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TRADE RESOURCE CENTER
CURRENT UPDATES: March 11, 2004
Dear Friends, Below is the latest installment of the ATRC Email Update. We had hoped to bring you an analysis of the situation in Haiti, but time is not on our side. We were faced with tough decision: hold off on sending this email out until we were able to pull our Haiti article together, risking the likelihood that all of the other important information and analysis we have compiled here would be woefully out of date. Or send it out without commenting on Haiti. These are the trade offs we have to make sometimes. In fact, maybe by the time we get on top of Haiti and are able to offer our thoughts, they will be out of date because democracy will be fully entrenched there… as it is in Iraq. The pitfalls of our work: sarcasm, cynicism and being behind schedule all the time. Some how we are maintaining somewhat good spirits in spite of all of this. And we hope you are too. In fact, the only way we maintain good spirits is because we know all of you are out there doing all you can. In this update:
1. A Unified Security Budget for the United States The report points out that while many of the Bush administration's policies since September 11th -- from the doctrine of preventive war to the development of "usable" nuclear weapons -- have been challenged, the funding for those priorities has gone unchallenged. The report notes, "From 2000 to 2004, these budgets have increased by more than 50%. Congress has approved each of these budgets, and virtually the entire menu of programs specified in them, with hardly a whisper of debate." With increasing budget deficits, Congress can no longer ignore the waste and excess of the military budget. The report outlines a unified security policy and provides a working model on how to reduce the deficit, cut military spending and INCREASE our security by balancing spending on military and NON-military tools such as international security programs, nonproliferation efforts and homeland security. Some of the key findings include: · The Bush administration proposes to spend seven times as much in 2005 for the military portion ($430 billion) of the national security budget as for the nonmilitary portion ($62 billion). · The administration's decision to cut the Comanche program was a good start. The report identifies ten other programs, including the F-22 fighter and the DDX destroyer, which could be safely cut or reconfigured to free up $56 billion in resources for other neglected security priorities. · In a 2002 speech President Bush identified development assistance as a security tool, linking the desperate resort to terrorism with the hopelessness of persistent poverty. This unified security budget recommends a $10 billion increase in US development assistance, and outlines key reforms in development policy. · The remainder of the report's recommended savings are allocated to addressing key deficits in homeland security, including increased funding for "first responders" to a terrorist attack. 2. The Pentagon's Operational Test and Evaluation FY 2003 Annual Report The report from Thomas P. Christie, the Pentagon's top weapons evaluator, is the "embodiment of the 'fly before you buy' philosophy," an annual summary of the state of all the Pentagon's weapons systems. Here's what the report had to say about the Pentagon's missile defense program: · Due to the immature nature of the systems they emulate, models and simulations of the BMDS cannot be adequately validated at this time. · Due to the immature BMDS elements, very little system level testing was performed by the close of FY 2003. · To date, the GMD program has demonstrated the technical feasibility of hit-to-kill negation of simple target complexes in a limited set of engagement conditions. The GMD test program in FY 2003 was hindered by a lack of production representative test articles and from test infrastructure limitations.
II. ALL THINGS NUCLEAR In the March 8th edition of The New Yorker, Seymour Hersh asks, "Why is Washington going easy on Pakistan's nuclear black marketers?" Good question. Hersh notes that on February 4th, Dr. Abdul Qadeer Kahn, Pakistan's hero and father of the country's nuclear bomb, confessed to being solely responsible for operating an international black market in nuclear-weapons materials. The next day, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf claimed to be shocked by the announcement, and feigned ignorance of Khan's actions before last October when U.S. officials informed him. "If they knew earlier, they should have told us," he said. As Hersh pointed out, "It was a make-believe performance in a make-believe capital." Everybody knows -- and knew -- that the Pakistani intelligence service and Khan were transferring nuclear technology and equipment around the world. Hersh quotes a Bush administration intelligence officer saying, "We had every opportunity to put a stop to the A.Q. Khan network fifteen years ago." But we didn't. The Bush administration's response to the recent admission has been to praise Musharraf and go along with the charades -- continuing the quid pro quo relationship between Pakistan and the US. Washington is preparing a "major spring offensive" that will involve thousands of American troops inside northern Pakistan in search of Osama bin Laden, and wants Musharraf on their side. But is the U.S. risking reigning in nuclear proliferation in exchange for bin Laden? Should they being doing one at the expense of the other? And are they overlooking the connections? Husain Haqqani, a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told the New Yorker: "Once they had the bomb, they had a shopping list of what to buy and where. A.Q. Khan can bring a plain piece of paper and show me how to get it done -- the countries, people, and telephone numbers. 'This is the guy in Russia who can get you small quantities of enriched uranium. You in Malaysia will manufacture the stuff. Here's who will miniaturize the warhead. And then you go to North Korea and get the damn missile.'" "This is not a few scientists pocketing money and getting rich. It's state policy," he added. Robert Gallucci, a former United Nations weapons inspector who is now dean of the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service, told Hersh, "Badd as it is with Iran, North Korea, and Libya having nuclear-weapons material, the worst part is that they could transfer it to a non-state group. That's the biggest concern, and the scariest thing about all this -- that Pakistan could work with terrorist groups on earth to build nuclear weapons. There's nothing more important that stopping terrorist groups from getting nuclear weapons. The most dangerous country for the United States now is Pakistan, and second is Iran." Read the full article at The New Yorker Nuclear Weapons 'Immoral,' Say Religious, Scientific Leaders
The 2004 Preparatory Committee meeting of the States Parties to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty will be held in New York, April 26- May 7, 2004, For a list of events go to Reaching Critical Will's website at www.reachingcriticalwill.org Reports | Recent News Coverage | Updates
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