Now that the total disaster known as the Clinton presidency is over, the media elite have begun rewriting history for Bill Clinton. Oh, Clinton intended to do the right thing, but events – or the religious right – conspired against him.
For example, President Bush just announced how he intends to implement part of the trilateral agreement between the U.S., Russia and the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency – originally entered into, but never implemented, by Clinton. The agreement was made to ensure the demilitarization of nukes, but in reporting on yet another courageous reversal of Clinton by Dubya, the Clintonoid revisionists at the New York Times don’t even mention the agreement, or Clinton’s overt and covert rationales for committing us to it.
All they write is that “The Clinton plan was to dispose of 52.5 tons [of nuclear material], more than half the national stockpile, but that was reduced to 34 tons. Some of the plutonium that was to have been mixed with wastes is unsuitable for conversion to fuel.”
You probably got the impression from that revisionist report that Clinton intended to dispose of half the nukes in our stockpile, and that he planned on converting the plutonium recovered from them into reactor fuel. Wrong. He intended to dispose of all – not half – our nukes and didn’t plan on converting any plutonium at all from any source into reactor fuel.
In 1992, Congress authorized the elder Bush to assist Russia in getting rid of plutonium and uranium recovered from dismantling some 20,000 Soviet nukes. The Russians had already decided to burn it up as mixed-oxide (MOX) reactor fuel, but didn’t have the money to do it. Bush and Congress judged that it was in our national security interests to help them.
But then Bill Clinton became president and proceeded to ignore that and all subsequent congressional mandates. Why? Well, the Clintonoids were afraid that if the Russian plutonium disposition plan succeeded and a MOX-based nuclear reactor fuel cycle got firmly established worldwide, nuclear power – with access to an essentially unlimited supply of MOX, derived from reprocessed reactor fuel – would be given a new lease on life.
How to thwart the plan? Turn it over to the United Nations to implement. That could take forever.
And to further complicate matters, Clinton proposed back in 1993 that the U.S. and Russia would each subject their nuke dismantling and disposition projects to the U.N.’s International Atomic Energy Agency. Intertwining the disposition of our excess nukes – which were in no danger of getting loose in the first place – with the disposition of Russian excess nukes essentially insured that nothing would ever get done.
Moreover, the trilateral agreement – not formally signed until 1997 – was hailed by Clinton to be an important step toward the U.S. and Russia meeting the nuke “disarmament obligations of Articles I and VI of the Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons.” The agreement was also designed to “complement” the proposed START III agreement, which would include “measures relating to the transparency of strategic nuclear warhead inventories and the destruction of strategic nuclear warheads.”
That is, not only was the trilateral agreement covertly designed to eliminate nuclear power, but was also overtly designed to eliminate nukes, themselves.
The Bush administration has now decided how to dispose of our excess plutonium and has concluded that the best and cheapest way to do it is the very way the Russians intended to dispose of theirs a decade ago – make MOX fuel out of all of it and burn it up in nuclear power reactors.
Clinton never asked Congress for the funds to meet our trilateral commitments, either to dispose of our own excess plutonium or to assist the Russians dispose of theirs. So, since 1993, nothing has been done. With Dubya, that’s changing. The Bush administration can now be expected to ask Congress for the funds required to dispose of our excess plutonium.
But our nukes are not the problem. Russian nukes are.
The Russians still don’t have the necessary funds to dispose of their plutonium. In implementing Clinton’s trilateral nuke-disarmament agreement, Bush must somehow transform it into a vehicle for solving the Russian loose-nuke problem. By endorsing the Russian method of disposition, he has set us on the right track. Now he has to help Russia – financially and technically – down that same track with us.
Despite what the Clintonoid revisionists write, it is becoming more and more obvious that Bill Clinton never intended to solve the loose-nuke problem, by heading down that track or any other.
The buried secret of the U.S. Senate
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