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And only the federal government is both empowered and equipped to face this challenge.
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Article I, Sections 8, 9 and 10, and Article II, Section 2 of the United States Constitution lay the responsibility for the defense of the United States on the Congress and Executive of the federal government of United States.1 In our modern world, there can be no graver threat to the United States than nuclear attack, and there is no more likely source of nuclear attack than nuclear terrorism.
While the recent foreign policy efforts of the United States to achieve security for itself and the rest of the world have met with, at best, mixed success, the foreign policy efforts of international bodies have met with no success at all. Direct negotiation with the United States and the United Kingdom resulted in the dismantlement of Libya's clandestine nuclear program in 2003, a program which had flourished despite U.N. sanctions and International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) supervision.2 By contrast, U.N. and IAEA efforts have made no progress in halting nuclear programs by the Islamic Republic of Iran or the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. 3
Indeed, the failed history of U.N. missions in Somalia (1993), Rwanda (1994), Srbenica (1995), the Congo (1998-2002), and Sudan (ongoing), indicate that without the participation and leadership of the United States, the international community is not capable of offering security guarantees. 4
As the nation that currently holds the world's greatest military and economic power, and is the stated target of international terrorist organizations, the United States must take on primary responsibility for the prevention of nuclear terrorism.
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1 Furthermore, the non-delegation doctrine states that as an enumerated power of the federal government, this responsibility can not be delegated to a state or international body.
2 "Libya's Nuclear Update - 2004," The Risk Report, vol. 10, no. 2 (Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control, March-April 2004).
3 The International Atomic Energy Agency ("IAEA") has famously failed to detect the nuclear weapons programs of Iraq (1981), Libya (2003), North Korea (1993), and the A.Q. Kahn nuclear arms proliferation network, which operated from 1987 - 2003. While the 2008 United States National Intelligence Estimate believes Iran to have ceased its clandestine "active" weaponization research in 2003, although as documented herein, weaponization of a critical mass of fissile material is relatively trivial and Iranian enrichment of fissile material continues at the present time. Perhaps more worryingly, the current director of the IAEA, Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei, seems at times through both actions and words to be less than committed to the non-proliferation principles of Articles I - III of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty ("NPT"). In a statement to the Carnegie International Non-Proliferation Conference in June 2004, Dr. ElBaradei stated that "it is hard to understand how we can continue to ask the nuclear 'have-nots' to accept additional non-proliferation obligations - and to renounce any sensitive nuclear capability as being adverse to their security." While Dr. ElBaradei's comments were made in the larger context of overall nuclear disarmement (as stipulated by Article VI of the NPT), we believe it is concerning for these statements to be made by the director of an agency charged principally with ensuring compliance with the non-proliferation articles (I-III) of the NPT, particularly in the context of an apparently less-than-vigorous IAEA approach towards Iran's nucelar program.
4 Although a RAND Corporation study, "The UN's Role in Nation-Building" notes a high percentage of favorable outcomes of UN peace-keeping interventions, it concedes that only one such intervention could be categorized as "peace-making" rather than "peace-keeping." The intervention in question was in the Congo in 1960 and culminated in a 30-year dictatorship characterized as one of the most dictatorial and corrupt in Africa.
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