#7
Christian Science Monitor
November 23, 2001
Dust off those reports on nuclear threats
By Daniel Schorr
WASHINGTON - In my somewhat chaotic filing system, I have a collection of
documents labeled WMD for "weapons of mass destruction." They are
mostly reports by official and scholarly panels on the looming threats of
chemical, biological, and nuclear warfare. It is remarkable how little attention
these reports have received until lately.
To pick a few off the pile, there is the 1998 report of the Harvard-Stanford
Preventive Defense Project against Catastrophic Terrorism led by former Defense
Secretary William Perry and former Assistant Secretary Ashton Carter. It calls
for mobilization in anticipation of an emergency resulting from an act of
terrorism.
There is a booklet compiled by the McCormick Tribune Foundation last year
titled "Catastrophic Terrorism: Uncertain Response." Then, a 1998
report of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, warning that some
college students have designed workable models of atomic bombs.
On the more official side, the January report of an Energy Department task
force chaired by former Sen. Howard Baker and former White House counsel Lloyd
Cutler, stressing the need to control "loose nukes," especially in
Russia. A 1998 report of the US Commission on National Security, headed by
former Sens. Gary Hart and Warren Rudman, calls for more attention to terrorist
dangers.
All these and more are being dusted off now that Osama bin Laden has claimed
to have nuclear weapons, and especially now that he may be feeling increasingly
besieged. There is new attention to the testimony of an Al Qaeda member last
winter in federal court in New York about meetings aimed at acquiring nuclear
fuel on the black market, probably from a former Soviet state. Now, in The
Economist magazine, Harvard's Graham Allison, former assistant secretary of
Defense, reports on terrorist groups trying to break into Russian nuclear
storage sites and the possibility that up to 40 KGB suitcase nuclear bombs are
not accounted for.
Last year, says Mr. Allison, the CIA intercepted a message in which a member
of the Al Qaeda group boasted of plans for an American Hiroshima. Now, perhaps,
the Bush administration will consider restoring some of the funds cut from the
Nunn-Lugar Program, which in 10 years has paid for defusing 5,000 nuclear
weapons in the former Soviet Union.
Maybe we needed Osama bin Laden to prod the United States government to take
the nuclear threat seriously.
Daniel Schorr is a senior news analyst for NPR.
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