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The political scientist John Mueller, the Woody Hayes Chair of National Security Studies at the Ohio State University, has written "Atomic Obsession: Nuclear Alarmism from Hiroshima to Al-Qaeda," and his thesis is that the world's magical thinking and alarmism about nuclear energy and nuclear weapons has significantly distorted policy making and threatens to leave the United States more vulnerable to more pressing threats. Mueller's opinions are not shared by most of his colleagues, but they are taken seriously -- he's not a provocateur. I asked Mueller this morning to put the news about Iran in the context of his theories.  How much of a threat is Iran's proliferation? How much of a threat is the West's obsession with Iran's proliferation?

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Here is a story from the Washington Post and Pro Publica that reports the facts faithfully but does not, I believe, come to the correct conclusion. The essence of the article is that Greg Craig, the White House counsel, is taking the blame for the Guantanamo closing and the messiness that resulted from it, and that the administration took away Gitmo from his portfolio, and that Craig may be, ah, promoted out of the White House to a job on the federal bench or become an ambassador.

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The Obama administration's new state secrets privilege policy makes it harder, in theory, for the Justice Department to invoke the doctrine, while leaving the privilege intact -- and, in a way, fortifying it for use in the future. So far, the loudest objection to the policy, which was announced this morning, is that the administration refuses to apply the new rules to ongoing or legacy litigation, which leaves them defending assertions of the privilege that don't meet their current standards.

According to policy analysts, the biggest change is the department's voluntary decision to adopt a "significant harm" standard for each privilege assertion. Current case law provides little guidance here, which has given implicit permission to the executive branch to invoke the privilege when the harm to national security would be only slight. In practice, if the administration sticks to its guns, the number of future cases that involve an assertion of the privilege would decline significantly.

"It's a matter of emphasis and policy means, not a fixed rule," a senior Justice Department official who drafted the policy acknowledged in an interview. The official agreed to discuss the application of the privilege and provided new details on the condition of anonymity. A White House spokesman said President Obama has reviewed and endorsed the new guidelines.

During the presidential campaign and in April of 2009, Obama said the privilege ought to be "modified."  I think it is appropriate to say that there are going to be cases in which national security interests are genuinely at stake and that you can't litigate without revealing covert activities or classified information that would genuinely compromise our safety.

But searching for ways to redact, to carve out certain cases, to see what can be done so that a judge in chambers can review information without it being in open court, you know, there should be some additional tools so that it's not such a blunt instrument.

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Taking his turn before the United Nations General Assembly meeting today, President Obama will urge countries not to use America's past penchant for "acting alone in the world" as an excuse to avoid getting their hands dirty.

"Those who used to chastise America for acting alone in the world cannot now stand by and wait for America to solve the world's problems alone. We have sought - in word and deed - a new era of engagement with the world. Now is the time for all of us to take our share of responsibility for a global response to global challenges," he plans to say, in excerpts distributed by the White House.

"If we are honest with ourselves, we need to admit that we are not living up to that responsibility. Consider the course that we are on if we fail to confront the status quo. Extremists sowing terror in pockets of the world. Protracted conflicts that grind on and on. Genocide and mass atrocities. More and more nations with nuclear weapons. Melting ice caps and ravaged populations. Persistent poverty and pandemic disease. I say this not to sow fear, but to state a fact: the magnitude of our challenges has yet to be met by the measure of our action."

Within the next two weeks, as National Cyber Security Awareness Month begins, the White House is finally expected to name its executive cyber security coordinator, and former assistant secretary of defense Frank Kramer is the leading candidate. One of Kramer's selling points is that he sees a public debate about cyber security as urgent and necessary. The communications challenge he faces is, in some ways, the same old story: when it comes to homeland security, we do a poor job of estimating risk. Where DHS spent $50 billion since its inception on Project BioShield, which stockpiles medicines in the event of an improbably widespread biological terrorism event, it has spent about $80 million on cyber security, even though cyber security breaches happen regularly, and are regularly damaging. It's a fairly large miscalculation, one that has shaped policy and the public's response to it. Since the beginning of the administration, there have been more than 100 confirmed cyber attacks on major American corporate and government interests.

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