The ongoing failure of imagination - Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

[chat_noir]

snip

In sum, my best judgment is that based on current trends, a nuclear terrorist attack on the United States is more likely than not in the decade ahead. Developments in Iraq, Iran, and North Korea leave Americans more vulnerable to a nuclear 9/11 today than we were five years ago. Former Defense Secretary William Perry has said that he thinks that I underestimate the risk. In the judgment of most people in the national security community, including former Sen. Sam Nunn, the risk of a terrorist detonating a nuclear bomb on U.S. soil is higher today than was the risk of nuclear war at the most dangerous moments in the Cold War. Reviewing the evidence, Warren Buffett, the world's most successful investor and a legendary oddsmaker in pricing insurance policies for unlikely but catastrophic events like earthquakes, has concluded: "It's inevitable. I don't see any way that it won't happen." <18>

...

But what has been done on these fronts to combat nuclear terrorism? Are we any safer from a nuclear terrorist attack than we were on 9/11?

After the Trade Center towers fell, President George W. Bush declared war on terrorism; toppled the Taliban, eliminating Al Qaeda's sanctuary in Afghanistan; and articulated a new doctrine in which the United States would "make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them." The Bush administration made an important conceptual advance in recognizing that the gravest danger lies in what Vice President Dick Cheney termed the "nexus between terrorists and weapons of mass destruction." To minimize that threat, the United States successfully sponsored U.N. Security Council Resolution 1540, which requires states to criminalize proliferation; promoted a new Proliferation Security Initiative, which expands upon existing legal frameworks to allow the interception of WMD-related cargo; and persuaded other members of the G-8 Global Partnership to match a U.S. commitment of $1 billion annually over the next decade to secure and eliminate former Soviet nuclear weapons. Furthermore, in February 2005 Bush leveraged his personal friendship with Russian President Vladimir Putin to reach an agreement at Bratislava that each leader would make securing loose nuclear material his personal responsibility and that their respective energy ministers should meet and report regularly on progress toward that goal.

On the other hand, in combating what Bush has rightly identified as "the single most serious threat to the national security to the United States" and the only terrorist attack that could kill a million Americans in one blow, the Bush administration has demonstrated a puzzling absence of focus, energy, and urgency. Indeed, some of the administration's actions have, in fact, made U.S. citizens more vulnerable.

September 11, 2001 demonstrated terrorists' capacity for mega-terrorism. As former CIA Director Porter Goss told Congress last year, "There is sufficient material unaccounted for so that it would be possible for those with know-how to construct nuclear weapon." <19> But as of 2005, as the most comprehensive review of what has and has not been done on this agenda concludes, only 54 percent of the buildings in the former Soviet Union holding nuclear material had received comprehensive security upgrades. <20>

http://www.thebulletin.org/article.php?art_ofn=so06allison

Graham Allison is director of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government. He is author of Nuclear Terrorism: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe (2004). This article draws upon and updates arguments published in Nuclear Terrorism and related publications by the author.





WE ARE LESS SAFE THAN WE WERE 5 YEARS AGO

[Greeby]

1. The clock hasn't changed, has it?

:scared:

Edit - I just checked, it's still seven minutes to midnight

http://www.thebulletin.org/doomsday_clock/current_time.htm