Stopping a nuclear nightmare
The 20th century was the century of ideology and the wars spawned by fascism and communism. The 21st century is at risk of surpassing those evils in the depravities of unaccountable stateless terrorism coupled with access to a destructive power once a monopoly of the accountable sovereign state. The nature of the evil was manifest in the coldblooded torture and murder of the schoolchildren in Beslan. The taboo of child killing was coldbloodedly broken, a fact that has few parallels in the long history of evil.
This was made-for-TV terrorism, intended for the sole purpose of horrifying a worldwide audience. As on 9/11, we were made once again to witness the indefensible--and to recognize once again how utterly defenseless mankind is against nihilists who value human life--including their own--so cheaply. Russia will not respond by negotiating sovereignty with Chechnya, as some commentators here suggest it should. Instead, repression will follow. That's understandable--but it could be a dangerous diversion of energies. A more urgent requirement in Russia is to stop terrorists from killing on a much grander scale. The means are at hand in Russia, in the form of its weapons-usable nuclear material.
Building a bomb. Graham Allison, the founding dean of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and a former assistant secretary of defense, has expounded, in Nuclear Terrorism, an important new book, on the security risks that this deadly resource holds for the world should it fall into terrorists' hands, or hostile nation-states, and used against us. Twelve years after the dissolution of the Soviet empire, Allison says, there are still thousands of weapons and tens of thousands of potential weapons in the form of fissionable material held in unsecured storage facilities across Russia.
The only practical way a terrorist organization could create a nuclear bomb is through access to fissionable material; stateless terrorists simply don't have the wherewithal, either technologically or monetarily, to manufacture the stuff themselves. That leaves them with basically two options--either win the support of a state sponsor who has fissionable material or steal it. Once they have acquired such materials, constructing a nuclear device is a very doable thing. Remember the Princeton student who, back in 1977, demonstrated in his senior thesis (he got an A) the capacity to design an inexpensive, little nuclear weapon from publicly available information? And let's not forget that A. Q. Khan, the founder of Pakistan's nuclear-weapons program, had spent a decade or more selling nuclear technology and services on the worldwide black market.
That's why it's so critical to secure, without further delay, the vast stockpiles of fissionable material that remain dangerously insecure. Even finished weapons are barely protected. A 99 percent success rate would not do; 1 percent would mean there would be some 200 nuclear weapons out of control in Russia.
And make no mistake about it--once the terrorists get hold of these materials, there is every reason to believe they could use it against America, for smuggling across its long porous borders is virtually unstoppable. The most recent estimate was that we had less than a 1 in 10 chance of detecting a nuclear cargo sent by land, sea, or air. Not to mention that no state or federal agency has jurisdiction to control the 21 American Indian reservations that stretch across hundreds of miles of our border.
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