RUTHFULLY YOURS

Nuclear Terror: As a slick nuclear “summit” takes place in Washington, Iran announces it’s a month away from joining the “nuclear club”? Photo ops are no anti-nuclear terrorism strategy.

Ed Sullivan for decades gave TV viewers “a really big shoe!” But neither the surviving Beatles nor Topo Gigio, the Italian mouse puppet, were at Blair House this week.

Blair House was the setting for a nuclear confab of heads of state and other high-ranking leaders from 47 countries. It might as well have been held a couple of hundred miles north at the Ed Sullivan Theatre on Broadway, David Letterman’s current prowling ground.

American taxpayers are ponying up for the cool “Nuclear Security Summit, Washington 2010” logo (do participants get taxpayer-financed “Nuclear Summit 2010” baseball caps?) and TV studio-style map-of-the-world backdrops, not to mention the replica of the U.N. Security Council roundtable, pictures of which were all over the news.

The Obama “O” campaign logo presumably helped get him elected in 2008 — along with his rousing speech at a football stadium in Denver.

But showmanship and perpetual campaigning do not an effective national security policy make.

Ronald Reagan may indeed have been master of the powerful image, but when he, for instance, famously made a televised entrance in the presence of a newly built Stealth aircraft, there was substance behind him — literally: That was a real Stealth and it was already deployed.

A B-2 bomber can take out an uranium enrichment facility in Iran. But the logos and roundtables and lighting — and sound bites and documents — that will be the actual end product of this week’s summit will do nothing to stop Iran, or North Korea, or al-Qaida, or any other would-be atomic terrorist government or group.

Now, the president might respond that he knows that. But does he?

We are over a year into this presidency, and it’s clear what this administration’s anti-nuclear terror policy is: spend months, even years, building up some kind of united moral front with the goal of shaming Iran and North Korea into civilized behavior.

It takes time for the U.S., under new leadership, to extend its hand in sincerity to Tehran. It takes more time to see whether the mullahs are willing to embrace it. And it then takes still more time after that to get the major powers to join together in yet another round of economic sanctions — by all appearances pointless — against Iran.

The trouble is the clock is ticking in Iran too.

Tehran’s Islamofascist regime has been taking advantage of the months and years, even during President Bush’s terms, to move ever closer to nuclear weapons capability.

Until finally on Tuesday, Behzad Soltani, the deputy head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization, has declared that Tehran will join the “world nuclear club” within a month and expand its nuclear technology for “purposes other than energy and fuel production.”

President Obama and Chinese President Hu Jintao were all smiles this week, sitting together in front of that cool “Nuclear Summit” logo.

But Beijing’s foreign ministry issued a statement Tuesday repeating that “China always believes that dialogue and negotiation are the best way out” when it comes to a nuclear Iran. “Pressure and sanctions cannot fundamentally solve it.”

Both Iran and China are playing us for fools.

In their history of proliferation, “The Nuclear Express,” nuclear weapons designers Thomas Reed and Danny Stillman assert America faces “a new Cold War on two fronts” — “confrontation with the radical Muslim world” and “the struggle for economic survival vis-a-vis China.”

Stillman made 10 visits to China’s nuclear weapons complex from 1990 to 2001, and he and Reed warn: “We believe those foes are in league” — Islamists and China.

As he sits backstage at the show, the president might want to think about that possibility.