September 23, 2002 By MICHAEL LEVI WASHINGTON President Bush wisely warns of the danger posed by a nuclear-armed Iraq, but he remains unevenly engaged in other efforts that would stem the spread of nuclear weapons. Saddam Hussein's nuclear potential has been repeatedly cited by the administration as the one unassailable reason why the American people should support an invasion of Iraq. Yet ours is a dangerous stance: If we remove the threat of Saddam Hussein while leaving the rest of our nonproliferation policy unchanged, we will achieve only a marginal improvement in our security against nuclear terror. To make an invasion of Iraq worthwhile, a new investment in nuclear security is urgently needed. Leading experts and many in the intelligence community agree that Saddam Hussein still needs several years to produce enough highly enriched uranium for a nuclear bomb. Thus, when Vice President Dick Cheney warned that Iraq could quickly obtain nuclear weapons, he could only have been referring to one thing: Iraq might acquire the crucial fissile material it needs abroad, through theft or on the black market. How much security can we buy by merely removing one customer for this supply? Certainly, Saddam Hussein's nuclear potential is greater than that posed by terrorists working without state support. Intelligence reports suggest that Iraq has the implosion technology needed to make a bomb from 20 kilograms of highly enriched uranium. Al Qaeda, for example, probably does not have such technology and would need three times as much for the simple Hiroshima-type weapon it could master. Other sources indicate Iraq could make a bomb from plutonium; terrorist groups like Al Qaeda most likely could not. For these reasons, Iraq poses a special threat. That said, our current effort, focused narrowly on Iraq, is woefully inadequate for reducing the nuclear threat. The same uranium Iraq seeks abroad might be bought by terrorists and fashioned into bombs. A terrorist group like Al Qaeda, if it were to obtain a nuclear weapon, would be more likely than Iraq to use it. And yet our responsibilities in securing nuclear materials are being ignored. A month ago, Ted Turner and the Nuclear Threat Initiative had to pitch in $5 million to evacuate two bomb's worth of poorly secured uranium from Belgrade. House Republicans are pushing for a provision in next year's defense bill that would block the president from spending nonproliferation money outside the former Soviet Union. Over a year ago, a bipartisan commission chaired by Howard H. Baker Jr. and Lloyd N. Cutler urged that we spend $30 billion over the next 10 years to secure nuclear materials in Russia; at our current spending rate of $1.1 billion per year, we will fall miserably short. Despite inadequate funding, our programs have been very successful. We have secured the uranium that might have made thousands of bombs and we have kept numerous Russian nuclear scientists from going to work for rogue regimes. A new investment in nonproliferation would help convince a skeptical world that we're serious about nuclear proliferation - that our obsession with Iraq is about weapons of mass destruction, not domestic politics or oil or revenge. An extra billion dollars spent on nonproliferation would be a tiny fraction of the cost of war in Iraq. If nuclear terrorism visits America, will it be any consolation that the bomb was not Saddam Hussein's? Michael Levi is director of the Federation of American Scientists' Strategic Security Project Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company