NEW YORK — A nuclear attack on the United States by terrorists is “inevitable if the U.S. and other governments just continue to do what they are doing,” Graham Allison, author of Nuclear Terrorism: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe, said here Monday in pressing for greater security of nuclear materials.
“We are living on borrowed time. It’s more puzzling why it hasn’t already happened than why it could happen,” Allison, a director at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, said in a speech at the Council on Foreign Relations.
Pointing to the title of the book, he said the chances of such a disaster could be “reduced to virtually zero” if extra safeguards are placed on the world’s supply of weapon-grade highly enriched uranium (HEU) and plutonium (see GSN, Sept. 22).
To this end, Allison said foreign policy in the field should be based on three “no’s” — “no loose nukes,” meaning “locking down as good as gold” all existing plutonium and HEU supplies; “no new nascent nukes,” stopping additional countries, particularly Iran, from developing a nuclear program; and “no new nuclear weapons states.” On this last point, he said, there are eight nuclear weapons states “and then there’s North Korea slinking across. I would draw a bright line under the eight and say ‘that’s how many there are and there’s not going to be more.’”
This strategy requires a hard line against the nuclear ambitions of North Korea and Iran, he said. This requires “a bunch of carrots” and “a very large stick;” the carrots being economic and political incentives and the stick being military action to destroy their nuclear sites if required.
Allison said North Korea presents the greatest threat since it was more likely to sell nuclear weapons to terrorists. The communist nation will “absolutely” develop nuclear weapons “if we just keep doing what we are doing. This will be judged by historians as the worst failure in American foreign policy ever,” he said.
The Bush administration’s behavior toward North Korea has been “strange,” he added. U.S. officials have refused to negotiate bilaterally with the communist regime or offer economic incentives for it to eliminate its nuclear program. The carrots here should be “all the bribes they want” and the stick should be the warning that a nuclear North Korea will provoke a new Korean War in which North Korea would be destroyed, said Allison.
“That’s an extreme proposition justified only because when I ask myself what is the world going to look like if North Korea succeeds in having nuclear weapons. … I think that world is going to be even worse,” he said (see GSN, Sept. 28).
Allison said Iran has been clear in its objectives to produce a complete domestic nuclear cycle, but the United States alternates between “barking speeches” and “ignoring them.”
“We haven’t threatened them with anything plausible, we haven’t actually offered them anything, but we’ve told them we want them to change their regime (and) we don’t want you to have nuclear weapons,” he said. The goal should be to “freeze Iran where it is today.”
The West should offer Iran “a lot of carrots” including a promise not to attack, allowing Iran to finish the Bushehr nuclear plant with the guarantee of a constant supply of nuclear fuel from Russia as long as the spent fuel is returned, and supporting European investments. He estimated that such “a grand bargain” would have an 80 percent chance of success.
The sticks should include sanctions, but “the really big stick is a credible military threat to destroy their facilities for enriching uranium and reprocessing plutonium before they turn on,” Allison said.
By “locking down as good as gold” the world’s supply of highly enriched uranium and plutonium, Allison said he meant the nuclear material should be as completely secured as the U.S. stock of gold.
“Locking it down at the source is the point of greatest leverage” to prevent terrorists from getting nuclear weapons, he said.
The U.S. Cooperative Threat Reduction Program, which is designed to secure all Russian nuclear weapons and fissile materials, has succeeded in securing half the Russian materials after 13 years at a cost of $1 billion per year, he said. The present schedule, which Allison said the Bush administration endorses, means the job will not be finished until 2020. He added the Democratic presidential candidate, Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, says it can be completed in four years.