Bush Seeks Nuke Crackdown

President Calls For Strict Controls On Potential Weapons Material

(CBS/AP)  President Bush, pointing to the recent disclosure of an extensive black market weapons network led by the father of Pakistan's nuclear bomb, said Wednesday that no new countries should be allowed to possess the ability to enrich or process nuclear material.

He argued that international efforts to combat the spread of weapons of mass destruction have been neither broad nor effective enough and require tougher action from all nations.

"The greatest threat before humanity today is the possibility of secret and sudden attack with chemical or biological or radiological or nuclear weapons," Bush said.

"We must confront the danger with open eyes and unbending purpose," he said in a speech at the National Defense University. "I've made clear to all the policy of this nation: America will not permit the terrorists and dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world's most deadly weapons."

His call to prevent countries from acquiring the equipment and technology to enrich uranium and reprocess spent fuel for plutonium -- even if the stated intent is to build civilian power facilities — was likely to anger Iran and North Korea and the countries that have supplied them.

Bush for the first time publicly accused Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan's network of supplying to North Korea the centrifuge technology that is needed to make highly enriched uranium for nuclear weapons. The administration previously had said that it believed Khan's network was supplying weapons technology to North Korea, Libya and Iran but had not specified what.

The administration and North Korea are locked in a dispute over whether the Koreans are trying to develop nuclear weapons using highly enriched uranium. North Korea has acknowledged building nuclear weapons using plutonium but denies it is trying to build a weapon with highly enriched uranium — a key dispute as the two nations head into talks later this month with four other countries, including China.

With the president still being criticized over whether Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, he also used the speech to outline the role that good U.S. intelligence has played in the ongoing dismantlement of Khan's network, as well as Libya's commitment last December to give up its weapons of mass destruction programs.

He gave much of the credit for Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf's action against Khan to the groundwork laid over several years by U.S. intelligence.

"We will find the middlemen, the suppliers and the buyers," Bush said. "Our message to proliferators must be consistent and it must be clear: We will find you, and we're not going to rest until you are stopped."

Bush singled out the U.N.'s nuclear watchdog organization, the International Atomic Energy Agency, for criticism, calling for the creation of a special committee to focus on safeguards and verification and to ensure that nations comply with international obligations.

He also complained that nations such as Iran, which has been under investigation for proliferation, has been allowed to sit on the IAEA board of governors. "Those actively breaking the rules should not be entrusted with enforcing the rules," the president said.

The agency is seen as ineffective by many in the Bush administration who cite the agency's failure to stop weapons programs in Libya, North Korea and other countries.

The president also urged other countries to step up funding for programs aimed at securing vulnerable nuclear arsenals in Russia and other former Soviet-bloc nations, and called for an expansion of similar efforts elsewhere in the world — though he made no mention of any additional U.S. funding. Democrats have criticized the Bush administration for underfunding the program, both in Russia and beyond.

And the president renewed his call, first made before the U.N. General Assembly last fall, for a new Security Council resolution demanding that all U.N. members enact stricter export controls and criminalize weapons proliferation.

"President Bush's latest initiative to stop the spread of nuclear weapons faces two hurdles: the view in the international community that Washington pursues a go-it-alone strategy, and a 'boy who cried wolf' credibility problem," says CBS News Foreign Affairs Analyst Pamela Falk.

"Clearly, much is at stake. The President is understandably focused on external threats. If al Qaeda could obtain nuclear weapons or if North Korea or Iran continue to develop nuclear programs, the world would once again have to brace itself for a nuclear showdown," says Falk.

"There is intense pressure on the White House to try to bring the United Nations into this initiative," Falk says. "And, as we know from the 'boy who cried wolf story,' when there is a real and imminent threat, it is important that others believe it."

The president also announced that three new countries — Canada, Singapore and Norwary — are joining the 11 now involved in his Proliferation Security Initiative, which aims to interdict shipments of weapons of mass destruction.

"There is a consensus among nations that proliferation cannot be tolerated. Yet, this consensus means little, unless it is translated into action," Bush said. "Every civilized nation has a stake in preventing the spread of weapons of mass destruction."