Preventing the unthinkable.

• Author: Gallucci, Robert L.
• Position: Nuclear Terrorism: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe - Book Review

Graham Allison, Nuclear Terrorism: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe (New York: Times/Henry Holt, 2004), 263 pp., $24.

IT IS BECOMING common for government officials, members of Congress, national security commentators and the media in general to identify a terrorist attack on an American city with a nuclear weapon as the most serious threat to our national security today. But it has taken some years for this wisdom to become conventional, and that is a little surprising. For 15 years, experts have been warning about the huge stockpiles of poorly secured fissile material, highly enriched uranium and plutonium in the former Soviet Union. Over the years, we have gotten the details on how much material is located at which facilities, in what form it can be found, and even the specifics on the inadequacies of internal and external security at each. We also learned that those responsible for securing it were poorly paid, that corruption was rampant in these societies and that organized crime was thriving. With hundreds of thousands of kilograms of the stuff to worry about, and only five kilos required to make a Nagasaki-sized bomb, supply seemed to be plausibly available if not assured. Demand, if our assessments of the intentions of Libya, Iraq, Iran and North Korea, to name a few, were at all accurate, also appeared to be high.

And all this was on top of the concern about thousands of nuclear weapons in Russia, some of which might also be had for the right price. As with fissile material, security, we learned, was uneven, with particular concern focused on tactical nuclear weapons because they were more portable and perhaps protected by less sophisticated measures for preventing unauthorized use. And then there were the nuclear scientists and engineers themselves, those who knew how to build nuclear weapons, more than 10,000 of them in Russia, who were suddenly underemployed or unemployed. They might be available too.

Although all this was well reported and serious government programs were created--the Nunn-Lugar legislation, the Cooperative Threat Reduction Program, the International Science and Technology Center--to address vulnerable weapons, material and scientists, the threat persisted for a decade, into the new Bush Administration. Then the events of 9/11 occurred.

Overnight, attacks on New York City and Washington brought home the reality of American vulnerability to the country's leadership. Not since the British burned our capital...