Cheney: Nuclear attack 'a very real threat'

By Mark Silva | Chicago Tribune • Published April 16, 2007

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WASHINGTON - Vice President Dick Cheney, often called upon to deliver the administration's toughest talk about the wars abroad, now says this about the threat of terrorists detonating a nuclear bomb in a U.S. city: "It's a very real threat ... something that we have to worry about and defeat every single day."

Cheney's warning about what he thinks is at stake for the United States if it withdraws from Iraq - delivered in a television interview Sunday and coupled with a speech in Chicago on Friday and a war statement that President Bush plans to make today - is part of an escalating chorus of pressure that the White House hopes to exert on Democrats to approve a new war-spending bill.

Vowing to veto any spending bill that includes a timeline for withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq, the Bush administration believes it ultimately will win a "clean" bill - predicting that Democratic leaders will buckle after Bush vetoes their bill.

"I'm willing to bet" the Democrats eventually will concede, Cheney said on CBS News' "Face the Nation."

"If they don't have the votes to override the president's veto ... they will not leave the troops in the field without the resources they need to be able to carry out their mission," Cheney said. "There may be some people who are so irresponsible that they wouldn't support that, but I think the fact of the matter is that the majority of Democrats ... will in fact give us the bill that's absolutely essential."

Cheney, who accused Democratic leaders of reverting to an "early 1970s" sense of "abandonment and retreat" in his speech Friday to the Heritage Foundation in Chicago, said in his CBS interview that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., has taken an "irresponsible" stance in insisting upon attaching an autumn 2008 timeline for withdrawal to the war spending bill.

"He's done a complete 180 from where he was, in five months," Cheney said of Reid. "He cannot make the basic fundamental decisions that have to be made, with respect to the nation's security, given everything that's at stake in the war on terror and what we're doing in Iraq and with 140,000 American troops in the field in Iraq, in combat, every day, and call that kind of rapid change in position anything other than

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