Most people now know that a jetliner can be a weapon. What they might not realize is that it can also serve as a nuke. Think what would have transpired if the terrorists who targeted New York's World Trade Center had chosen to ram one, or all, of the hijacked jets into a nuclear power plant. "There wouldn't be the explosion of a nuclear bomb, but you would still have the release of radioactive contamination that would produce major fallout," says Edwin S. Lyman, scientific director of the Nuclear Control Institute in Washington. In other words, another Chernobyl.
National security experts have been warning for years that the U.S. is vulnerable to a terrorist attack using "weapons of mass destruction" such as biological agents or nuclear bombs. The federal government tended to downplay those warnings. But not anymore. After the Sept. 11 attacks, the U.S. put on standby alert its Nuclear Emergency Search Team, which is trained to respond to terrorists armed with nuclear weapons. V. Alan Mode, a former division leader of the counterterrorism effort at Lawrence Livermore National Labs, says other modes of aggression, including bioterrorism, are a far likelier threat, but "the effects of a nuclear attack are so massive that you must give it a tremendous amount of respect and thought."
Other experts are on the same page. Testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last March, former Senate Majority Leader Howard H. Baker Jr., co-chair of an Energy Dept. task force on nuclear security, declared that "the most urgent unmet national security threat to the United States today is the danger that weapons of mass destruction or weapons-usable material in Russia could be stolen and sold to terrorists or hostile nation states."
MISSILES UNLIKELY. Certainly, it would be a challenge for terrorists to come up with a nuclear capability, including the missiles needed to deliver a conventional nuke. Only in Hollywood does the idea of stealing nuclear warheads find any currency. And security experts who fret about future airborne suicide attacks acknowledge that blowing up one of America's heavily reinforced nuclear power plants would be far from easy. (They are designed to withstand plane crashes--but so was the World Trade Center.)
The more urgent and immediate threat is that terrorists might get their hands on small amounts of weapons-grade uranium or plutonium and build a crude but still devastating bomb. Some 603 tons of these materials are stashed across the former Soviet Union, under security conditions that have raised alarms around the world. Seven years ago, the U.S. committed $2.2 billion to helping Russia protect those materials. But the U.S. General Accounting Office reported last February that only 14% of the supplies have been fully secured--and the Bush Administration recently cut the budget for the program.
The production of homemade nukes is more than a hypothetical problem. The International Atomic Energy Agency reports that illicit trafficking in nuclear materials has doubled since 1996, and it counts 370 confirmed cases of smuggling in the past eight years. A State Dept. study notes that as many as 130 terrorist groups worldwide have expressed interest in obtaining nuclear capabilities--among them Osama bin Laden's Al-Qaida. "Many of the Russian nuclear sites remain vulnerable to insiders determined to steal enough existing material to make several nuclear weapons," states a report issued by Baker's researchers. "The Task Force was advised that buyers from Iraq, Iran, and other countries have actively sought nuclear weapons-usable material from Russian sites."
"REASONABLE CHANCE." They wouldn't have to buy all that much, either. "If you had a softball-size lump of enriched uranium, some materials [mostly] available at Radio Shack, and an engineering grad of an American university, you would have a reasonable chance of making" a crude nuclear weapon, says Graham T. Allison, director of the Belfer Center for Science & International Affairs at Harvard University and an expert on nuclear terrorism. The resulting bomb could level the tip of lower Manhattan, he warns.
Perhaps most frightening is that terrorists are not constrained by the same considerations that keep nations with nuclear power from pushing the button. If such weapons were used to pursue political or nationalist goals, the deployers would reasonably fear losing public support for their agenda. Members of extremist cults suffer no such constraints, argue terrorism experts. One only need look at Ground Zero of the World Trade Center bombing and consider how much worse it could have been if the same fanatics had brought radioactive material on board.
By Catherine Arnst in New York, with William C. Symonds in Boston
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