With the Cold War behind us, Americans don’t seem to worry much about a nuclear attack. But the Sept. 11, 2001, strikes on New York and Washington exposed the bloodthirsty ambitions of the West’s terrorist enemy, and many experts worry that a nuclear incident in a major city is a tragedy waiting to happen.
We should take steps to ensure these fears are never realized.
There’s no doubting the risk.
Hundreds of tons of loose nuclear materials sit unprotected in Russia, and not all of it can be accounted for. In addition, radiological material that could be used to make a so-called dirty bomb can be found in some 200 research laboratories around the globe, where it can conceivably fall into the wrong hands. Maybe it already has.
Law enforcement, military and intelligence officials will make every effort to strengthen border and domestic security, but it is a difficult task. It is imperative that officials not be paralyzed by the lack of imagination cited by the Sept. 11 commission in explaining how top officials failed to heed intelligence warnings in the summer of 2001.
We’re concerned, too, that the public seems ignorant of how to react if the dangerous day should come.
Experts say thousands of lives might be saved by rapidly evacuating people downwind of a radiation cloud, yet only small numbers of first responders have been prepared in Denver and elsewhere in Colorado for such an event.
Governments must try and thwart the nuclear threat by taking immediate steps to secure poorly guarded facilities that contain nuclear weapons and materials in Russia and elsewhere around the globe. In this country, the public needs to insist that Washington make it a top priority. Former Sen. Sam Nunn is trying to educate the public about the threat with a film available on DVD, “Last Best Chance.” Local safety and evacuation measures need to be updated.
At the United Nations this week, dozens of world leaders signed a Russian-sponsored treaty making it a crime to possess radioactive material with the intention of committing a terrorist act. President Bush is in favor, “so that all those who seek radioactive materials or nuclear devices are prosecuted and extradited wherever they are.” It’s an important message to send to would-be terrorists.
Still more needs to be done. The stakes are enormous.
A nuclear strike would make attacks in New York, Washington, London and Madrid pale by comparison. Many thousands of people and buildings would simply disappear – and the economic damage would reverberate worldwide for years.
Graham Allison has studied the threat for years and believes it is “possible that al-Qaeda is hiding nuclear bombs in one or several American cities today.” Allison, director of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University and a former assistant secretary of defense, is author of “Nuclear Terrorism: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe.” Given that the amount of highly enriched uranium needed to build a simple nuclear weapon is smaller than a football, smuggling it into a major city is not impossible, he says.
As the title of his book implies, Allison believes a catastrophe can be prevented. “There are strategic chokepoints in the nuclear supply chain that, if closed tightly enough, could reduce the likelihood of a nuclear bomb going off in a city to nearly zero … ,” he writes. “We don’t lose an ounce of gold from Fort Knox, nor do the Russians lose a single (piece of) artwork … from the Kremlin Armory. …Why should we imagine that gold or art objects are more valuable and worthy of protection than nuclear weapons and materials?”
Stanford University’s Institute for International Studies says al-Qaeda’s desire to obtain nuclear arms is documented by evidence discovered in bunkers vacated by the terrorists after they fled Afghanistan. Its report estimates that at least 88 pounds of weapons-grade uranium and plutonium has been stolen so far from poorly guarded nuclear facilities in the former Soviet Union alone. The Sept. 11 commission said in its report that al-Qaeda has tried to acquire or make nuclear weapons for at least 10 years.
About two months after the Sept. 11 attacks, wire services reported that two retired nuclear scientists instrumental in developing Pakistan’s atom bomb admitted to investigators that they had met with Osama bin Laden. At one meeting, a bin Laden associate indicated he had nuclear material and wanted to know how to use it to make a weapon. The son of one of the scientists told The Associated Press that his father rebuffed bin Laden. Perhaps.
President Bush has been criticized for paying little attention to the threat of nuclear terrorism, though critics say he is more alert to the threat now. At a U.N. summit in Bratislava, Slovakia, earlier this year with nuclear security at the top of its agenda, Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin set a target of 2008 for securing Russian nuclear facilities and vowed to develop emergency procedures to respond whenever they learn of missing materials or dirty bombs. Those are critical steps. Without urgent efforts to secure “loose nukes,” it could take until 2020 or 2030, the Henry L. Stimson Center and the Center for American Progress concluded in a report this past week.
Last month marked the 60th anniversary of the day in 1945 when the United States dropped a bomb on Hiroshima. Descriptions of the devastation are eerie: At the point of explosion, the air temperature reached several million degrees. Then a fireball spread across the city accompanied by a chilling shock wave that obliterated everything in its path. More than 50,000 people died instantly and another 100,000 died over the next five months. Not since the attack on Hiroshima and the subsequent one on Nagasaki, thankfully, has a nuclear weapon been set off in warfare or anger. Governments must do everything in their power to ensure it never happens again.
