In the past four years, Mexico has submitted information about more than 74,000 guns seized south of the border that the government suspects were smuggled from the United States. But much of the data is so incomplete as to be useless and has not helped authorities bust the gunrunners who supply the Mexican mafias with their vast armories, officials said.

According to U.S. agents working here, Mexican prosecutors have not made a single major arms trafficking case. [...]

As a pillar of a $1.4 billion aid program to Mexico to fight the surging violence and corrupting power of the drug cartels, the U.S. government announced three years ago that it would provide Mexico with its proprietary eTrace Internet-based system. On Tuesday in Mexico City, U.S. and Mexican officials signed a memorandum of understanding allowing for its full implementation. [...]

But translating the program into Spanish took two years. And since its delivery almost a year ago, only a dozen Mexican agents have been trained to use it.

Efforts to stop money trafficking into Mexico are also reportedly less successful than the government had hoped. National security experts argue the best method to catch drug cartel leaders is to cut off their resources — money and guns — to force them into riskier, more visible ventures.

Drug cartel violence is responsible for more than 28,000 deaths in Mexico since President Felipe Calderón took office three years ago, including brutal mass-killings near the border. It is very difficult to purchase firearms in Mexico, and the Mexican government claims 90 percent of weapons it confiscates come from the U.S., the Post reports. (U.S. law enforcement agents — and gun lobbyists — claim the percentage is actually lower.)

So far, little of the violence in Mexico has spread to the U.S., experts say. But Republican politicians continue to push for tighter border security, claiming spillover violence is a serious threat to safety in southern border states.

Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani of Pakistan and President Barack Obama at the Nuclear Security Summit in Washington on Monday (Xinhua/ZUMApress.com)

Later today, the Washington Nuclear Security Summit will conclude by issuing a communique pledging to concentrate the international mind around President Obama’s goal of securing all separated plutonium and highly enriched uranium within four years, in order to prevent nuclear terrorism. It won’t be released until it’s released, of course. But it’s going to promise dedicated national action by 47 countries participating in the summit, rather than empowering international agencies to take control of each nation’s plutonium or uranium supplies. So what comes after this week’s summit for nuclear security?

[Security1]Enforcement, principally. “The summit is a forcing mechanism,” said Jeffrey Lewis, a nuke expert at the New America Foundation who blogs at Arms Control Wonk. “It causes states to do things for a while.” The communique will make those “things” clearer, but the contours are already taking shape: States will take increasing steps to shore up their legal and regulatory frameworks to keep track of civilian or military nuclear stockpiles. And, especially, they’ll shore up their export controls to ensure government officials keep track of what nuclear materials or components travel across their borders — or, in the case of Malaysia, which didn’t have any before yesterday (though perhaps not because of the summit), they’ll put those controls in place.  That’s crucial for tracking international proliferation: A.Q. Khan, the world’s most notorious proliferator, used Malaysia as a hub for shipping centrifuges to nations like Libya, since they’d drop off the grid once shipped.

In other words, what Lewis calls the “house gifts” that states showed up to the summit presenting are less important to nuclear security than the consistent enforcement of the rules in place for monitoring and controlling the establishment and movement of nuclear material. It’s a bit ironic. The administration is understandably touting the commitments of Chile and Ukraine and Canada at the summit to get rid of thousands of kilograms of highly enriched uranium. (The Canadian government, right now, is trying a group suspects known as the “Toronto 18″ for plotting terror attacks on Canadian nuclear facilities, among other targets.) But after the summit ends and countries won’t show up to Washington bearing pledges, the measure of the summit’s success will be in the actions that governments take to safeguard and reduce the weapons-grade material under their control.

And it will be governments that take those steps, with international entities in supporting roles at best. Gary Samore, the National Security Council director with the portfolio for nuclear weapons and proliferation policy, clarified during a Friday conference call that the urgency of the timeline for securing nuclear materials meant working within the “sovereign responsibility” that governments continue to insist holds for all matters nuclear. “If we were to spend a lot of time trying to construct a new international architecture, I think it might actually have the unintended effect of really diverting us from taking the practical measures that we want to take in the near term,” Samore said.

That raised the question of whether steps governments take would really stop the next A.Q. Khan, a Pakistani national hero whom the Pakistanis placed under house arrest after his proliferation network was disclosed, allowing no international access to him. Lewis said strengthening nations’ export controls would probably represent the most important step against international proliferation. “Until we really clamp down, and get, first of all, universal national establishment of export controls and then, second, get countries to actually enforce the export controls they,” he said, “we’re not really going to know how much of a problem we have here.”

Then there’s the task of getting nations to broach subjects the summit neglected for fear of bursting the consensus. “Missing from this discussion is the importance of further production of separated plutonium or highly enriched uranium,” said Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association. “The French were particularly unhelpful in getting that idea or that principle into the discussion, because they believe that reprocessing of nuclear fuel is important for their energy strategy. But it is also a major proliferation problem.”

Not that Kimball believes that the first-ever nuclear security summit needed to address every crucial proliferation or security issue all at once. “What we’re talking about here is a summit that is attempting to focus international attention on this aspect of the nuclear problem in a way that hasn’t ever been done before,” he said. “The United States has reminded other countries that there are other fora to discuss these issues [like] Iran’s safeguards violations, Israel’s non-[Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty] status, nuclear disarmament progress.”

There will be another nuclear security summit in 2012, both to measure nations’ progress in enforcement and, administration officials hope, to expand the aperture of what’s possible in the nuclear-security field. But immediately after the summit concludes, the nuclear issue will remain the subject of high-level international attention. The Obama administration, now equipped with the acquiescence of the Chinese, will present a sanctions package to the United Nations Security Council to raise the cost of illicit Iranian nuclear enrichment within weeks. In May, nations will reconvene to strengthen the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, the cornerstone of international security. Ben Rhodes, the National Security Council’s director of strategic communications, told reporters Friday that among the summit’s goals was to “provide momentum going forward” for a nuclear-security agenda.

For Lewis, the fact that the terms of the debate are about nuclear security and no longer about military applications of nuclear weapons is vaguely surreal. “It used to be about deterrence, deterrence and then, as a distant third, deterrence,” he said. “All this other stuff was the province of people who wanted to mess around with our beautiful deterrent.”

The New York Times reports:

The Obama administration, attempting to salvage a faltering nuclear deal with Iran, has told Iran’s leaders in back-channel messages that it is willing to allow the country to send its stockpile of enriched uranium to any of several nations, including Turkey, for temporary safekeeping, according to administration officials and diplomats involved in the exchanges.

Now, that might not really be a substantive renegotiation. The destination of the fuel is less important to the administration than getting the stockpile of it out of Iran all at once. But that’s what the Iranians are apparently still holding out to do. Will the Obama administration agree to that? And if so, how much time would any such agreement put back on Iran’s nuclear clock?

U.N. inspectors found “nothing to be worried about” in a first look at a previously secret uranium enrichment site in Iran last month, the International Atomic Energy chief said in remarks published Thursday.

Mohamed ElBaradei also told the New York Times that he was examining possible compromises to unblock a draft nuclear cooperation deal between Iran and three major powers that has foundered over Iranian objections.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has rejected revisions to the deal, though there are those who urge her to reconsider.

“Fortunately, the conditions for international nuclear cooperation have been met,” Mr. Ahmadinejad said. “We are currently moving in the right direction and we have no fear of legal cooperation, under which all of Iran’s national rights will be preserved, and we will continue our work.”

An Iranian hardline newspaper has indicated that the regime wants two changes to the offer, which, as it stands, would send about 75 percent of Iran’s low-enriched uranium to Russia and France for processing into a state basically unsuitable for nuclear weapons. Experts believe that would add a year to the time it would take Iran to build a bomb. But Iran, according to the paper, will ask to stagger the shipments of uranium and for immediate weapons-unsuitable uranium shipments into Iran to power a medical-research reactor. The Times says that those changes may “undermine the deal.” We’ll have an idea tomorrow about whether that’s a gambit; what the Iranians will say; and how the United States and its allies will respond.

“The disclosure of information related to nuclear facilities suggests that the current system does not provide adequate review and safeguards.

“Accordingly, I have asked the Government Accountability Office to investigate immediately what led to the disclosure of this information and to make recommendations to prevent a similar disclosure in the future.”

I spent Saturday at the bi-annual Knob Creek Machine Gun Shoot, right outside of Louisville, Ky. Gun enthusiasts of all stripes were there — from the National Rifle Association and sportsmen to militia members to white supremacists and Obama birthers. Here’s a collection of choice photos from the show (after the jump):

Above you’ll see the view of the main attraction—a range of metal cans, cars, and a refrigerator being shot at by dozens of military grade weapons.

The view from the other side.

Some of the better merchandise from the exhibit tens. This one says “Prepare for Obama’s Citizen Army (ACORN + Nation of Islam)”

T.P.S. (Utz) is a vendor of weapon and survivalist handbooks which also sells The Anarchist Cookbook and “Hit Man,” a guide to assassination.

Minnesota’s Oak Grove Arms was selling these T-shirts.

Selling a scimitar inside the exhibitors’ tent.

The Nazi merchandise table was notably quiet, and seller Mark Stevens told me that business was slow. But classic German designs were fairly popular with attendees. For example:

Also:

And also:

Sadly, I couldn’t open the plastic to read the book.

The Obama Birthers were here, at one table located near the NRA’s booth, getting a mix of receptive conversations and brush-offs. Here’s Carl Swensson of RiseUpAmerica, who has started a Citizen Jury to indict President Obama.

The Birthers had two sets of petitions, one just for members (or retired members) of the military who wanted to join Orly Taitz’s legal actions against Obama. Taitz is the blonde woman with the pink nametag, obscured slightly by Theresa Padget, the woman in the sweatshirt.

Some good deals on ammo.

The high cost of shooting a machine gun. Spending 75 rounds from an AK-47 would run you $120.

The results!

A pre-WWI maxim gun, displayed by Kent and Kathy Lomont of Idaho, affixed with the infamous Sean Delonas cartoon. The Lomonts declined to explain what the cartoon meant.

The sellers of this T-shirt reported that all three boxes of it had sold out by 3 p.m. on Saturday.

The vast majority of T-shirts were, of course, much more innocuous.

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