Let me see. What makes us safer? Invading Iraq or this?
Ukraine announced Monday that it has agreed to give up its highly enriched uranium, at the start of a summit called by President Obama to focus on protecting the world’s stockpiles of nuclear materials from terrorist organizations pursuing the bomb.
The announcement, made by White House press secretary Robert Gibbs, came soon after Obama’s meeting with President Viktor Yanukovych of Ukraine. It was their first face-to-face meeting since Yanukovych’s February inauguration.
Ukraine agreed to give up its roughly 90-kilogram stock of highly enriched uranium by the next Nuclear Security Summit scheduled to be held in the summer of 2012, much of it this year. In addition, Ukraine will convert its research reactors from highly enriched to low-enriched uranium, a complicated engineering task.
Gibbs said the United States has been working to secure the former Soviet state’s highly enriched uranium for a decade, calling Monday’s announcement “just the kind of step we want to see at this summit.” He said the amount is sufficient to make “several nuclear weapons.”
Who’s next?
who knows? though you can be certain it won’t be israel.
and since we’re on the nuclear subject, LIEberman (I-Isr) is still hyping the iranian nuclear ‘threat’ and has now embraced the reichwing myth that the u.s. “nuclear arsenal is deteriorating” and posturing that he won’t support the new START treaty.
why is this man still in the dem caucus?
Reading this I’m reminded of a college house-mate who wanted to join the Border Patrol so he could find out what it was like to actually shoot someone.
This was a Quaker school, btw!
Oh, and yes, he did leave school early and join some branch of the military.
I wonder if he got his wish…
After our last president, I’m still adjusting to Obama’s ability to multitask. (Ah yes, global nuclear disarmament—a nice little side project to work on while going “all in” and passing major health care reform.)
This does reinforce my sense that Obama is who he said he was. Securing loose nukes was one of the first issues he worked on when he got to the US Senate, and clearly he’s continued working on it despite the fact it’s an issue with little or no short-term domestic political upside for him.
A disturbingly large percentage of the right wing has gone around the bend because Obama’s a socialist/fascist/communist/liberal/Kenyan/scary black guy from a big city. A (mercifully smaller) portion of the left is enraged to discover he’s a pragmatic center-left politician who meant what he said about expanding the Afghanistan war, and who offered the most conservative health proposal of the major Democratic candidates in 2008.
I don’t agree with everything Obama is doing. I am, after 8 years of Bush-Cheney, almost ridiculously grateful that we have a president who is not only competent, but one who is skilled, and who treats the public, his allies and his opponents with respect.
Like Medvedev said “He is a Thinker!”
That is such a great compliment! How nice is it to have a ‘Thinker’ for a President?