Nunn: Terrorists winning the race to acquire nuclear weapon

“We are in a race between cooperation and catastrophe, and the threat is outrunning our response,” said Nunn, D-Ga., a former Senate Armed Services chairman who now leads the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a group that promotes nonproliferation issues.

Nunn’s comments came as part of a public discussion following up on the recommendations made a year ago by an independent commission that investigated the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Although the government has enacted about half the recommendations — including creation of a national intelligence czar, Nunn said it has largely ignored those concerning the need to find, catalog and destroy plutonium and uranium. “Cradle-to-grave” monitoring of these materials is perhaps the most critical component of the war on terror, he said.

Part of the difficulty, Nunn said, is the effort requires broad international support — particularly from Russia, where hundreds of tons of loose nuclear material reportedly sit unprotected.

“We don’t know how many tactical weapons the Russians have or where they are located,” Nunn said. “We hope they do, but we’re not confident of that.”

Although President Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin have agreed in principle to work together on harnessing these materials, Nunn said the negotiations have been scuttled by lesser concerns, such as deciding who would be liable should something go wrong.

There is no greater international threat than a weapon of mass destruction falling into the hands of terrorists, Nunn said, and it would be practically impossible to avert an attack once that happens.

“The hardest place for terrorists to achieve their purpose of getting a nuclear weapon is where it is situated, where it is located,” Nunn said. “Once they have got it, dealing with it in nuclear commerce is really like a needle in a haystack.”

Former Indiana Rep. Tim Roemer, who was a member of the 9/11 Commission, moderated the discussion and agreed the Bush administration and Congress had done virtually nothing since last July to curb nuclear proliferation.

“The terrorists keep on expediting their timetable and putting more urgency into it, but we seem to be getting more complacent and skating on thinner ice,” Roemer said.

Roemer cited the need to establish a Counter-Proliferation Center under the new Director of National Intelligence office. That was part of the 9/11 Commission’s recommendations and was in the legislation that created the director’s office, but little has been done, Roemer said.

Instead, Roemer said, almost 90 percent of all money spent on averting terrorist attacks since Sept. 11, 2001, has focused on correcting the last one rather than predicting the next.

Ashton Carter, co-director of the Preventive Defense Project, said the American effort has been focused too much on people and too little on materials. Some of the nuclear materials in question have a half-life of millions of years, he said.

“Think how many turns of the wheel in human history, how many weirdo groups, how many cults, how many movements, how many countries with unstable rulers there could be in the lifetime of these materials,” Carter said. “Once they’re made, they are a lasting danger to humanity.”

Nunn said a nuclear attack on an American city would not only be catastrophic but give all terrorists the leverage of blackmail.

“Can you imagine people claiming all over the globe that they’re going to blow up another city after the first one goes up?” Nunn said. “That’s the kind of horror we would face.”

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On the Net:

Nuclear Threat Initiative: http://www.nti.org/