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The Fear That Terrorism Will Go Nuclear by Steve Coll, The Washington Post, February 10, 2005 Traditional thinking, focused on governments, still dominates US weapons policy, writes Steve Coll. At a recent conference on the future of al-Qaeda sponsored by the Los Alamos National Laboratory, I posed a dark question to 60 or so nuclear weapons scientists and specialists on terrorism and radical Islam: how many of them regarded the probability of a nuclear fission bomb attack on US soil in the next several decades as negligible - say, less than 5 per cent? At issue was an explosion as big or bigger than the one that destroyed Hiroshima that could claim hundreds of thousands of lives, rather than an easier-to-mount but less lethal radiological attack. Amid sombre silence, three or four hands went up. This grim view, echoed in other quarters of the national security bureaucracy, can't be dismissed as Bush Administration scare-mongering. "There has been increasing interest by terrorists in acquiring nuclear weapons," Mohamed ElBaradei, the Egyptian director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said recently. "I cannot say 100 per cent that it hasn't happened [already]." But there is little specific, rigorous, apolitical discussion of this threat available to the public. In focusing all-out on nuclear aspirants such as Iran and North Korea, the US may be distracting itself from a graver problem. A time traveller tuning in to the American discussion about nuclear proliferation early in 2005 might think the dial had been accidentally set to 1965. Then, as now, US arms control debate focused heavily on the fear that too many governments would go nuclear. The Bush Administration recognises that catastrophic terrorism has changed the context in which states own or seek to acquire nuclear weapons. Yet traditional non-proliferation thinking, focused on governments, still dominates US policy. When George Bush mentioned nuclear dangers in his State of the Union address, he referred only to the problem of governments seeking weapons. That challenge remains urgent, but it does not explain the gloom at Los Alamos. A startling number of US nuclear and terrorism specialists believe the threat of a jihadi nuclear attack in the medium term is very serious. They recognise that as a technical and scientific matter, such an attack can be very difficult for private groups to pull off. They fear it anyway. They may have professional incentives to conjure the worst case, but I believe this to be their honest assessment. At the centre of their pessimism stands Osama bin Laden. Some of these analysts may lean towards pessimism because, with the stakes so high, they would rather be wrong than fail to anticipate a preventable attack. In 1998, Richard Clarke, a White House aide, was accused of scare-mongering about a little-known terrorist named Osama bin Laden to win budgetary funds from Congress. September 11 taught us that Chicken Little sometimes gets it right. But the failures to correctly assess Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction showed he sometimes gets it wrong. By 2001, al-Qaeda had a formal headquarters, management committees, a dozen or more training facilities, global recruiting centres, a few thousand sworn members and thousands of other followers. Today al-Qaeda is no longer much of an organisation. Its headquarters have been destroyed, its leadership scattered, or dead or in jail. Since the late 1980s and certainly since 1991, bin Laden has seen the US as the principal invader of the Muslim world because of its support for the Saudi royal family, Israel and other Middle Eastern governments he labels apostate. His inspiration is the American atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which he says shocked Japan's fading imperial government into a surrender it might not otherwise have contemplated. Bin Laden has said he seeks nuclear weapons not only because it is God's will, but because he wants to do to American foreign policy what the US did to Japanese imperial surrender policy. It's difficult to doubt bin Laden's intent. There is evidence that he and his allies have experimented with chemical and biological weapons. But in public, bin Laden talks mainly about nuclear bombs. As far as is known, he and his followers lack the capability to carry out a significant attack. Given the pressure he is under, it is difficult to imagine how bin Laden will ever regain the space he would need to carry out or closely supervise such a complicated attack himself. Yet as long as he is at large, he will at the least seek to inspire others to act on his behalf. He has helped to radicalise several individual scientists associated with Pakistan's nuclear program. And his rationale for attacking the far enemy has been globally distributed, on satellite television and the internet. The Washington Post ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Push to Redesign Nuclear Warheads Ignites Arms Race Fears By William Broad,
February 9, 2005 Worried that the ageing US nuclear arsenal is increasingly fragile, scientists have begun designing a new generation of nuclear arms meant to be sturdier and more reliable and to have longer lives. US officials say the program could help shrink the US nuclear arsenal and the high cost of its maintenance. But critics say it could needlessly resuscitate the complex of factories and laboratories that make nuclear weapons and could possibly ignite a new arms race. So far, the warhead design effort involves three nuclear weapons laboratories - Los Alamos, Livermore and Sandia. Bomb experts at these heavily guarded facilities are now scrutinising secret arms data gathered over a half century for clues about how to achieve the new reliability goals. The relatively small initial program, involving fewer than 100 people, is expected to grow and produce finished designs in the next five to 10 years, culminating, if approval is given, in prototype warheads. Most important, officials say, the effort marks a fundamental shift in design philosophy. For decades, bomb makers sought to use the highest technologies and most innovative methods. The resulting warheads were lightweight, powerful and in some cases so small that a dozen could fit on a slender missile. The American style was distinctive. Most other nuclear powers, years behind the atomic curve and often lacking top skills and materials, settled for less. Their nuclear arms tended to be ponderous if dependable, more like Fords than Ferraris. Now, American designers are studying how to reverse course and make arms that are more robust, in some ways emulating their rivals in an effort to avoid the uncertainties and deteriorations of nuclear old age. US experts worry that critical parts of the arsenal, if ever needed, may fail. Originally, the roughly 10,000 warheads in the US arsenal had an expected lifetime of about 15 years. The average age is now about 20 years, and some are much older. In November, Congress approved a small, largely unnoticed budget item that started the new design effort, known as the Reliable Replacement Warhead program. Officials say the designs could eventually help recast the nuclear arsenal with warheads that are more rugged and have much longer lifetimes. "It's important," said John Harvey of the National Nuclear Security Administration, which oversees the arsenal. "Our labs have been thinking about this problem off and on for 20 years," he said. "The goal is to see if we can make smarter, cheaper and more easily manufactured designs that we can readily certify as safe and reliable for the indefinite future - and do so without nuclear testing." But arms control advocates say the program is unneeded and dangerous. They said it could start a new arms race if it revived underground testing and that its invigoration of the nuclear complex might aid the design of warheads with new military capabilities, possibly making them more tempting to use in a war. "The existing stockpile is safe and reliable by all standards," said Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association in Washington. "So to design a new warhead that is even more robust is a redundant activity that could be a pretext for designing a weapon that has a new military mission." The New York Times |
