The Democratic controlled Congress should let it be known that any promises, agreements, and changes in regulations the Bush Administration is rushing to dish out in its waning days will be subject to review after the elections. American and foreign special interests should be warned that they would be unwise to take these deals as firm, given the ways in which they were struck -- without proper hearings, Congressional consultation, and above all, public notice. This hold true for all deals, but especially the particularly harmful ones concerning the proliferation of nuclear materials.

Recently, the Washington Post reported that the Bush Administration is preparing to formalize a deal which would allow Plum Creek Timber Co, the nation's largest private landowner, to convert hundreds of thousands of acres of forestland in Montana into residential subdivisions. The deal was made behind closed doors between the Undersecretary for Natural Resources and the Environment and Plum Creek Timber, and neither local officials in the region nor the public were granted an opportunity to have a say in the matter. In the words of Pat O'Herren, an official in Missoula County, Montana,"...40 years of Forest Service history that has been reversed in the last three months," without even standard environmental assessments.

Similarly, the New York Times recently reported that Bush Administration appointees are preparing to propose a number of regulatory changes to securities rules, changes which critics say would dilute measures put in place after the Enron scandal erupted in order to forestall accounting gimmicks and corrupt practices.

The harm to the public perpetuated by these two deals, and many others like them, pale in comparison to the damage to national security the Bush team is causing with the nuclear deals it is promoting. The fact that some of these deals have been in the making for a longer time does not make them more benign. They all concern what Professor Nina Tannenwald, in her excellent book on the subject, called "the nuclear taboo." For decades, those committed to preventing a nuclear conflagration have advocated a norm that called on nations that have nuclear arms to gradually scale them back until they are all removed and which urged all other nations not to acquire these weapons of mass destruction. The taboo against these horrible arms has been quite effective. Several nations that started down this road reversed course and folded their nuclear plans. Others decided not to even set out in this way.

Now comes the Bush Administration, and as a favor to various American corporations, it is promoting the sale of nuclear technologies to Russian corporations, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain. This is despite the fact that Russia is helping Iran to build its nuclear facilities. One may say that these facilities are meant to be used for peaceful purposes, above all to generate energy. However, once a nation has a nuclear capability, it can greatly benefit from it to develop a nuclear military capacity. Even if such a nation signs the NPT, and opens itself to inspection, it can notify the other parties to the treaty and the UN Security Council that it is quitting, and do so quite legally as long as it gives a three month advance notice--taking its nuclear plants with it. This is basically what North Korea did. And, as the deal the Bush Administration is promoting with India shows, helping the civilian nuclear industry allows India to shift the uranium it already has to its military facility. All in all, these acts by a Bush Administration on it last leg greatly weaken the taboo against nuclear proliferation and pave the way to more nuclear military programs.

Amitai Etzioni is a professor of international relations at the George Washington University. For more discussion, see Security First (Yale 2007). www.securityfirstbook.com To contact him, write comnet@gwu.edu