| Publication |
2009.
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| Summary/Abstract |
In the initial weeks of the Obama administration, former Vice President Dick Cheney stated that there was a "high probability" of a terrorist attempt to use a nuclear weapon or biological agent and that "whether they can pull it off depends on what kind of policies we put in place." President Barack Obama, in his April 5 Prague speech, said that terrorists "are determined to buy, build, or steal" a nuclear weapon and that the international community must work "without delay" to ensure that they never acquire one. Obama also outlined a number of policies for locking down vulnerable nuclear material and strengthening the nuclear nonproliferation regime.
If both Cheney and Obama are right, that the threat is real and we are in a race against time, then the new administration needs to act quickly to adapt its nuclear and biological proliferation prevention strategies and threat reduction programs to combat this 21st-century challenge. This effort will require significantly increasing programmatic budgets, creating a robust globalized agenda, harmonizing U.S. government and international programs, removing bureaucratic and legal impediments to action, and utilizing new tools to defeat the new threats. The Obama administration needs to create a next-generation Global Proliferation Prevention Initiative.
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