Tom Maertens
December 7, 2004
Even if you paid close attention to electoral campaign issues, you could be excused for thinking that George W. Bush and John Kerry did not agree on anything.
But you'd be wrong. Both stated explicitly that the greatest danger facing the United States was nuclear weapons in the hands of terrorists.
Graham Allison, former assistant secretary of defense, longtime adviser to the Pentagon and presently a Harvard professor, has been saying this for years. He has now laid out the case in detail in "Nuclear Terrorism." You won't be reassured. Experts say it's a question of "when," not "if," terrorists will attack us with nuclear weapons. Indeed, some U.S. analysts believe Al-Qaida already has a nuclear weapon.
How hard is it to make a nuclear weapon? In 1977, a Princeton undergraduate set out to design a nuclear weapon as his thesis project. The resulting blueprint, using unclassified sources, would have been a perfect terrorist weapon: a bomb the size of a beach ball with a 10-kiloton yield, at a cost of $2,000. Detonated in the center of a large city, it might have killed and injured millions. Members of the Princeton faculty who had worked on the WWII Manhattan Project submitted it to the government, which immediately classified it "Secret."
The difficult part of building a bomb is not the design but obtaining highly enriched uranium or plutonium, the fissile material. No fissile material, no nuclear weapon. This is why Allison believes that catastrophe is preventable: The number of sources for such material is finite, albeit rather large. We must secure this material using the "gold standard" that has prevented the loss of gold from Fort Knox, he writes.
This is the first of what he calls the "Three No's": No Loose Nukes. Russia has more nuclear weapons and fissile material than any country in the world. Allison estimates this material could be secured for $40 billion or less, and urges that the program be expedited.
The second is No New Nascent Nukes. This would be directed at preventing the construction of national production facilities for enriched uranium or plutonium, the key to bombmaking, by countries like Iran.
The final principle is No New Nuclear Weapons States. The immediate target of this would be North Korea. Allison laments that the Bush administration has no strategy for North Korea except to deny that a crisis exists, an approach that he believes is intolerable for a great power and one which future historians will see as gross negligence.
Pakistan is also high up in his threat hierarchy. It has a record of selling nuclear technology, and its nuclear scientists have apparently already provided weapon design information to Al-Qaida.
As for Iraq, Allison says it would not have made the top 20 most likely suppliers of nuclear material. For this reason, he believes the U.S. invasion was a strategic blunder and a diversion from the real fight against terrorists. The Bush administration, he writes, has failed to develop a coherent strategy for combating nuclear terrorism, despite its tough talk.
Graham Allison has written a very readable book that will tell you the essential facts about nuclear terrorism along with some things you may wish you didn't know.
Tom Maertens was NSC director for nuclear issues in both the Clinton and Bush White Houses.
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