2009 October Bulletin

Security Spending Primer: Getting Smart About The Pentagon Budget is now available. The Primer is a “one-stop-shopping” resource and has two main goals:

• to provide comprehensive, easy-to-understand information on the complexity of the federal budget process; and
• to help build the capacity of people across the U.S. who want their voices and their priorities to be heard in the debate over federal spending in general and military spending in particular.

• Nobel Committee Member: Nuclear Disarmament Efforts Won Obama the Prize | Wall Street Journal
• It is about so much more than "peace" | WAND blog

A great piece... one of our favorite myths...

2. A military strike would knock out Iran's program.

Actually, a military attack would only increase the possibility of Iran developing a nuclear bomb.

"There is no military option that does anything more than buy time," Defense Secretary Robert Gates said last month. "The estimates are one to three years or so." And that's if the United States struck hundreds of targets. A less powerful Israeli attack could only damage, not destroy, Iran's facilities.

Worse, after such a bombing, the Iranian population -- now skeptical of its leadership -- would probably rally around the regime, ending any internal debates on whether to build a bomb. Iran would put its nuclear program on fast-forward to create weapons to defend itself. It could also counterattack against Israel or other U.S. allies. This month, a top official of Iran's Revolutionary Guard threatened to "blow up the heart of Israel" if the United States or Israel attacks first.

Learning From the 1999 Vote on the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty
by Daryl Kimball, Arms Control Association | October, 2009

There is cause for optimism. The prospects for U.S. ratification are better than they ever have been. Technical developments since 1999 have strengthened the arguments of treaty proponents, and the political alignment in the Senate has changed significantly. One key factor, though certainly not the only one, is that President Barack Obama pledged in his April 5 nuclear weapons speech in Prague that his administration “will immediately and aggressively” pursue U.S. ratification of the CTBT.

The Obama administration, because of its general philosophical bent, seems likely to move toward a more multilateral approach to its space policy. Such a shift would shape the debate on space in the international community.

The flow of comments and questions we’ve fielded show in stark manner how deeply the excesses of some of these armed privateers, numbering tens of thousands at the height of the war in Iraq and now flowing in growing numbers into Afghanistan, have affected the popular and political perceptions of the two wars, in America and elsewhere in the world. Fairly or unfairly – and there is much unfairness, inevitably, in condemning an entire class of individuals because of the brute behavior of the worst among them – the allegations of trigger-happy violence by private security contractors that have marched onto the front pages of newspapers around the world have loaded the very term “contractors” with connotations of arrogance, indiscipline and a contempt for the lives of others.

There is no more visible sign that America is putting the Iraq war behind it than the colossal operation to get its stuff out: 20,000 soldiers, nearly a sixth of the force here, assigned to a logistical effort aimed at dismantling some 300 bases and shipping out 1.5 million pieces of equipment, from tanks to coffee makers.

Here's the bottom line: There may be more time on the Iranian nuclear clock than some analysts had feared. The fuel stock that the Iranians have worked so hard to produce might damage their centrifuges if they try to enrich it into a bomb. Making a deal with Iran to enrich nuclear fuel outside the country makes sense, so long as the international community can monitor where and how it's used -- and learn whether there's a secret stash.