An American Hiroshima

I hate to serve as the Prophet of Nuclear Doom again this week, but a Nicholas Kristof piece in today's New York Times brings up some crucial issues:

If a 10-kiloton nuclear weapon, a midget even smaller than the one that destroyed Hiroshima, exploded in Times Square, the fireball would reach tens of millions of degrees Fahrenheit.

It would vaporize or destroy the theater district, Madison Square Garden, the Empire State Building, Grand Central Terminal and Carnegie Hall (along with me and my building). The blast would partly destroy a much larger area, including the United Nations. On a weekday some 500,000 people would be killed.

Could this happen?

Unfortunately, it could - and many experts believe that such an attack, somewhere, is likely. The Aspen Strategy Group, a bipartisan assortment of policy mavens, focused on nuclear risks at its annual meeting here last week, and the consensus was twofold: the danger of nuclear terrorism is much greater than the public believes, and our government hasn't done nearly enough to reduce it.

Graham Allison, a Harvard professor whose terrifying new book, "Nuclear Terrorism," offers the example cited above, notes that he did not pluck it from thin air. He writes that on Oct. 11, 2001, exactly a month after 9/11, aides told President Bush that a C.I.A. source code-named Dragonfire had reported that Al Qaeda had obtained a 10-kiloton nuclear weapon and smuggled it into New York City.

The C.I.A. found the report plausible. The weapon had supposedly been stolen from Russia, which indeed has many 10-kiloton weapons. Russia is reported to have lost some of its nuclear materials, and Al Qaeda has mounted a determined effort to get or make such a weapon. [Soon they'll have no problem getting one from Iran — Ed.] And the C.I.A. had picked up Al Qaeda chatter about an "American Hiroshima."

President Bush dispatched nuclear experts to New York to search for the weapon and sent Dick Cheney and other officials out of town to ensure the continuity of government in case a weapon exploded in Washington instead. But to avoid panic, the White House told no one in New York City, not even Mayor Rudy Giuliani.

Dragonfire's report was wrong, but similar reports - that Al Qaeda has its hands on a nuclear weapon from the former Soviet Union - have regularly surfaced in the intelligence community, even though such a report has never been confirmed. We do know several troubling things: Al Qaeda negotiated for a $1.5 million purchase of uranium (apparently of South African origin) from a retired Sudanese cabinet minister; its envoys traveled repeatedly to Central Asia to buy weapons-grade nuclear materials; and Osama bin Laden's top deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, boasted, "We sent our people to Moscow, to Tashkent, to other Central Asian states, and they negotiated, and we purchased some suitcase [nuclear] bombs."

Professor Allison offers a standing bet at 51-to-49 odds that, barring radical new antiproliferation steps, a terrorist nuclear strike will occur somewhere in the world in the next 10 years. So I took his bet. If there is no such nuclear attack by August 2014, he owes me $5.10. If there is an attack, I owe him $4.90.

I took the bet because I don't think the odds of nuclear terror are quite as great as he does. If I were guessing wildly, I would say a 20 percent risk over 10 years. In any case, if I lose the bet, then I'll probably be vaporized and won't have much use for money.

Unfortunately, plenty of smart people think I've made a bad bet. William Perry, the former secretary of defense, says there is an even chance of a nuclear terror strike within this decade - that is, in the next six years.

"We're racing toward unprecedented catastrophe," Mr. Perry warns. "This is preventable, but we're not doing the things that could prevent it."

In his closing paragraph, Kristof drags out the tired "Iraq is a distraction" argument and blames the Bush administration for ignoring the nuclear proliferation threat. The accusation is unfair. The nature of nuclear threats is such that we would not necessarily know of all steps taken to thwart them. It is obvious more should be done, but it is Democrat leaders who are preventing that.

Imagine the political hay Democrat strategists would make over a pre-election preemptive strike against Iran's nuclear installations. President Bush probably is aware he should mount such a strike now, but he knows it is too politically dangerous. His actions could leave the country in the hands of a President Kerry, who would spend his days in sackcloth and ashes apologizing to Iran, France, Germany and the rest of the "international community" for this dreadful US "war crime." And the nuclear terror attack would come.

Nevertheless, Kristof's threat assessment quotes and data are correct. In fact, he understates the threat by focusing on an American Hiroshima, involving a weapon of only 10 kilotons. During the Cold War, the Soviets fabricated 20,000 nuclear warheads, many in the multi-megaton class, capable of destroying entire regions of the US. Do we know where all of those are?

We conservatives would do well to keep up our ten minute lobbying against the threat of barbarians with nuclear weapons. And hope that God still has some use for our country.

For more information, see "Nuclear Terrorism" under "Entries by Topic" at at the PoliticalDevotions.com Weblog