"We will not permit the world's most dangerous regimes and terrorists to threaten us with the world's most destructive weapons." Thus George Bush after the September nth attacks, promising to face down the threat from the spread of weapons of mass destruction. In the coming flurry of American-European meetings, Mr Bush will be pressing hard for curbs on proliferation to be treated as an epoch-shaping issue, alongside stability in Iraq and the spread of democracy in the Middle East. The message is filtering through in surprising places. It helped convince Libya last December to speed its exit out of the illicit mass-destruction business. The alarming tales that have since emerged of the wholesale auctioning off of Pakistan's nuclear technologies, not just to Libya, but to North Korea, Iran and possibly others, led the UN Security Council to pass a resolution obliging all governments to criminalise illicit weapons and technology transfers. This was done at Mr Bush's urging. Yet despite these diplomatic successes, and the money being spent on securing "loose nukes" (see box on next page), Bush strategy still has plenty of critics.
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