Washington Accused Of Ignoring Nuclear Terror Threat

[CVX]

By Andrew Gumbel
The Independent - UK
8-21-4

LOS ANGELES -- The Bush administration insists that its top priority is keeping weapons of mass destruction out of the hands of terrorists. But in a withering new book, one of America's foremost nuclear weapons experts argues that the White House has been so heedless of the threat that nuclear armageddon in one or more US cities is now "more likely than not" over the next decade.

Graham Allison, a former defence official under both Republican and Democratic administrations and now a leading researcher at Harvard, describes the Bush administration as "reckless" for its failure to secure fissile materials around the world and its apparent lack of interest in preventing North Korea and Iran from becoming nuclear powers. In his book Nuclear Terrorism: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe, Mr Allison lays out a series of measures to minimise the risk that al-Qa'ida or another group could either build or buy a nuclear weapon and then smuggle it into the United States.

He demonstrates that the Bush White House, for all its bullish rhetoric, has taken none of them.

"No one observing the behaviour of the US government after 9/11 would note any significant changes in activity aimed at preventing terrorists from acquiring the world's most destructive technologies," he writes. At the same time, al-Qa'ida is known to have taken steps to obtain nuclear weaponry since 1992, and has publicly stated its ambition to kill four million Americans.

"On the current course," Mr Allison concludes, "nuclear terrorism is inevitable." The most likely scenario, according to security experts, is that al-Qa'ida or another group would buy or steal fissile material and then construct its own bomb, using science that has been in the public domain for 30 years. Hence the urgent need to secure the world's relatively restricted stockpiles of that fissile material - either highly enriched uranium or plutonium. However, a programme for securing nuclear materials in the former Soviet Union, pioneered by US Senators Sam Nunn and Richard Lugar, has been so poorly funded that it will take another 13 years to finish at the current pace. "The incandescent and incontestable fact is that in the two years after 9/11, fewer potential nuclear weapons' worth of highly enriched uranium and plutonium were secured than in the two years before 9/11," Mr Allison told The Independent on Sunday.

A further 43 countries have varying amounts of fissile material as by-products of their civilian nuclear power industries, but as things stand the US is only willing to take this off their hands if they pay for the privilege.

Mr Allison described the Bush administration's approach to North Korea and Iran as "paralysis" - offering neither carrots nor sticks to prevent those countries becoming full nuclear weapons states. If North Korea developed a full nuclear production line - carrying with it the distinct possibility of selling parts or technology to the highest bidder - it would be "the greatest failure of American diplomacy in all our history".

A nuclear North Korea would almost certainly induce Japan and South Korea to develop their own programmes. And the Bush administration is talking about new nuclear tests and the development of so-called "mini-nukes" and atomic bunker-buster bombs.

Mr Allison ascribed many of the White House's failures to the war in Iraq, which, he says, has diverted attention and eaten up resources in a country that had neither nuclear weapons nor a nuclear weapons programme.

But he also accused the White House of a failure of imagination, an odd combination of denial and fatalism."They don't get that this is a preventable catastrophe," he said. An effective "war on nuclear terrorism", Mr Allison argued, would cost around $5bn (£2.75bn) per year. "In a current budget that devotes more than $500bn to defence and the war in Iraq," he suggested, "a penny of every dollar for what Bush calls 'our highest priority' would not be excessive."

© 2004 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd http://news.independent.co.uk/world/...p?story=553841

[plazul]

I'm not that worried about terrorists acquiring fissile material. True, the recipe for the A-Bomb has been out there for years but building and *testing* a nuclear device is hardly child's play. Terrorists with access to a supercomputer and a staff of qualified weapons scientists might be able to model and simulate a thermonuclear bomb and blast but I doubt that they can acomplish that.

Terrorists really don't need nuclear weapons to achieve their objectives. In my opinion, it's a red herring thrown out there to frighten the public into becoming more compliant with domestic surveillance and other invasive anti-terrorism measures.

Nuclear proliferation and rogue governments are a different story. We do need to be extremely concerned about nuclear weapons in the hands of governments that are volatile and unpredictable. I don't put Iran in that category.

[xlt66]

Originally Posted by plazul

Nuclear proliferation and rogue governments are a different story. We do need to be extremely concerned about nuclear weapons in the hands of governments that are volatile and unpredictable. I don't put Iran in that category.

I put N. Korea in that category. Why don't you think Iran is irrational?

[plazul]

I addressed your question in another post. Iran is still suffering from the aftermath the war with Iraq. Like all wars, it was a major human tragedy. Since then, Iran has trended more towards the center with radical mullahs still being very vocal in its society, but the goal of the new government is economic development and building a strong defense against both Israel (a nuclear power) and Iraq. They aren't interested in bringing on a nuclear holocaust or a bloody protracted ground war but they do desire strategic balance in the region which will be difficult as long as Israel continues to point nuclear missiles at Tehran and routinely rattles the sabre in Iran's direction.

The United States still treats Iran as though it's on a war footing and refuses to release billions of dollars in Iranian assets which it has held since the 80s. And recently, the President of the United States named Iran as part of the "axis of evil" which, as I said in my other post, could be viewed as a precursor to preemtive war.

Iran is justifiably nervous. It doesn't officially sponsor terrorism but, for internal political reasons, it hasn't done much to stop Iran's banking system from being used as a conduit for terrorist funding and it hasn't cracked down on privately funded, quasi military organizations, operating for terrorist purposes in Iran. It's a delicate balance between interfering with them and controlling radical elements and public unrest. In short, Iran does harbor terrorists but it doesn't sponsor them and it would behoove the United States to defuse the situation by normalizing relations with Iran, investing in economic development, and taking other steps to enable Iran to move more to the center and get a handle on internal forces that threaten domestic and international peace.

Finally, I don't believe that Iran has a nuclear device but they are capable of manufacturing one. If they were actively engaged in weapons development I think publications like Janes, Atomic Scientist, and other academic journals would have published opinions to that effect.

[capt_buzzard]

What's next on your agenda Mr President? North Korea, Iran or Pakistan?

[Paula]

One BIG BOMB, that would slow things down, don't you think, lets get outrageous and do something to stop the towel heads threating us, they will never understand us here, they are in the biblical times at primitive levels, they are ignorant to lifestyles here in america, a large expolsion would make a difference.

[gmc]

plazul

Iran is justifiably nervous. It doesn't officially sponsor terrorism but, for internal political reasons, it hasn't done much to stop Iran's banking system from being used as a conduit for terrorist funding and it hasn't cracked down on privately funded, quasi military organizations, operating for terrorist purposes in Iran.

Dubstitute Saudi arabia for iran and you could say exactly the same thing.