Are terrorists plotting a nuclear heist?

Nuclear arms control no longer aims merely to lower the chances of attacks with weapons launched on missiles or dropped from airplanes. Today, it aspires to reduce the risk that terrorists will attack with improvised nuclear weapons, contends physicist Richard L. Garwin.

"The problem is to avoid Hiroshimas, to avoid big cities being subjected to nuclear attack in an era when it is totally incomprehensible that the Russians will use their 18,000 nuclear weapons against us," says Garwin, who notes that Pres. George W. Bush is intent on reducing spending on important nonproliferation programs while increasing money for the nation's nuclear stockpile.

Garwin, the Philip D. Reed Senior Fellow for Science and Technology at the Council on Foreign Relations, chaired the Arms Control and Nonproliferation Advisory Board of the State Department from 1993-2001. In 1998, he was a member of the Commission to Assess the Ballistic Missile Threat to the U.S., chaired by now-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

"There will be terrorist nuclear explosions in cities in the next [few] years" Garwin asserts, presenting a scenario with the potential to kill hundreds of thousands of people. "It shouldn't be imagined that a nuclear weapon made by terrorists, maybe with some advice from others and using highly enriched uranium metal, would have a low yield. It could perfectly well have a full yield of 10,000 tons of high explosives."

Reducing the odds of such an attack will require better control of highly enriched uranium-235 and plutonium--the fissile materials from which nuclear weapons are made--as well as expanded intelligence capacity, from better infiltration of terrorist groups to improved detection of smuggled weapons-grade material. Moreover, there needs to be a rapid and serious reduction of nuclear inventories, especially in the U.S. and Russia, to lessen the risk of security breaches.

"We need to spend a lot more money [on nonproliferation]," Garwin insists. "Compare the $1,000,000,000 a year spent on the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction [Program] with the $87,000,000,000 appropriation a few months ago for a year of war in Iraq--a war which was held by the possibility of weapons of mass destruction. But these are real weapons of mass destruction that we are talking about here."

Garwin, who, with Nobel Prize winner Georges Charpak, wrote Megawatts and Megatons: A Turning Point in the Nuclear Age?, says he generally favors nuclear power. However, he warns of a dangerous connection between it and weapons proliferation. States desiring nuclear weapons often choose a line of nuclear power reactors that allow them to get their hands on enriched uranium or separated plutonium. In fact, Pres. Bush has proposed that many countries not have the full fuel cycle. Operators would use reactors to produce power but forgo reprocessing, which could result in potential bomb material. Because the U.S. and Russia maintain the largest stockpiles, arms reductions among them could have the largest ripple effect in downgrading risks.

"The Soviet Union no longer exists, and the half of it that constitutes Russia and has all the nuclear weapons is not our enemy," Garwin points out. "In fact, they are our friends.... Nobody believes that Russia is intentionally going to launch nuclear weapons against the United States or that we will launch ours against them."

Nevertheless, America maintains thousands of nuclear weapons ready to launch at a moment's notice simply because the other side has the capability to do the same. "The fact that we have no interest in such a strike doesn't cut any ice in this calculus" Garwin recommends reduction from more than 10,000 weapons each to 2,000. Such scale-backs look like sacrifices, but really are in our national interests. Eventually, the number may limbo to 1,000 each, which is "enough for any conceivable purpose" Garwin is not in favor of getting rid of all nuclear weapons.

Russia has enough uranium-235 and plutonium to build tens of thousands of additional weapons. The U.S. has a program to buy 500 tons of weapons-grade uranium from Russia over the next 20 years for $12,000,000,000. The uranium from disassembled weapons eventually may find use in nuclear reactors.

For now, much of the Russian material is spread over dozens of sites, many of which are improperly safeguarded. While U.S. nuclear wastes eventually are secured in the Yucca Mountain repository in Nevada, Russian wastes are not centralized. According to Garwin, consolidating fissile material at fewer sites may help "prevent robbery, not by a few people who are amateurs but teams who are equipped with powerful weapons and some of whom are willing to die, as is the case with terrorists."

Lately, there has been pressure to add weapons to the U.S. stockpile--"bunker buster" bombs for destroying facilities built deep underground and "agent defeat" weapons for neutralizing chemical and biological agents housed in shallow underground facilities. Bunker busters, which can blow up hardened facilities down to hundreds of meters, have been in our inventory a long time. "It's the B53 nine-megaton nuclear bomb. But nine megatons exploded on the surface creates lethal fallout over thousands of square kilometers, and especially if the other side has put the hardened facility under a city. It would destroy the entire city."