Ignoring The Unthinkable
By Fred Hiatt
Monday, March 17, 2003; Page A19
If a terrorist were to detonate a 10-kiloton nuclear bomb in Grand Central Station, about half a million people would die immediately -- roughly equivalent to the population of Washington, D.C. Much of Manhattan would be destroyed, and depending on the prevailing winds the rest of the island might have to be evacuated. Hundreds of thousands more would die of burns and exposure to radiation. The direct economic effects would surpass $1 trillion, or one-tenth of the nation's annual economic output. Indirect effects -- if, say, the terrorists threatened to destroy another city -- would be much higher.
It is impossible to predict how U.S. social and political structures would change after such an attack. But if you posit, for a moment, sufficient normalcy to imagine a congressional hearing, you can also imagine questions, as after 9/11, about who had failed to "connect the dots," and why.
In this case, however, such questions would be met by an astonishing response. Officials would have to acknowledge that the dots had been connected long before the attack; that both the danger and the means to eliminate it had been well understood; and that the president and Congress had failed to do what was necessary.
Those are the inescapable conclusions of a new report, "Controlling Nuclear Warheads and Materials," by Harvard University experts Matthew Bunn, Anthony Wier and John P. Holdren. The report was commissioned by the Nuclear Threat Initiative, which is chaired by two politicians who have been trying for more than a decade to focus the nation's attention on this threat: Sen. Richard G. Lugar (R-Ind.), who is also chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and former senator Sam Nunn (D-Ga.).
Nunn noted last week that President Bush has said that keeping weapons of mass destruction from terrorists is "our highest priority." But the report concludes flatly: "It is simply not the case that the U.S. government is doing everything in its power to prevent a terrorist nuclear attack on the United States from occurring." And: "Between occasional initiatives, the level of sustained, day-to-day engagement from the highest levels . . . has been very modest (as, indeed, it was in the previous administration, and the one before that)."
On one level, this insufficient response is difficult to comprehend. No one doubts that a nuclear explosion is the most fearsome single terrorist threat. It is also now beyond dispute, based on documents discovered in Afghanistan and other evidence, that al Qaeda, for one, has made serious efforts to acquire a weapon and has demonstrated the organizational skills to deploy it.
It is clear too that the single best defense against such an attack is to prevent nuclear warheads or material from falling into terrorists' hands. Once they have such material, the remaining tasks are daunting but doable: assembling a weapon, smuggling it into the United States, detonating it. Available technologies would be unlikely to detect a weapon as it crossed the border.
But terrorists cannot manufacture the nuclear material they would need; they would have to buy or steal it. The location of such material often is not secret, nor is its condition of storage: highly vulnerable. "The reality," says Bunn, "is that there are hundreds of buildings around the world in scores of countries where the essential ingredients of nuclear weapons are dangerously insecure."
Last year the U.S.-Russian "Project Vinca" succeeded in spiriting bomb-grade material out of an insecure site in Yugoslavia. But that operation required more than a year of planning and an infusion of private funds -- and there are at least 24 other such high-risk sites around the world. In Russia, little more than a third of nuclear material has been secured in cooperative U.S.-Russian programs, and tales of theft, attempted theft and sloppy protection are legion: guards who do not patrol because they have no winter uniforms, security systems shut because of unpaid electricity bills. "Weapons-grade and weapons-usable nuclear materials have been stolen from some Russian institutes," says the CIA. "We assess that undetected smuggling has occurred, although we do not know the extent or magnitude of such thefts."
A focus on Iraq may be seen as a distraction from this threat, or as one essential component of a response; in either case, it is certainly not sufficient. Yet the danger of unsecured nuclear material has not received a fraction of the official attention devoted to the Iraqi threat. And Nunn asserts that, as inadequate as the American response has been, most other nations have done far less.
Why? The authors of the report offer various explanations: bureaucratic resistance, suspicion among nations, the absence of any corporate constituency that profits substantially from such work, the mistaken belief that everything possible is being done or, alternately, that nothing useful can be done.
And then there is the most human of reasons: No one likes to think about the unthinkable.
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