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Photo by Scott Quintard UCLA
Photo
Harvard's Graham Allison, an expert on nuclear terrorism. |
Doctrine of Three noS
Preventing nuclear terrorism
BY AJAY SINGH
UCLA Today Staff
A month after the 9/11 attacks, Vice President Dick Cheney and
several hundred government officials evacuated Washington, D.C.,
in response to a CIA report that Al Qaeda had smuggled a small,
Hiroshima-style atomic bomb into the country.
Although the intelligence turned out to be faulty, a nuclear terrorist
attack on the United States is not just feasible but entirely possible,
warned Graham Allison, a leading expert on nuclear terrorism, in
a well-attended lecture at the Faculty Center Dec. 2.
“A nuclear 9/11 is the ultimate form of terrorism,”
said Allison, the Douglas Dillon Professor of Government at the
Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. “But the
good news is that it’s also the ultimate preventable catastrophe.”
That message, in fact, forms the subtitle of Allison’s latest
book, “Nuclear Terrorism: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe”
(Times Books, 2004), which was published last August.
The threat of nuclear terrorism doesn’t just come from nuclear
bombs, said Allison; terrorists can also use plutonium and highly
enriched uranium to make nuclear bombs. These materials are “nascent
bombs,” he explained, that can be packed into an SUV and detonated
in any crowded American city, instantly killing as many as half
a million people.
Nuclear terror can be prevented by practicing what Allison called
the “Doctrine of Three Nos”: no loose nukes, no new
nascent nukes and no new nuclear states. Ensuring “no loose
nukes” would require that the United States and Russia, which
together own about 95% of all nuclear weapons and materials, enforce
a new international security pact aimed at preventing terrorists
from acquiring nuclear weapons or their components.
Hundreds of nuclear bombs are currently stored without adequate
security precautions, especially in Russia. “Do we know how
to lock up things that we don’t want people to steal?”
Allison asked. “How much gold does the U.S. lose from Fort
Knox? Not an ounce. So could you imagine locking up nuclear weapons
as well as gold? It’s a big but feasible undertaking.”
Making certain that terrorists don’t get their hands on nascent
nukes is more complex, said Allison, because it means “there’s
not going to be any new national production of highly enriched uranium
or plutonium — and the only vivid test case of that today
is Iran.”
Iran recently pledged to temporarily stop constructing factories
that would allow it to enrich uranium and reprocess plutonium. “That
has got to be made a permanent or long-term moratorium,” Allison
said. He recommended that Washington offer Iran “a grand bargain”
for denuclearization and pledge that the United States will not
attack Iran to depose its theocratic regime.
“But for that deal to be struck, I believe somebody has to
be able to pose a credible military threat to destroy [Iran’s
processing] factories before they become operational,” Allison
said. Deterrence can be effective, he added, but not the way it
has been exercised in Iraq, where “we shot the wrong guy.”
The test case for no new nuclear states, the most challenging of
the three nos, is North Korea, which Allison described as “the
most promiscuous proliferator on Earth.” Believed to already
possess six to eight nuclear weapons, North Korea is “completing
its factories, which would allow it to produce another dozen bombs
a year,” Allison said.
On a 10-point scale of danger, said Allison, North Korea is about
nine, Iran four and Iraq not even one. Americans should be happy
the United States hasn’t yet been attacked, he added. But
unless urgent steps are taken to stop nuclear terror, Americans
are “living on borrowed time.”
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