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Priorities: Missile Defense or Loose Nukes?
Some
experts say America does face a real threat of nuclear attack, not from
a missile, but from terrorists who wouldn't need technical expertise,
just a ticket to Russia. There, they'd find some 30,000 nuclear weapons
and hundreds of tons of weapons grade plutonium, poorly guarded by a
cash-starved government.
Graham Allison, now at Harvard's Kennedy School, was an Assistant Secretary
of Defense in the Clinton Administration. He says to leave that many
weapons and that much material at that level of risk in the world is
wildly irresponsible, and with just one bowling-ball sized lump of enriched
uranium, terrorists could build a crude bomb powerful enough to vaporize
much of lower Manhattan and kill 100,000 people.
He wrote in a 1995 Washington Post editorial that the chances of a
nuclear terrorist incident are greater than 50 percent over the course
of the decade. Now, five years down the line, does he still think there's
a fifty-fifty chance of nuclear terrorism in the decade? "I would
not change my bet at all," he replies.
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Next year, the U.S. government will spend about a billion dollars to
help Russia secure this material, a fraction of the $8 billion it will
spend on National Missile Defense. Allison says it should reverse these
priorities. Lindsey Mattison, a Russia expert with the International
Center in Washington agrees. "We're going to spend $7 billion on
a task that scientists find improbable, which is to knock down a missile
moving at several thousand miles an hour when in fact there are 30,000
weapons, many of which are small enough to be in a rental van,"
he says. "It is going to be a real shock if one of these weapons
turns up in the hands of somebody willing to use it."
A recent U.S. intelligence report says its more likely that a terrorist
attack with weapons of mass destruction would use ships, trucks, and
airplanes rather than missiles. A bipartisan task force deemed this
the nation's "most urgent, unmet security threat."
However, a relatively low-tech program to secure loose nukes doesn't
encourage the kind of corporate and congressional support so apparent
in Huntsville that has pumped life and billions of dollars into national
missile defense. At least not yet...
Next: Retooling the Military
Mind for a New Threat
