Could worse be yet to come?
Nov 1st 2001 | from The Economist [major sections]
Whether or not Osama bin Laden has acquired nuclear weapons, Graham Allison* argues that the world must respond as though he has—and without delay
AL-QAEDA'S terrorist assault on September 11th awakened Americans to the stark reality of mega-terrorism: terrorist acts that kill thousands of people at a single stroke. In the twinkling of an eye, possibilities earlier dismissed as analysts' (or Hollywood's) fantasies became brute fact. President George Bush rightly and resolutely declared war on Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda, and their Taliban hosts.
Yet as the American government scrambles to pursue a war for which it had not prepared, it must, in the idiom, “go with what we've got”. Assembling an international coalition of very strange bedfellows, acquiring intelligence from sources and by methods it had mostly neglected, and jerry-rigging defences against the most obvious vulnerabilities, it gallops off in all directions. It does so without a comprehensive assessment of the threats it now faces, and lacking a coherent strategy for combating mega-terrorism.
In contrast, Mr bin Laden and his al-Qaeda network have been thinking, planning and training for this war for most of a decade. September 11th demonstrated a level of imagination, sophistication and audacity previously thought impossible by the American, or any other, government. As the press has reported, just a year ago the FBI had assured the administration that it had a “handle” on all al-Qaeda operatives within the United States.
Even in the midst of the exhausting exigencies of the current crisis, responsible leaders must acknowledge the possibility that much more catastrophic terrorist acts may be yet to come. Along the spectrum of mega-terrorism, the worst case would be a nuclear explosion in a large city. Had al-Qaeda attacked the World Trade Centre not with a minivan filled with explosives, as in 1993, nor with jumbo jets, but with a vehicle containing a nuclear device, what would the consequences have been? Even a crude nuclear device could create an explosive force of 10,000 to 20,000 tons of TNT, demolishing an area of about three square miles. Not only the World Trade Centre, but all of Wall Street and the financial district, and the lower tip of Manhattan up to Gramercy Park would have disappeared. Hundreds of thousands of people would have died suddenly.
In a 1995 Washington Post op-ed, I warned: “In the absence of a determined programme of action, we have every reason to anticipate acts of nuclear terrorism before this decade is out.” I find no reason to revise this estimate today. The question is whether the horror of September 11th can now motivate the United States and other governments to act urgently not only against al-Qaeda, but also on the well-identified agenda for action to minimise the risk of nuclear mega-terrorism.
How real is the threat?
As the Bush administration took office in January, a bipartisan task-force, chaired by the former Senate majority leader, Howard Baker (now ambassador to Japan), and Lloyd Cutler, a former counsel to the president, presented a report card on non-proliferation programmes with Russia. The principal finding of the task-force is that “the most urgent unmet national security threat to the United States today is the danger that weapons of mass destruction or weapons-useable material in Russia could be stolen, sold to terrorists or hostile nation states, and used against American troops abroad or citizens at home.” (Emphasis added).
Think about it. Is this proposition correct, or incorrect? No serious analyst has spent more than a day examining the evidence without concluding that “loose nukes” are a first-order threat. Although some would argue that bioterrorism is an equal or greater danger, both count as threats of the highest order. As Mr Baker testified to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in March, “It really boggles my mind that there could be 40,000 nuclear weapons, or maybe 80,000, in the former Soviet Union, poorly controlled and poorly stored, and that the world isn't in a near state of hysteria about the danger.”
The danger can be summarised in three propositions. First, attempts to steal nuclear weapons or weapons-usable material are not hypothetical, but a recurring fact. Just last week, the chief of the directorate of the Russian Defence Ministry responsible for nuclear weapons reported two recent incidents in which terrorist groups attempted to break into Russian nuclear-storage sites, but were repulsed. The past decade has seen scores of incidents in which individuals and groups have successfully stolen weapons material from sites in Russia and sought to export it—but have been caught.
A few years ago Boris Yeltsin's assistant for national security affairs, Alexander Lebed, reported that 40 out of 100 special KGB suitcase nuclear weapons were not accounted for in Russia. Under pressure from colleagues, he later retreated to the official Russian line that all nuclear weapons are secure and accounted for, but his twists and turns left more questions than answers. In the mid-1990s, more than 1,000 pounds of highly enriched uranium—material sufficient to allow terrorists to build more than 20 nuclear weapons—sat unprotected in Kazakhstan. Recognising the danger, the American government purchased the material and removed it to Oak Ridge, Tennessee.
Second, if al-Qaeda or some similar group obtained 40 pounds of highly enriched uranium, or less than half that weight in plutonium, with material otherwise available off-the-shelf, it could produce a nuclear device in less than a year. The only high hurdle to creating a nuclear device is fissionable material—an ingredient that is fortunately difficult and expensive to manufacture. But as a former director of the Livermore Laboratories wrote a quarter of a century ago, “If the essential nuclear materials like these are in hand, it is possible to make an atomic bomb using the information that is available in the open literature.” An even easier alternative is a radioactivity-dispersal device which wraps a conventional bomb with radioactive materials that disperse as fallout when the bomb explodes.
Third, terrorists would not find it difficult to sneak such a nuclear device into the United States. Recall that the nuclear material required is smaller than a football. Even an assembled device, like a suitcase nuclear weapon, could be shipped in a container, in the hull of a ship, or in a trunk carried by an aircraft. After September 11th, the number of containers that are X-rayed has increased to approximately 10%: 500 of the 5,000 containers currently arriving daily at the port of New York/New Jersey. But as the chief executive of CSX Lines, one of the foremost container-shipping companies, put it: “If you can smuggle heroin in containers, you may be able to smuggle in a nuclear bomb.”
This threat has emerged because, after the cold war, the Soviet Union's nuclear arsenal and stockpile were no longer held behind prison walls. Post-Soviet societies have experienced a remarkable transformation over the past decade, becoming simultaneously more free, more chaotic and frequently more criminalised. The same dynamic that liberated individuals also undermined systems that previously controlled some 30,000 nuclear weapons and 70,000 nuclear-weapon equivalents in highly-enriched uranium and plutonium at more than 100 sites across Russia.
Thanks to extraordinary professionalism on the part of Russian military and security guards, many attempts to steal weapons have been thwarted. The security forces have been greatly helped by far-sighted co-operative threat-reduction programmes, set up at the initiative of Senators Sam Nunn and Richard Lugar, which have contributed almost $1 billion a year. The American government knows of no case at present in which those who wish to make nuclear weapons have acquired either the weapon, or sufficient nuclear materials to make one. What must worry us, however, is what we don't know.
If Mr bin Laden and other terrorist groups have not so far succeeded in acquiring nuclear weapons, or materials from which to assemble them, we should give thanks for our great good fortune. If they have acquired them, most people will quickly conclude that, under existing conditions, this was bound to happen.
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What must America do?
Preventing nuclear terrorist attacks on the American homeland will require a serious, comprehensive defence—not for months or years, but far into the future. The response must stretch from aggressive prevention and pre-emption to deterrence and active defences. Strict border controls to keep out smuggled containers will be as important to America as ballistic-missile defences.
To fight the immediate threat, the United States must move smartly on two fronts. First, no effort can be spared in the military, economic and diplomatic campaign to defeat and destroy al-Qaeda. Simultaneously, the unprecedented international effort of intelligence and law-enforcement agencies must seek to discover and disrupt al-Qaeda sleeper cells and interrupt attempted shipments of weapons.
Second, the United States must seize the opportunity of a more co-operative Russia to “go to the source” of the greatest danger today: the 99% or more of the world's nuclear, biological and chemical weapons of mass destruction that are stored in Russia and the United States. The surest way to prevent nuclear assaults on Russia, America and the world is to prevent terrorists from gaining control of these weapons or materials to make them.
The readiest sources of such weapons and materials are the vast arsenals accumulated over four decades of cold-war competition. At the November summit at Crawford, as a central pillar of what Colin Powell, the secretary of state, has called the new “post-post-cold war” partnership, Mr Bush and Vladimir Putin should pledge to make all nuclear weapons and material as secure as technically possible as fast as possible. Their best course would be to follow the recommendations of the Baker-Cutler task-force (see above). Within Russia, the programme should be jointly financed by the United States, its allies in the war against terrorism, and Russia.
In the fog and heat of a frustrating war against an elusive terrorist enemy, to call upon leaders to act to prevent attacks of a kind that have not yet occurred may seem over-demanding. But if we fail to act on this agenda now, how shall we explain ourselves on the morning after a nuclear September 11th?
Graham Allison is director of the Belfer Centre for Science and International Affairs at Harvard's Kennedy School and author of “Avoiding Nuclear Anarchy” (MIT Press, 1996). He served as assistant secretary of defence in the first Clinton administration. |
