Are terrorists plotting a nuclear heist?

• Position: Arms Control

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...