President Obama has fallen under attack from the Republican National Committee and the GOP presidential candidates after a live microphone picked up a private conversation in which he asked Russian President Dmitry Medvedev for “space” and “patience” on the missile defense issue until after November’s election.

Today, Obama hit back at his critics. “I think everybody understands — if they don’t, they haven’t been listening to my speeches — that I want to reduce nuclear stockpiles,” Obama said today. “And one of the barriers to doing that is building trust and cooperation around missile defense issues. And so this is not a matter of hiding the ball,” said Obama, in remarks delivered on the final day of the nuclear security summit in South Korea.

Obama took on his critics’ charges that his comments to Medvedev showed weakness on nuclear security and pointed to the political realities of the campaign season as severely limiting his ability to move forward on major policy initiatives, telling reporters:

[T]he only way I get this stuff done is if I’m consulting with the Pentagon, with Congress, if I’ve got bipartisan support, and frankly, the current environment is not conducive to those kinds of thoughtful consultations.

I think the stories you guys have been writing over the last 24 hours [about the open mic incident] is pretty good evidence of that.

Yet the GOP will try to make something out of Obama’s rather innocuous comments. Hours after Obama’s exchange with Medvedev, the Republican National Committee produced a new video asking “what else is on Obama’s agenda after the election that he isn’t telling you?” and Mitt Romney said of Obama and his open mic comments, “I don’t think he can recover from it, to tell you the truth.”

In an amazing column today, Charles Krauthammer – the great sage of neoconservatism – exposed the far-right’s shockingly naive and negligent approach toward the most urgent and dangerous threat in the post Cold War era: nuclear terrorism.

Krauthammer sarcastically dismisses the widely praised Nuclear Security Summit:

What was this great convocation about? To prevent the spread of nuclear material into the hands of terrorists. A worthy goal, no doubt. Unfortunately, the two greatest such threats were not even on the agenda. The first is Iran, which is frantically enriching uranium to make a bomb, and which our own State Department identifies as the greatest exporter of terrorism in the world. Nor on the agenda was Pakistan’s plutonium production, which is adding to the world’s stockpile of fissile material every day… So what was the major breakthrough announced by Obama at the end of the two-day conference? That Ukraine, Chile, Mexico and Canada will be getting rid of various amounts of enriched uranium. What a relief.

There are a few things to unpack.

First, Krauthammer doesn’t understand the threat of nuclear terrorism. To Krauthammer, and to the neoconservative right, the threat of nuclear terrorism is almost exclusively seen as coming from a “state sponsor.” As a result, he can’t comprehend what the summit was about, or what it achieved, because to Krauthammer all nuclear terror discussion basically begin and end with Iran, not the mundane task of securing loose nuclear materials.

But the most significant nuclear terror threat does not emanate from a state giving nuclear weapons to a terror group. Nuclear terrorism is frighteningly more straightforward than conservatives seem to get. Al Qaeda doesn’t need Iran to get a nuke, the need to find a “Nick the Greek.”

Nuclear materials are floating around on the black market, especially in the former eastern bloc. Criminal elements have bought off guards acquired materials and then sought to sell them. Once nuclear materials are acquired, you just box it up and ship it to the US – likely in kitty litter, which further prevents detectors from catching it. Once at the destination, it gets a little more complicated, but a few capable people with a decent science background and an internet connection could fairly easily acquire the materials to build a Hiroshima-like device, which then could be exploded at a city of their chosing.

Yet, in a Fox News interview this week Krauthammer asserted that the summit was “all about changing the subject.” This summit wasn’t changing the subject, this IS the subject.

Secondly, Krauthammer’s column exposes that the neoconservative right has no idea how to address the problem of nuclear terrorism. Part of the reason why nuclear terrorism remains firmly in the right’s blind spot, is because securing loose nuclear materials cannot be done unilaterally. Instead, it requires multilateralism.

It requires getting countries to do more to eliminate or lock down nuclear materials. As David Hoffman said this “is not rocket science.” This is also why Graham Allison called nuclear terror the “ultimate preventable catastrophe.” Yet despite the windfall of global support after 9-11 the Bush administration never made this topic a global priority or led a concerted global effort to solve this problem. Instead, it festered and grew more likely, according to a bipartisan commission.
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The holding of a Nuclear Security Summit on the scale of the gathering that created the United Nations, is an event that should have happened immediately after 9-11, almost a decade ago. Despite claims that such a summit would merely be a talking shop, the fact is that tangible and far-reaching results were achieved.

Bilateral deals were struck with the Ukraine, Chile, Canada, Mexico — all agreeing to give up their stockpiles of highly-enriched uranium. Furthermore, Russia agreed to eliminate 68 tons of weapon grade plutonium, enough for 17,000 nuclear weapons. Other countries agreed to additional steps to improve port security and to address nuclear trafficking.

Additionally, the final communique from the summit achieves a consensus on the dangers of nuclear terrorism and it gets nations to make commitments to secure all their vulnerable nuclear materials within four years. Importantly, it lays out a “work plan” for countries to follow and to ensure countries live up to these pledges, South Korea will hold a follow-up nuclear summit in two years to put pressure on countries to follow through.

This is a monumental first step, a step that should have been taken nine years ago. Graham Allison has called nuclear terrorism the “ultimate preventable catastrophe.” This is because the way Al Qaeda would develop a nuclear bomb is by stealing or buying weapons-grade uranium or plutonium and these materials can be locked down and eliminated if all countries that possessed these materials made the effort. Yet, until this Nuclear Security Summit, a far-reaching effort, despite the devastating terror attacks after 9-11, was not made. The question is why wasn’t it?

The Bush administration inexplicably failed to aggressively prioritize nuclear security. Following the 9-11 attacks, the United States had a unique opportunity where it had the overwhelming support of almost every nation in the world to push for aggressive multilateral action on this front. Yet this moment not only was not seized, but was quickly squandered through the invasion of Iraq. Instead, of focusing on the real and present nuclear danger of a nuclear terrorist attack, the Bush administration manufactured a nuclear threat and took the United States to war to remove nuclear weapons from a regime that had none.

Fundamentally, advancing nuclear security requires a concerted multilateral effort. The US cannot unilaterally eliminate or secure nuclear materials. Instead, it requires US global leadership in order to convince countries to treat this issue as a major global priority. Yet the Bush administration’s approach was built around unilateralism — whether that was the creation of a “coalition of the willing” in Iraq or by sending UN hater John Bolton to be America’s ambassador to the world. Thus nuclear security was an issue that the Bush administration was not ideologically built to tackle.

As a result, years have gone by, more nuclear materials have gone missing, and the dangers of nuclear attack against the United States has grown.