- LOS ANGELES -- The
Bush administration insists that its top priority is keeping weapons of
mass destruction out of the hands of terrorists. But in a withering new
book, one of America's foremost nuclear weapons experts argues that the
White House has been so heedless of the threat that nuclear armageddon
in one or more US cities is now "more likely than not" over the
next decade.
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- Graham Allison, a former defence official under both
Republican and Democratic administrations and now a leading researcher
at Harvard, describes the Bush administration as "reckless" for
its failure to secure fissile materials around the world and its apparent
lack of interest in preventing North Korea and Iran from becoming nuclear
powers. In his book Nuclear Terrorism: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe,
Mr Allison lays out a series of measures to minimise the risk that al-Qa'ida
or another group could either build or buy a nuclear weapon and then smuggle
it into the United States.
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- He demonstrates that the Bush White House, for all its
bullish rhetoric, has taken none of them.
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- "No one observing the behaviour of the US government
after 9/11 would note any significant changes in activity aimed at preventing
terrorists from acquiring the world's most destructive technologies,"
he writes. At the same time, al-Qa'ida is known to have taken steps to
obtain nuclear weaponry since 1992, and has publicly stated its ambition
to kill four million Americans.
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- "On the current course," Mr Allison concludes,
"nuclear terrorism is inevitable." The most likely scenario,
according to security experts, is that al-Qa'ida or another group would
buy or steal fissile material and then construct its own bomb, using science
that has been in the public domain for 30 years. Hence the urgent need
to secure the world's relatively restricted stockpiles of that fissile
material - either highly enriched uranium or plutonium. However, a programme
for securing nuclear materials in the former Soviet Union, pioneered by
US Senators Sam Nunn and Richard Lugar, has been so poorly funded that
it will take another 13 years to finish at the current pace. "The
incandescent and incontestable fact is that in the two years after 9/11,
fewer potential nuclear weapons' worth of highly enriched uranium and plutonium
were secured than in the two years before 9/11," Mr Allison told The
Independent on Sunday.
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- A further 43 countries have varying amounts of fissile
material as by-products of their civilian nuclear power industries, but
as things stand the US is only willing to take this off their hands if
they pay for the privilege.
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- Mr Allison described the Bush administration's approach
to North Korea and Iran as "paralysis" - offering neither carrots
nor sticks to prevent those countries becoming full nuclear weapons states.
If North Korea developed a full nuclear production line - carrying with
it the distinct possibility of selling parts or technology to the highest
bidder - it would be "the greatest failure of American diplomacy in
all our history".
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- A nuclear North Korea would almost certainly induce Japan
and South Korea to develop their own programmes. And the Bush administration
is talking about new nuclear tests and the development of so-called "mini-nukes"
and atomic bunker-buster bombs.
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- Mr Allison ascribed many of the White House's failures
to the war in Iraq, which, he says, has diverted attention and eaten up
resources in a country that had neither nuclear weapons nor a nuclear weapons
programme.
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- But he also accused the White House of a failure of imagination,
an odd combination of denial and fatalism."They don't get that this
is a preventable catastrophe," he said. An effective "war on
nuclear terrorism", Mr Allison argued, would cost around $5bn (£2.75bn)
per year. "In a current budget that devotes more than $500bn to defence
and the war in Iraq," he suggested, "a penny of every dollar
for what Bush calls 'our highest priority' would not be excessive."
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- © 2004 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story=553841
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