Politics: Business as Usual, Part II

I don't know if the on going Valerie Plame incident is bothering anyone else, but let me briefly note some things that continue to bother me about this case.

For those of you who may have forgotten who Valerie Plame is, she is a CIA operative who was supposedly operating under cover inside the US. She was making a fairly concerted effort to reveal her own identity, but that is beyond the matter at hand. Robert Novak revealed Plame's identity in a newspaper article, and then Scooter Libby, the Chief of Staff of Vice President Cheney, was convicted of perjury for giving conflicting reports to the FBI about the case.

Congressional Democrats have accused the Bush administration of revealing Plame's identity in retaliation against her husband, Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who had testified to Congress that Iraq was not attempting to acquire uranium ore from Africa.

Now, why do I bring this up now? The case does not seem to have gone away. House Oversight Chairman Henry Waxman has subpoenaed Attorney General Michael Mukasey to hand over notes from the FBI's investigation of Cheney, including "notes about the 2003 State of the Union address, during which President Bush made the case for invading Iraq in part by saying Saddam Hussein was pursuing uranium ore to make a nuclear weapon. That information turned out to be wrong" (emphasis added).

Now, perhaps Congress has missed it, but Saddam Hussein had managed to stockpile a rather large supply of uranium ore in the form of yellowcake. Collation forces found a stockpile of 550 metric tons (1.2 million pounds) of yellowcake in an underground nuclear research laboratory. I have a hard time understanding how Hussein could not have been pursuing uranium ore if he had stockpiled 550 metric tons. I suppose they could be disputing the "in Africa" part of the President's claim, but that would be beside the point anyway. I guess I just don't have a suitable imagination to be a politician.

Politics: Business as Usual

Politicians have always specialized in empty promises. One of the most recent noteworthy remarks was given by Obama in reference to his proposed nuclear policy for the United States:

We will make the goal of eliminating all nuclear weapons a central element in our nuclear policy.

While I suppose that it is perfectly possible that the US could eliminate its arsenal of nuclear weapons, I hardly think that Russia and China would be interested in following suit. If you have any doubts, check out the following links: here and here. The Russians certainly aren't up for this sort of policy. The Department of Defense's figures for China's nuclear stockpile can be found here. China's only stated policies that I could find are that they won't shoot first and that they won't use or threaten to use nuclear weapons against countries that do not possess nuclear weapons.

Unfortunately, nuclear weapons will remain a necessary weapon until either we have some more powerful weapon to replace them, or the major countries have sufficient anti-missile systems to make the use of nuclear ICBMs impractical. It would be nice if all countries followed the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, but in practice we can only control our own behavior. Countries that do not like us can always give nuclear technology to warmongering countries. So, nice try, Obama. That is a nice campaign promise to make, but nuclear weapons are here to stay, at least for awhile.