The president thinks the world is safer than it was three years ago. Which world is he living in?

Earlier this week, at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, home of the Y-12 nuclear-weapons facility, in Tennessee, President Bush gave one of his best-written speeches. This was his "America is safer"speech, and we will no doubt hear variations on it many times in the next four months. In it, he lists the world's hot spots, one by one (Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan), contrasts what each was like three years ago with what it's like now, and concludes each success story with the refrain, "and the American people are safer." After the last item on the checklist, he expands the viewfinder, exclaiming, "and America and the world are safer."

It's a very effective speech (the Oak Ridge scientists greeted each repetition with stormy applause), unless you take a closer look at the examples it cites—in which case questions of comparative safety (are you safer now than you were three years ago?) seem at best ambiguous and in some cases downright depressing.

The "slam dunk" case would seem to be Libya. Three years ago, Muammar Qaddafi was acquiring materials for nuclear weapons. Today, he's surrendered the materials, invited in international inspectors, and stepped into the civilized world. Libya has a particular resonance for Oak Ridge, because it's the national lab where Qaddafi's nuclear materials are now stored.

Without question, any action that keeps Qaddafi away from an A-bomb is an unequivocal plus. But just what did turn him away from such ambitions? And how close was he to building a weapon, anyway?

In the past, Bush has suggested that Qaddafi changed course because he saw what happened to Saddam and wondered if his own crown might be next. Bush implied as much at Oak Ridge: "[T]he Libyan government saw the seriousness of the civilized world and correctly judged its own interests." It seems plausible that fear of impending invasion may have played a role in Qaddafi's calculations. But there are a few facts that weaken this theory.

First, when Bush first touted Libya's disarmament in his State of the Union address last January, he heralded the move as the result of "nine months of intense negotiation" involving Libya, the United States, and Britain. Qaddafi made his announcement in December. "Nine months" suggests the talks started the previous March. That was before the war in Iraq began.

At the same time, Bush said at Oak Ridge, the crucial step came when U.S. and British intelligence tracked a large shipment of nuclear equipment on a German-registered cargo ship bound for Tripoli. They informed the Germans, who diverted the ship to an Italian port, where the cargo was confiscated. This incident took place just last autumn—months after Saddam's toppling. If Qaddafi was trembling from the great display of American power, his fear didn't stop him from continuing his quest for black-market nuclear gear.

So, Qaddafi was negotiating about giving up his nuclear ambitions before the war in Iraq, yet he furtively persisted in these ambitions after Saddam's regime had tumbled. Maybe his nuclear gambits—the arming and the disarming—had little to do with the war, after all.

How close was Qaddafi to getting a bomb—that is, how much disarmament did his sacrifice involve? Mohammad ElBaradei, the director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, after examining the cache and the facilities, said Libya's nuclear program was "at a very initial stage." Not just an initial stage, a very initial stage.

David Albright, a specialist at the Institute for Science and International Security, breaks it down. Libya had ordered 10,000 centrifuges but almost none of the associated components needed to connect them into a spinning cascade for enriching uranium hexafluoride—that is, almost none of the stuff you'd need to turn uranium into bomb-grade material, much less into a bomb.