http://www.currentargus.com/ci_4317028 Terror's long shadow Despite efforts, U.S. remains vulnerable to nuclear attack
By John Aloysius Farrell Post Washington Bureau Chief DenverPost.com Washington - To test America's defenses against nuclear terrorism, congressional investigators placed radioactive material in the trunks of two rental cars and set out to enter the United States from Canada and Mexico. U.S. border guards halted the vehicles when the hidden cargo triggered high-tech radiation detectors. But the "terrorists" talked their way into the country with the help of forged documents "that my 20-year-old son could easily develop with a simple Internet search," said Sen. Norm Coleman, R-Minn., chairman of the investigative subcommittee of the Senate's homeland security committee. The episode last December, disclosed at a Senate hearing in March, is emblematic of the government's efforts to keep terrorists from detonating nuclear weapons on American soil, which President Bush regards as the single greatest terrorist threat. The U.S. has allocated billions to anti-terrorism measures and bought piles of expensive gadgetry, but glaring vulnerabilities persist. "We have spent money freely and wildly, but ... what we have to show for it is extraordinarily difficult to determine," said Dr. Irwin Redlener, director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University in New York. "The question is: Are we safer?" he said. "That's where the answers start to get very murky. There are things that have been deployed that have turned out to be failures." Since the terrorist attacks on America five years ago today, Congress has appropriated more than $5 billion for radiation detectors, border guards, shipping safeguards and security upgrades, according to a Harvard University study. The U.S. has provided paychecks for foreign weapons scientists, bolstered defenses at Russian arsenals and stockpiled emergency drugs and supplies. But the U.S. effort is still uncoordinated and scattershot, experts say, and in need of focused leadership that has the clout to get things done. "The size of the problem still totally dwarfs the policy response," Thomas Kean, Republican chairman of the 9/11 commission, told a congressional hearing in March. "The ... (U.S.-backed) program to secure nuclear materials in the former Soviet Union is now 14 years old," Kean said. "And about half of the nuclear materials in Russia still have no security upgrades whatsoever. At the current rate of effort, it is going to take another 14 years to complete the job. And is there anybody anywhere who thinks in this country we have 14 years? "This is unacceptable. Bin Laden and the terrorists will not wait." The 9/11 commission, in its final report card last December, gave the Bush administration and Congress a "D" for failing to mount the "maximum effort" needed to secure weapons of mass destruction. "Countering the greatest threat to America's security is still not the top national security priority of the president and the Congress," the 9/11 panel said. The Nuclear Threat Initiative, or NTI, a group whose leadership includes billionaires Ted Turner and Warren Buffett, former Democratic Sen. Sam Nunn of Georgia and Republican Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana, warned in July that "urgent actions are needed to prevent a nuclear 9/11." "A dangerous gap remains between the urgency of the threat of nuclear terrorism and the scope and pace of the U.S. and world response," wrote Harvard researchers Matthew Bunn and Anthony Wier, the authors of the NTI study. "There is some good news to report, but there is still far too much bad news." Bush aware of threat The administration knows it has a long way to go to secure the nation, especially against a nuclear attack. The Bush administration recognizes the importance of the issue and is proud of its accomplishments yet acknowledges that the job is incomplete, said Frances Townsend, the White House homeland security director. The president "often" reminds her that nuclear terrorism is "the greatest threat," said Townsend. "We have made tremendous progress by working closely with the international and scientific communities to control nuclear materials and improve radiation detection and cargo screening. "More work needs to be done," said Townsend, "but today our nation is much more secure and prepared than it was five years ago." Yet government auditors have uncovered some spectacular flaws in U.S. efforts: The State Department, for many years, supplied foreign countries with radiation detectors that the Energy Department's own experts deemed ineffective. A multimillion-dollar fortress, built with U.S. funds in Russia to secure nuclear warheads, sat empty for more than two years as a result of diplomatic squabbling. A radiation portal - intended to detect nuclear material in passing vehicles - was installed on a dead-end road in one European country, a mobile sensor unit never left the garage in another, and equipment sat idle in the basement of the U.S. Embassy in one Baltic nation for lack of electric power. Corrupt foreign border guards are an endemic problem - so much so that U.S. officials are looking to install radiation portals on both sides of select border crossings worldwide, in the hope that one country's guards are honest. Another drawback to the $400,000 machines are false alarms - triggered by natural radiation levels in innocuous items like cat litter or bananas - that cause operators to dial down the sensitivity of the detectors. The stakes are high Although a nuclear attack is improbable, experts say a relatively small bomb could kill hundreds of thousands. The 9/11 commissioners and other security experts rank nuclear terrorism as a threat of low probability but the highest consequence. A nuclear device smaller than the bomb that leveled Hiroshima could kill 500,000 people if detonated in a crowded city like New York on a typical workday, according to the NTI. "Devastating economic aftershocks would reverberate throughout the world" as borders and ports and airports were shut down, the NTI report said. After such an attack, terrorist groups would almost certainly claim to have more nuclear arms at their disposal, spurring panic and political turmoil. Banks and mortgage and insurance companies would fail, experts say, and investors in futures and derivatives markets would go bankrupt. A Rand Corp. study released this summer found "alarming vulnerabilities" when examining the "feasible" scenario of a 10-kiloton nuclear device, smaller than the Hiroshima bomb, concealed in a cargo container and detonated at the port of Long Beach, Calif. The cascading effects of such an attack would make Hurricane Katrina "look like a rain shower," said Redlener. The attack would "devastate a vast portion of the Los Angeles metropolitan area," the Rand researchers said. The blast would kill 60,000 people immediately, expose another 150,000 to hazardous radiation and send 6 million refugees onto jammed highways, where they would quickly run out of gasoline, water and food. Monitoring al-Qaeda The group wants nuclear weapons, but no one knows if it has succeeded in procuring bomb components. >From its inception as an international terrorist group in the late 1980s, al-Qaeda has sought nuclear arms. Since then, the International Atomic Energy Agency has documented 18 cases of theft involving weapons-usable plutonium or enriched uranium, the key components of a bomb. No one has linked al-Qaeda to the thefts, but "we assess that undetected smuggling has occurred, and we are concerned about the total amount of material that could have been diverted or stolen in the last 13 years," the CIA warned Congress in December 2004. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the U.S. has joined with the former Soviet states to share intelligence, decommission nuclear submarines, secure warheads, employ defense scientists and put radiation-detection equipment at hundreds of border crossings and other points of entry. After 9/11, Congress launched an expensive campaign to install radiation alarms at the European and Asian ports that ship cargo to the United States. And here at home, the detectors have become common sights at docks, railheads and border crossings. After years of complaints about a lack of government coordination and action, the Bush administration launched several new initiatives in the last 18 months. In July, Bush announced that he and Russian President Vladimir Putin would lead a "Global Initiative to Combat Nuclear Terrorism." The White House also has created a Domestic Nuclear Detection Office within the Department of Homeland Security to find a technological fix. "Some actions have been taken to improve security at our seaports," said Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, chairwoman of the Senate homeland security committee. "But unfortunately, many of these initiatives have not proceeded under a comprehensive security plan ... and some of them have not been effectively implemented." Keeping nukes secure Terrorists likely could sneak a nuclear bomb into the U.S., so keeping the weapons out of their hands is critical. As of today, "if terrorists could steal, buy or make a nuclear bomb, there can be little confidence that the government could stop them from smuggling it into the United States," the NTI concluded. "Thousands of tons of illegal drugs and hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants cross U.S. borders every year, despite massive efforts to stop them. The essential ingredients of a nuclear bomb can fit easily into a briefcase, and the weak radiation these materials emit can be made quite difficult to detect with the use of modest amounts of shielding." The real key, experts said, is to lock up the world's finite amount of plutonium and enriched uranium. Of particular concern are more than 100 civilian research reactors, scattered in 40 countries, each with enough highly enriched uranium to make a nuclear bomb. These reactors are typically guarded, said former Sen. Nunn, "by an underpaid guard and a chain-link fence." "The bottom line is that insecure nuclear material anywhere in the world is a serious national-security threat to the United States," said Wier, the NTI study co-author. "We have to wrap our minds around that threat." Staff writer John Farrell can be reached at 202-662-8920 or [EMAIL PROTECTED] [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] -------------------------- Want to discuss this topic? Head on over to our discussion list, [EMAIL PROTECTED] -------------------------- Brooks Isoldi, editor [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.intellnet.org Post message: osint@yahoogroups.com Subscribe: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe: [EMAIL PROTECTED] *** FAIR USE NOTICE. This message contains copyrighted material whose use has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. 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