I was born in 1960, so a good portion of my life I've had to deal with the idea of global nuclear war.  While the threat of that has thankfully diminished with the break-up of the old USSR, I, like Obama, still worry about terrorists and rogue states taking out a city or 2. That threat is real, although I think Obama pushed it a little harder than reality demands.

     I honestly believe that we are past the point of any of the major nuclear powers engaging in an all out nuke war. But we do still need to worry about extremists and "rogue" countries like North Korea. Thankfully NK is kept in check by their ties to China right now, China has no interest in nuking their trade partners and I'm sure they have made that clear to Kim.  Iran, I am not that worried about even though it would be somewhat destabilizing in the Mideast, there is always Israel to counteract that. Iran would take many years to match Israel's estimated capability of 50-60 nukes.

      Terrorists on the other hand don't have to deal with the threat of retribution.  They don't have cities that we can threaten, and they don't honestly care who dies as long as they can make a big splash on the news for their cause and it is really not that hard to build a basic fission bomb, as any competent physicist could build one given the material.  As much as we would like to believe that al'Qaeda and like minded groups are a bunch of peasants hiding in caves, that is not true, they have a lot of very smart people working for them, all it takes is one physicist who believes as they do.

     Which brings me back to the material.  It honestly scares me how much weapons grade plutonium and uranium went missing after the breakup of the USSR. Hell, they've lost track of some of their tactical nukes by some reports.  The agreement that we have been told of today helps to keep the material we know of safer, but really doesn't address the stuff that is already missing.

      Several things bother me about this summit though, first and foremost, the virtual press blackout on it. I've read way too many complaints from the press about this, and I agree with them.  While I understand the need for security with so many heads of state in one place, it seems to me that properly cleared press should not have been excluded.  It makes one wonder just what they were talking about that couldn't be covered.

The other thing that bothers me is not properly recognizing Israel as a nuclear state. Come on, we've all known that Israel has had nukes for years, made from material from the United States, so isn't it time we all acknowledge it?

   Are we any safer from this summit? Who knows.  However, with the new START treaty and agreement that came out of this summit to keep better control of weapons grade material, I'd say yes. Not a lot safer, but the agreement to keep more control over the material is good, and anything that reduces the bombs that the major powers have is good. I like my planet and really don't want to see it wasted.

      As someone who lived 30 years of their life aware of the possibility of global nuclear war, I am very happy to say that I no longer worry about that, but I really don't want to wake up one morning, as I did on 9/11, to see that a city is gone instead of just a couple buildings.

      My fear is not backpack nukes or anything like that, those are pretty hard to make.  My fear is a crude bomb in a cargo container.  We can't even stop drugs coming in that way, so how could we stop something like that?  We can't really. If they are smart, which they are, it would be well shielded and legally covered, And a cargo container can be delivered anywhere.   

       We can't ever put the nuclear genie back in the bottle. We will never have a nuclear free world, but we can hopefully control it to some extent. Once something is known to be possible, it can be duplicated. We can't just ignore it or wish it away.  Even if we (I'm talking everyone who has them currently) got rid of all of our warheads, the tech is still out there. Building a bomb is basic physics when you come down to it, once people know a thing is possible...they will use it, and we know it is possible.

   All in all I think we got some good things out of the summit, I just would have wanted a bit more transparency to the whole thing.



My 2cp.......