Valerie Plame, the former covert CIA officer outed by the Bush Administration in retaliation for her husband Ambassador Joe Wilson’s public criticism of the faulty intelligence disseminated by Vice President Cheney’s office, participated in an April 1 panel discussion on Chris Matthews’ Hardball of Donald Trump’s statements this week on nuclear weapons. The complete episode is available on MSNBC’s website.
Plame, invited as an expert on nuclear nonproliferation, properly described Trump’s uninformed comments on the US use of nuclear weapons and suggestion that Japan and Korea develop their own nuclear military capabilities as “unbelievable”. However, in decrying the lack of discussion of nuclear nonproliferation in the 2016 presidential campaign, she singled out Bernie Sanders and his “tens of thousands” of college supporters. Derisively suggesting they were attracted by the promise of free tuition, she claimed that they “only had the vague notion that perhaps to end WWII we dropped the bomb on Japan”.
Plame and Wilson, both rabid Hillary Clinton supporters when she went up against Barack Obama in 2008, jointly renewed their fealty last year in a long piece in USA Today. Their attachment to Hillary (and perhaps the hope of appointment to positions in a second Clinton Administration) was probably at the root of this gratuitous slap at Bernie Sanders’ youthful supporters. Of course, Plame did not address the level of nonproliferation awareness or interest on the part of Hillary Clinton’s own young backers. She also failed to mention that, with the exception of a brief reference to the Iran nuclear deal negotiated by Secretary of State John Kerry, there is no mention of nuclear nonproliferation on HRC’s campaign website issue paper on National Security!