abolition of nuclear weapons,” ElBaradei told me shortly after the piece was published. On the other hand, Nunn’s byline on the article seems to have buoyed those who have long called for weapons reductions. “Here is a man who was known as the leading Democratic hawk in the Senate saying we have got to recapture this vision of eliminating nuclear weapons,” Joseph Cirincione, a nuclear-proliferation expert at the liberal Center for American Progress, says. “Not just reducing nuclear dangers but eliminating these weapons. It was a shot in the arm to everyone who’s been trying to correct the disastrous policies of the last six years.”

Nunn says that some people were stunned by his new stance. “How could you endorse this?” he has been asked. Ronald Reagan believed passionately in the principle of disarmament, but few in Washington’s foreign-policy establishment have ever shared that view. Brent Scowcroft, for one, calls abolition “a fantasy. But even if you could do it, that’s dangerous. I just think that we have invented nuclear weapons, and we cannot disinvent them. And a world where everybody gets rid of their nuclear weapons means that anybody that cheats can become a superpower in a short period of time. And I just think that’s a very dangerous world.”

Nunn acknowledges this danger and admits that any realistic disarmament plan would have to allow the U.S. to quickly reconstitute weapons if a threat emerged. But he has come to believe the greater danger is continuing on our current path. “I think we have to turn it around,” he told me a few weeks ago. “You literally can’t get there” — to a safer world, that is — “from here.”

Nunn concedes that any path to complete disarmament would be long and slow. He says that the U.S. could begin by finally starting to make substantial cuts in its nuclear forces, and by ratifying a 1996 international nuclear-test-ban treaty that Congress has refused to ratify, and by working to halt the production of new fissile material everywhere. But only a sweeping vision of a world free from the bomb can start such a process, Nunn says. “I don’t believe the steps are possible without the vision.”

It has been a long journey to this point. Twenty years ago, he says, the Wall Street Journal article “would not have been possible. I would not have been in that mood at that stage, and I said so.” Today, in fact, Nunn finds himself unexpectedly aligned with the original abolitionist vision that he only recently urged Ted Turner to de-emphasize. It is a vision many Democrats say Nunn could bring into a future Democratic administration, possibly as secretary of state or defense. (In a recent speech to the Council on Foreign Relations, Hillary Clinton cited Nunn and the N.T.I. as her inspiration for a bill to create a White House nuclear-terrorism adviser.)

But Nunn knows it could be another 20 years — probably more — before such a vision can be realized, if at all. “You can probably only get to the achievement with the next generation,” he says. “Probably none of the people who signed that will be able to see it through. But the world has to see that direction. Perhaps then a younger generation will see that the goal is achievable.

Correction: February 24, 2007

An article on Page 50 of The Times Magazine this weekend, about Sam Nunn, head of the Nuclear Threat Initiative and former chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, misstates the name of a company on whose board he serves. It is Chevron, not ChevronTexaco.

2) IDF troops uncover second explosives lab in Nablus raid
By Amos Harel and and Avi Issacharoff

An Israel Defense Forces patrol operating in the West Bank city of Nablus on Sunday uncovered an explosives laboratory containing six bombs and a Lau missile stolen from the IDF.

This is the second explosives factory the IDF has found broad operation against terrorist organizations in the city. Two IDF soldiers were lightly injured Sunday morning during the raid, Israel Radio reported.

The operation, which began on Saturday in the city's casbah, targets several organizations with military capability that the IDF believes may improve. The soldiers were injured in the casbah, the radio said, and officials said several Palestinians were also lightly injury.

Elite Nahal and Golani battalions are participating in the operation along with two additional infantry battalions.

Witnesses said dozens of IDF jeeps and armored vehicles raided the city center.

They said troops placed about 50,000 people under curfew in the center of Nablus and closed the main entrance to the city.

Schools and a university in the city announced that they had canceled studies due to the curfew.

The army also took over local television and radio stations, ordering people to remain indoors and warning residents that the clampdown would remain in effect for several days, Palestinian residents said.

On Saturday, the IDF uncovered an explosives lab in the city. Among the items found were pipe bombs, gas balloons and materials for producing explosive charges. Sappers detonated the explosive devices.

The army also said soldiers had been shot at in several places and returned fire.

Palestinian officials condemned the raid, saying it threatened Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas' efforts to restart peace talks with Israel.

"We condemn this military incursion," said Saeb Erekat, a confidante to Abbas. "This will undermine the efforts that are being made to sustain the cease-fire with Israel."

In the Gaza Strip, Hamas officials said the Israeli raid was undermining the Palestinian unity efforts.

"We question why these military campaigns are increasing now, said Ghazi Hamad," spokesman for the Hamas-led government. "This indicates the Israeli government is trying to turn what was agreed upon in Mecca into a failure."

The Israeli forces began moving into Nablus at about 3 a.m. and continued to move in for several hours, Palestinian witnesses said. They said about 80 military vehicles, along with several bulldozers, were in the city.

The bulldozers erected huge piles of rubble to block movement on main roads, witnesses said. The main entrance to the city also was closed.

Witnesses said Soldiers moved from door to door in Nablus' Old City, or casbah, entering homes in search of suspects.

At one point, nervous soldiers forced a Palestinian youth to lead a small group of soldiers up some stairs and into a home ahead of the forces. The soldiers then took the youth, along with several young Palestinian men, into a military vehicle.

The army had no immediate comment on Sunday's incident, which was filmed by AP Television News.

While the operation largely shut down Nablus, sporadic clashes were reported. Soldiers were pelted with stones and cement blocks, and exchanged fire with Palestinian gunmen, the army said, adding that two soldiers were lightly wounded by a Palestinian bomb.

The army responded to the protests with rubber bullets and stun grenades, witnesses said. In one incident, soldiers entered a cemetery to search for Palestinians who had pelted their vehicle with stones.

Palestinian medical officials said four Palestinians were wounded by rubber bullets during Sunday's unrest.

3)Head of the Hamas political bureau, Khalid Mash'al, has declared that the key to any solution to the Palestinian issue is Israeli recognition of Palestinian rights; to withdraw from the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and comply with Palestinian demands.

Speaking to the London based daily, Al Sharq Al Awsat, during his visit to
Egypt; Mash'al added that the Saudi king is trying to preserve Palestinian
blood.

Mash'al expects the Mecca agreement to be successful for a period of time,
as long as the Saudis and Egyptians are supporting it. He said that the deal
did not cover or achieve everything. He denied that there is a Saudi
initiative to improve relations between Hamas and Jordan.

The paper asked Mash'al about the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas,
meeting with Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, he said "we don't care
what the Israelis say, we made an agreement in Mecca and we will stick to
it, despite the challenges we are going to face." Mash'al added "Israel
should recognize Palestinian rights and withdraw from the West Bank and Gaza
Strip."

Mash'al also said "we have agreed in Mecca that external negotiations should
be the responsibility of the Palestine Liberation Organisation chairman
[Abbas] and when he is offered any settlements he should present them to the
legislative institutions."

When Mash'al was asked about his expectations of the Quartet (the United
Nations, United States, European Union and Russia) meeting with United
States secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, he said "regardless of what the
USA wants, I believe that there is a level of understanding among the Arabs
and the Palestinians, this will give us the margin to move and become closer
to national goals. The Arabs will be supporting the Palestinians and that
satisfies me, as this will form an Arab unity which can protect the
Palestinians."

With regard to the differences between Fatah and Hamas and to the political
partnership he said "this subject will be dealt with seriously, we will
discuss it and I believe that we will overcome any obstacles, there are many
steps that we are going to take to reach a real partnership in the
government."

About the internal fighting he said "we have made some mistakes and we
courageously admit that, but these are limited and were committed as
reactions, we don't feel proud of this and hope that it will be omitted from
history, we are steadfastly against the shedding of Palestinian blood."

When asked about the United States categorising of Arab nations as
'moderate' and 'extremist' he said "our relationship with the Arab countries
does not reflect this, we have maintained good relations with the Arab
countries, regardless of how the USA portrays or classifies them."

With regards to the aid embargo on the Palestinian authority, he said "the
Arabs can break it, at least partially, even if the US refuses to lift it,
but we notice that there are cracks in the position of the Quartet and
Russia takes a positive position, I am sure that the siege can be partially
broken."

Mash'al concluded by saying "the Mecca deal will succeed and continue, it
will be successful for a period of time because of the objective
circumstances. I am convinced that the deal did not achieve all of our
ambitions but at least it ended the internal fighting."

4) Imposing Sanctions: The Iran quandary
By ISAA KFIR

The findings by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) that Iran has continued to develop its uranium enrichment program, despite Security Council Resolution 1737, raises the possibility of further sanctions being imposed on Iran.

Such action, though welcomed, is unlikely to stop Teehran's march towards membership in the nuclear family, as Iran has already shown that it can and will ignore international norms and standards. Economic sanctions refer to the deliberate withdrawal or threat of withdrawal of trade and financial relations with a country in an effort to alter its behavior/policies.

The first recorded example of economic sanctions was the Megarian Decree in 433 BC. The Athenian Assembly imposed a trade embargo on Megara for supporting the Corinthians, Athens enemies. In response, the Megarans turned to Sparta, which issued an ultimatum to Athens to withdraw the embargo. When the Athenians refused, a devastating war (Peloponnesian War) ensued.

THE IRANIAN THREAT

Since the Megarian Decree and with the growing desire to avoid warfare economic sanctions have been used to encourage democracy, respect for human rights, end civil war, stop drug trafficking, fight terrorism, combat weapon proliferation and promote nuclear disarmament. In terms of UN sanctions, the Security Council operating under 41 may impose "measures not involving the use of armed force" to support the implementation of its decisions. These measures may include "complete or partial interruption of economic relations and of rail, sea, air, postal, telegraphic, radio, and other means of communication, and the severance of diplomatic relations." To work, sanctions require four major commitments: patience, cooperation, enforcement and respect. Unfortunately, these elements are rarely present in international politics.

In the case of Iran, Russia and China offer the biggest hindrance to the imposition of an effective economic sanction. Their reluctance to support a comprehensive sanction regime arises from purely pure national interests to a desire to assert their position on the global map. Iran is a major energy supplier to China, and as to Russia, the two countries have good trade relations.

On the international scene, since the end of the Cold War, Russia has sought to curve a new place under the sun for itself, by challenging American hegemony as seen recently with President Putin's declaration that America's approach to global relations is "very dangerous."

For China, its foreign policy centers on energy as it strives for economic growth. These considerations are bound to impact on negotiations relating to the language in the new resolution, the imposition of sanctions and the monitoring process.

Determining whether sanctions work is a difficult and contentious. A rare example of successful usage of sanctions is the case of South Africa, which endured sanctions from 1962 until 1992, which slowly suffocated the South African economy. This eventually led the business community to pressure the National Party to abandon the apartheid system that it instituted in 1948.

There are, however, numerous examples where sanctions have failed either because they were ignored (Somalia) or because the regime found means to circumvent the sanctions (Saddam Hussein, oil for food program.)

Imposing further sanctions on Iran would only serve the Ahmadinejad regime. It would allow the Iranian president to claim that Western-imposed sanctions are the cause of Iran's economic failings and not the clerics.

Democratic presidential candidate and former US ambassador to the UN Bill Richardson has hit the nail on the head when he said that Iran would not end its nuclear program just because it is threatened. The sad truth is that the current situation is a direct result of the criminal negligence of national and international leaders who for decades failed to deal with the Iranian regime, and therefore imposing sanctions now on Iran would be tantamount to closing the barn after the horses bolted.

World leaders must therefore unite for two reasons, firstly, international cooperation may facilitate an agreement where Iran voluntarily surrenders its nuclear program (as seen with North Korea and Libya) and more importantly they must work together to ensure that the twenty-first century will not go down in the annals of history as the century of nuclear proliferation.