Nuclear reality

Every day I check the news for nuclear Armageddon. Not like an on-edge, paranoid Midwesterner worried the terrorists will strike any minute, but more like someone who looks at his watch every few seconds because the train is late.

I am convinced that one day in my lifetime I will go onto CNN.com and read that a nuclear bomb has exploded in Manhattan. New York City will be obliterated, my friends and family members will be vaporized with millions of others, Midtown will become a desolate, smoldering nothing.

And when it happens, I will not cry. To be sure, I'll be upset, but crying is something I can only do if an event truly takes me by shock. When my grandfather died, for instance, I cried. When the Mets lost to the Yankees in the 2000 Word Series, I cried.

But New York decimated by nuclear terrorism -- it seems almost silly at this point to be surprised by it. In the last election, there were few things Bush and Kerry agreed on, but they were equally right when they identified nuclear proliferation as the number one threat today to American safety.

According to intelligence officials, there is a significant amount of nuclear material missing -- missing! -- from nuclear facilities in Russia. The CIA says it has no idea who has them, and no one, not even the Russians, knows how much is gone because the Soviets never had an efficient inventory system. As one former official told ABC News, there could be enough to make tens, hundreds or thousands of nuclear weapons, if the materials were sold into the right hands.

The bottom line, of course, is that one nuclear weapon unaccounted for is one too many. President Bush understands this, but North Korea and Iran continue to get all the government's (and the press's) attention. For all I know, Bush has his top-secret forces working the problem and everything is fine. But I have trouble believing life really works like it does in Ben Affleck movies, especially when our borders aren't nearly as secure as they should be, and political bureaucracy trumps any actual progress.

In the real world, Bush is failing to live up to his seven initiatives to fight nuclear proliferation. The president said he wanted to expand on the Nunn-Lugar legislation to help dismantle, destroy, and secure weapons and materials left over from the Soviet Union. But for this year's budget, Bush proposed a near 10 percent cut for Nunn-Lugar, and the U.S. continues to spend less than .25 percent of its defense budget on WMD reduction. That's the fraction of my own budget I spend on toothpaste each semester.

Ultimately, it flat-out baffles me why more people aren't screaming about the possibility for nuclear disaster. I'm not asking for widespread panic, nor do I think every terrorist out there has a ziplock bag of plutonium, but I'd rather be over-concerned and wrong than apathetic and right. In 2002, the G8 countries pledged $20 billion over the next 10 years to keeping nukes from the hands of terrorists, but even the international community seems to not care. According to one center for international studies, only a "tiny fraction" of those funds have been released and little is being done.

Back in the states, there are plenty of good ideas to go around and seemingly no good men to lead them. To be sure, if non-proliferation is going to succeed, the United States needs to be at the forefront. In another initiative, it's trying, but again has no sense of direction or urgency. In 2003, Bush created the Proliferation Security Initiative, a U.S.-led effort to stop the movement of banned weapons and weapon technology. Great idea, and last year he made a big point of expanding PSI, but the project has no power or international jurisdiction and only recently started doing practice drills.

Plus, the state department has a bureau of non-proliferation, but alas, it has little role in PSI. Good to know we've learned from the ineffectiveness of the CIA and FEMA.

I do not want to sound like a doomsayer, but bad people find ways to triumph, and perhaps I am just frustrated that it will take millions of innocent deaths, and the destruction of a city I love, before we can start to correct our mistakes. And even then, nothing will change. We're partly in this situation because people with power, with nuclear weapons, will entrench themselves to keep that power. The U.S. won't give up its own nukes, but somehow it must police others. Double standards are rarely effective.

So when you turn on FOX and New York is in ruins, go ahead and cry, as long as you're crying for our ignorance.