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Against Nuclear Terrorism

Nuclear Terrorism: The Untimate Preventable Catastrophe
Review by Dr. Jonathan Dolhenty

Graham Allison is one of America's leading experts on nuclear weapons and national security. He has served in the Department of Defense as assistant secretary of defense for policy and plans, is the director of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, and a professor at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. In other words, when this man speaks and writes on an issue where he has the expertise, it is prudent, very prudent, to pay attention to what he has to say. And he has a lot to say in his new book entitled "Nuclear Terrorism: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe."

I am a great fan of suspense thrillers and novels about spies, espionage, and international crises and disasters. How I wish that Allison's book was just another of my exciting leisure-time fictional entertainments! But, unfortunately, this book is nonfiction: a serious, indeed extremely serious, and sober, discussion of the threat we face called "nuclear terrorism." For example, one "dirty bomb," which simply consists of conventional explosives dispersing radioactive materials, exploded in downtown Manhattan, would make the island uninhabitable for years and result in many thousands of deaths from the immediate blast, from radiation poisoning over time, and from the immediate panic it would cause at the outset. And note: these radioactive materials are readily available in many medical and industrial facilities and, of course, explosives are so easy to obtain that they often fall into the hands of knowledgeable teenagers.

Scary? Of course. But that's not the worst possibility that Allison discusses in his book. Just suppose the bomb is a ten-kiloton nuclear weapon and it is smuggled into New York City, not all that difficult to do since not every package container or usable vehicle can be searched or inspected. On the other hand, maybe it's already there, smuggled in long before this, just waiting to be activated. What would happen if it was detonated? Well, according to Allison, if the bomb were set off in Times Square, up to a million people would probably die instantly. Thousands upon thousands more would be killed by collapsing buildings, fires, and the effects of radiation. Life and living, as New Yorkers have known it, would be changed forever in a matter of milliseconds.

If you think it would be too difficult for a terrorist group to build a nuclear weapon, think again. According to Allison, the only real difficulty to creating a nuclear weapon is getting one's hands on the fissionable material necessary to produce the nuclear explosion. This material is highly enriched uranium (HEU) or plutonium. Think that it's almost impossible for a would-be terrorist to obtain such material? Consider these facts the author has uncovered: In 1993, a Russian Navy captain entered a shipyard through an unguarded gate, broke into a building used to store nuclear submarine fuel, and stole three pieces of reactor core containing about ten pounds of HEU; In 1994, Czech police seized over eight pounds of HEU in the city of Prague, which was found inside a metal container in the back-seat of a car parked on a side street; In 2000, four Georgian nationals were arrested with about two pounds of HEU outside Batumi, the capital of the chaotic Adzhariya Autonomous Republic in Georgia. These are just a few examples. Allison provides a lot more, even showing how such material could be stolen within the United States at certain nuclear storage sites.

After a chapter devoted to showing how easy it would be to acquire fissionable material, Allison devotes the next chapter to the question: "When could terrorists launch the first nuclear attack?" You'll be surprised at the answer, I guarantee it. The reader should pay particular attention to the sub-topic in this chapter about "Building It Yourself." The author even includes diagrams for a simple "gun-type" nuclear bomb and an implosion-type nuclear bomb. Is he being irresponsible? No, these diagrams are easily available to anyone elsewhere! Following this discussion, in the next chapter, Allison discusses the question, "How could terrorists deliver a nuclear weapon to its target?" A number of scenarios are offered and he shows how easy it would be to smuggle a nuclear device into the United States and, of course, into New York City or anywhere else. Now go back and read paragraphs two and three in this review.

So, is it hopeless? The first half of Allison's book would lead one to believe that this is the case. But the author spends the second half of his book arguing that nuclear terrorism is preventable. And he provides a framework, a schematic of sorts, for a program of policies to prevent nuclear terrorism. First, there must be the "Three No's": No loose nukes, no new nascent nukes, and no new nuclear weapons states. Second, there must be the "Seven Yeses": Making the prevention of nuclear terrorism an absolute national priority, fighting a strategically focused war on terrorism, conducting a humble foreign policy, building a global alliance against nuclear terrorism, creating the intelligence capabilities required for success in the war on nuclear terrorism, dealing with dirty bombs, and constructing a multilayered defense. For the details of these no's and yeses, you'll just have to read the book. I think you'll find them reasonable and necessary. While Allison suggests a blueprint for prevention, it will ultimately be up to Americans and their government, hopefully in accord and alliance with other peoples of the world and their governments, to implement the policies he recommends.

"Nuclear Terrorism" is a book which needs to be read by every person who is concerned by the unprecedented threats which surround our lives today in a world which stands on the brink of a possible nuclear disaster. Graham Allison has defined the problem, provided the facts, and suggested a solution. Now it is up to the rest of us to help create the climate wherein the solution he proposes can be implemented.

Review by Dr. Jonathan Dolhenty post, courtesy Amazon.com

About NUCLEAR TERRORISM: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe

In NUCLEAR TERRORISM: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe (Times Books / an imprint of Henry Holt & Co.; August 9, 2004), Graham Allison, founding dean of Harvard’s modern John F. Kennedy School of Government, a former top Pentagon official, and one of America’s leading scholars of nuclear strategy and national security, gives us an urgent call to action. He makes the case that nuclear terrorism is inevitable—if we continue on our present course—and he sets out an ambitious but achievable plan for preventing a catastrophic attack before it’s too late.

Given the number of capable groups with serious intent, the increasing accessibility of weapons or nuclear materials from which elementary weapons could be constructed, and the countless ways by which terrorists could smuggle a weapon across America’s borders, Allison argues that if the U.S. and other governments keep doing what we are doing now, a nuclear terrorist attack is inevitable. Yet Allison is no pessimist. He contends that the big and underreported news is that nuclear terrorism is preventable. “As a simple matter of physics, without fissile material, there can be no nuclear explosion. There is a vast – but not unlimited – amount of it in the world, and it is within our power to keep it secure,” Allison writes. “No fissile material, no nuclear explosion, no nuclear terrorism. It is that simple.” The centerpiece of a strategy to prevent nuclear terrorism must be to deny terrorists access to nuclear weapons and materials. To do this, we must shape a new international security order according to a doctrine of the Three No’s: No loose nukes, No new nascent nukes, and No new nuclear states.

In this timely book, Allison provides in plain and accessible terms the “who, what, where, when and how” of nuclear terrorism – and explains how we can act now to prevent it.

"Graham Allison has written at once a gripping page-turner and a sober how-to manual on preventing nuclear catastrophe. Allison shows how the Bush Administration, despite its repeated warnings of "mushroom clouds" on American soil, has not done what it can to stem proliferation, stave off dirty bomb attacks, or prevent the advent of new nuclear states. Drawing upon his experience in government, Allison offers grim forecasts and recommends workable measures -- measures that could hardly be more timely, or more necessary."
--Samantha Power, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of "A Problem from Hell": America and the Age of Genocide.

"Graham Allison's NUCLEAR TERRORISM is absolutely first-rate. Our survival as a civilization may well depend more than anything else
on our heeding the recommendations of this chilling and superbly-crafted book."
--R. James Woolsey, Former Director of Central Intelligence

"Graham Allison has produced a book that it is truly alarming about the
danger of nuclear terror--yet optimistic about our prospects if we do all
that we could and should. One only hopes it is read and heeded."
--Richard Haass, President, Council on Foreign Relations

Amazon Books sells some copies for less than $1

Graham Allison
YaleGlobal, 14 March 2008

CAMBRIDGE: One month after the terrorist assault on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, on October 11, 2001, President George W. Bush faced a more terrifying prospect. At that morning’s presidential daily intelligence briefing, George Tenet, the director of central intelligence, informed the president that a CIA agent codenamed “Dragonfire” had reported that Al Qaeda terrorists possessed a 10-kiloton nuclear bomb, evidently stolen from the Russian arsenal. According to Dragonfire, this nuclear weapon was in New York City.

The government dispatched a top-secret nuclear emergency support team to the city. Under a cloak of secrecy that excluded even Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, these nuclear ninjas searched for the bomb. On a normal workday, half a million people crowd the area within a half-mile radius of Times Square. A noon detonation in Midtown Manhattan would kill them all instantly. Hundreds of thousands of others would die from collapsing buildings, fire and fallout in the hours thereafter. The electromagnetic pulse generated by the blast would fry cell phones and other electronic communication. The wounded would overwhelm hospitals and emergency services. Firemen would fight an uncontrolled ring of fires for days afterward.

In the hours that followed, Condoleezza Rice, then national security adviser, analyzed what strategists call the “problem from hell.” Unlike the Cold War, when the US and the Soviet Union knew that an attack against the other would elicit a retaliatory strike or greater measure, Al Qaeda – with no return address – had no such fear of reprisal. Even if the president were prepared to negotiate, Al Qaeda has no phone number to call.

Concerned that Al Qaeda could have smuggled a nuclear weapon into Washington as well, the president ordered Vice President Dick Cheney to leave the capital for an “undisclosed location,” where he would remain for weeks to follow – standard procedure to ensure “continuity of government” in case of a decapitation strike against US political leadership. Several hundred federal employees from more than a dozen government agencies joined the vice president at this secret site, the core of an alternative government that would seek to cope in the aftermath of a nuclear explosion that destroyed Washington.

Six months earlier the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center had picked up chatter in Al Qaeda channels about an “American Hiroshima.” The CIA knew that Osama bin Laden’s fascination with nuclear weapons went back at least to 1992, when he attempted to buy highly enriched uranium from South Africa. Al Qaeda operatives were alleged to have negotiated with Chechen separatists in Russia to buy a nuclear warhead, which the Chechen warlord Shamil Basayev claimed to have acquired from Russian arsenals. The CIA’s special task force on Al Qaeda had noted the terrorist group’s emphasis on thorough planning, intensive training and repetition of successful tactics. The task force highlighted Al Qaeda’s preference for symbolic targets and spectacular attacks.

As CIA analysts examined Dragonfire’s report and compared it with other bits of information, they noted that the September attack on the World Trade Center had set the bar higher for future terrorist attacks. Psychologically, a nuclear attack would stagger the world’s imagination. New York was, in the jargon of national-security experts, “target rich.”

As it turned out, Dragonfire’s report proved to be a false alarm. But the central takeaway from the case is this: The US government had no grounds in science or logic to dismiss this possibility, nor could it do so today.

There’s no established methodology for assessing the probability of an unprecedented event that could have such catastrophic consequences. Nonetheless, in “Nuclear Terrorism” I state my considered judgment that if the US and other governments just keep doing what they are doing today, a nuclear terrorist attack in a major city is more likely than not by 2014.

Richard Garwin, a designer of the hydrogen bomb whom Enrico Fermi once called, “the only true genius I had ever met,” told Congress in March 2007 that he estimated a “20 percent per year probability of a nuclear explosion with American cities and European cities included.” My Harvard colleague Matthew Bunn has created a model that estimates the probability of a nuclear terrorist attack over a 10-year period to be 29 percent – identical to the average estimate from a poll of security experts commissioned by Senator Richard Lugar in 2005.

Former Secretary of Defense William Perry has expressed his own view that my work may underestimate the risk. Warren Buffet, the world’s most successful investor and legendary odds-maker in pricing insurance policies for unlikely but catastrophic events, concluded that nuclear terrorism is “inevitable.” As he has stated: “I don’t see any way that it won’t happen.”

The good news is that nuclear terrorism is preventable by a feasible, affordable agenda of actions that, if taken, would shrink the risk of nuclear terrorism to nearly zero. A global strategy to prevent this ultimate catastrophe can be organized under a Doctrine of Three No’s: No loose nukes, no new nascent nukes, no new nuclear weapons. The first requires securing all nuclear weapons and weapons-usable material, on the fastest possible timetable, to a new “gold standard.” The second does not allow for any new national capabilities to enrich uranium or reprocess plutonium. The third draws a line under the current eight and a half nuclear powers – the five members of the Security Council and India, Israel, Pakistan and North Korea – and says unambiguously: “Stop. No More.”

The US cannot unilaterally sustain a successful strategy to prevent nuclear terrorism. Nor can the necessary actions simply be commanded, compelled or coerced. Instead, they require deep and steady international cooperation rooted in the recognition that nations share a common threat that requires a common strategy. A Global Alliance Against Nuclear Terrorism is therefore in order. The mission of this alliance should be to minimize the risk of nuclear terrorism by taking every action physically, technically and diplomatically possible to prevent nuclear weapons or materials from falling into the hands of terrorists.

Constructing such an alliance will require the US and other nuclear-weapons states to confront the question of a “fourth no”: no nuclear weapons. While US or Russian possession of nuclear arsenals is not a major driver of Iran’s nuclear ambitions, and while Osama bin Laden would not be less interested in acquiring a nuclear weapon if the US eliminated its current arsenals, the proposition that nuclear weapons are necessary for the security of US and Russia but intolerably dangerous if acquired by Iran or South Africa is difficult to sell to nuclear have-nots.

The question of a categorical “fourth no” has come to the fore with the January 2007 opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal by George P. Shultz, William J. Perry, Henry A. Kissinger and Sam Nunn, calling upon the US and other states to act to realize their Non-Proliferation Treaty commitment and President Reagan’s vision of “a world free of nuclear weapons.” Towards that goal, the immediate agenda should be to devalue nuclear weapons and minimize their role in international affairs. This should begin with nuclear- weapons states pledging to the following principles: no new national enrichment, no nuclear tests, no first use of a nuclear bomb and no new nuclear weapons.

Faced with the possibility of an American Hiroshima, many are paralyzed by a combination of denial and fatalism. This is unwarranted. Through a combination of imagination, a clear agenda for action and fierce determination to pursue it, the countdown to a nuclear 9/11 can be stopped.

Graham Allison is the director of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School. He served as assistant secretary of defense for policy and plans, and is the author of “Nuclear Terrorism: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe (Macmillan, 2005),” in which the argument stated here is developed at book length.

Courtesy 2008 Yale Center for the Study of Globalization http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/display.article?id=10503