Nuclear physicist and Antiwar.com columnist Gordon Prather explains the efforts of Senators Nunn, Lugar and Domenici to collect the excess fissile material left over from the dismantling of the former USSR’s European based tactical nuclear weapons at the end of the Cold War and how Presidents Clinton and Bush II have thwarted these efforts. Also Pakistan’s nuclear weapons and Iran’s total lack of them.
Physicist James Gordon Prather has served as a policy implementing official for national security-related technical matters in the Federal Energy Agency, the Energy Research and Development Administration, the Department of Energy, the Office of the Secretary of Defense and the Department of the Army. Dr. Prather also served as legislative assistant for national security affairs to U.S. Sen. Henry Bellmon, R-Okla. – ranking member of the Senate Budget Committee and member of the Senate Energy Committee and Appropriations Committee. Dr. Prather had earlier worked as a nuclear weapons physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California and Sandia National Laboratory in New Mexico.