What had been presented primarily as a counter-proliferation mission has been reconceived as counterterrorism.
For the first time, the strategy makes counter-proliferation the highest priority of nuclear policy makers.
Some of this new soft focus can also be spotted when it comes to counter-proliferation.
One of the trips took place in April 2012 and was led by Joseph DeTrani - a North Korea expert who then headed America's National Counter-Proliferation Center.
In an effort to inquire about certain reports involving Niger, CIA's counter-proliferation experts, on their own initiative, asked an individual with ties to the region to make a visit to see what he could learn.
U.S. diplomats and defense officials have worried the disclosures could undercut the ability of foreign leaders to continue cooperating with Washington on counter-terror and counter-proliferation operations, with Yemen, Pakistan and Afghanistan among those most focused on.
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Unfortunately, President Bush's laudable effort to encourage other industrialized nations to forego this sort of trade would be gravely undermined should some in his Administration succeed in what can only be described as a counter-counter-proliferation initiative.
Next week, more than 40 heads of state convene in Washington for a summit on counter-proliferation, which will lead to efforts at the United Nations to tighten economic sanctions against Iran to choke off its nuclear ambitions.
Will President Bush allow pandering for campaign contributions from such exporters to trump his counter-proliferation agenda and, by so doing, give every other industrial nation political cover to continue their lucrative transfers of potentially deadly technologies?
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The White House has been reassuring the Israeli government, the former senior official told me, that the more limited target list would still serve the goal of counter-proliferation by decapitating the leadership of the Revolutionary Guards, who are believed to have direct control over the nuclear-research program.
It may be purely coincidental, but this example of "whistling past the graveyard" seems all too familiar given the background of the man who has recently been entrusted by Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte with responsibility for running the newly created National Counter-Proliferation Center (NCPC): Ambassador Kenneth Brill.
The problem was compounded by others Negroponte also brought in from State, notably his assigning of the appallingly inadequate former U.S. ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency, Kenneth Brill, as the Director of the Counter-Proliferation Center and of Foggy Bottom "expert" Vann Van Diepen as the National Intelligence Officer for non-proliferation matters.
These include: Ambassador John Negroponte , the Director of National Intelligence, Tom Fingar , his deputy for Analysis and Chairman of the National Intelligence Council, and Ambassador Kenneth Brill , Director of the National Counter-Proliferation Center - a critically important job for which he seems particularly ill-suited by temperament and past track record of reflexive acquiescence to various instances of proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.
Over the past 3 years the Administration has worked day in and day out multilaterally at the UN and elsewhere on critical peace and security issues of great concern to the United States and Israel, including counter-terrorism and non-proliferation.
"There is clearly scope for us to work together, on counter-terrorism, on Afghanistan, on piracy, on non-proliferation, and many other areas as well, " Rasmussen said Monday.
Just when the United States and India were at last warming to each other, India's nuclear-bomb tests three years ago, provoking counter-blasts from Pakistan and blowing a hole through the global anti-proliferation effort, brought on a new chill.
And some LOST member states, including Communist China, insist that the treaty prohibits President Bush's Proliferation Security Initiative - a vital "coalition of the willing" effort to counter the sea-borne spread of weapons of mass destruction to terrorists and their state-sponsors.
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