Can nuclear weapons be put beyond the reach of terrorists? Security and intelligence experts work to step up their efforts.

by Doug Gavel

WHEN STEVEN MILLER, director of the International Security Program at the Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, envisions a nightmare terrorist scenario, his imagination doesn’t veer far from what actually occurred on September 11. In fact, he explains, the nightmare event could take place at the same location in the same city, utilizing the same mechanics, in the same time frame, with just one major difference — the terrorists would use a nuclear weapon.

“Such an attack would have killed hundreds of thousands of people, and everything up to 33rd Street [in Manhattan] would have been essentially destroyed,” Miller says. “It makes 9/11 look like a picnic.”

Indeed, Miller believes Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda operatives may have been very close to acquiring a nuclear device when they attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon a year ago. Bin Laden’s ability to do so, Miller contends, is directly related to the state of insecurity at many nuclear material storage sites spread throughout Russia and the former Soviet states.

“The [former] Soviet system of security, in which we had considerable confidence, was a highly efficient police state,” he says. “But in 1991, that state disappeared, and it was replaced by a messy quasi-democracy. The borders are now much more porous. The military has melted away. The security services are no longer as ubiquitous or ferocious.”

Whereas American nuclear storage facilities are highly secure with multiple backup systems, sophisticated personnel identification techniques, and high-tech entry and exit processes, many Russian facilities lack basic personnel ID systems, portal monitors, and exterior lighting and are surrounded by simple chain-link fences. As a result, Miller explained during the Kennedy School’s conference last spring, Undermining Terrorism: New Concepts and Policies for an Interdependent World, the opportunities for well-organized and well-financed terrorists to infiltrate a Russian nuclear storage facility are greater than ever.

In fact, Miller counts at least a dozen known incidents involving the theft of weapons-usable materials in the former Soviet Union in recent years. Several suspects have been arrested in undercover sting operations, but Miller wonders about those who may have gotten away. “One of the biggest worries, of course, is that you don’t know what you don’t know,” he says.

In partnership with the United States over the past decade, the Russians have secured between 30 to 40 percent of their “loose nukes.” That is a “step in the right direction,” Miller admits, but tens of thousands of nuclear weapons remain stored in unsecured locations in the former Soviet states, and the numbers will grow as authorities disassemble additional weapons to be decommissioned in coming years. “The persisting dilemma is that every day those materials sit out there
in conditions of insecurity, you expose yourself to the risk that someone like Osama bin Laden will figure out a way to [steal them].”

The answer, Miller says, is simple: lock down the remaining weapons-usable nuclear materials before it’s too late. “The goal of American policy ought to be to make as much fissile material as possible as secure as possible as quickly as possible,” he says. “It’s a very simple objective.”

It is also one of the objectives identified in the Hart-Rudman national security report issued in February 2001 and championed by the assiduous efforts of Graham Allison, Belfer Center director, and Matthew Bunn, senior research associate with the school’s Science, Technology, and Public Policy Program.

Current plans call for a 20-year timetable to secure the materials in Russia, a reasonable goal, perhaps, but not ambitious enough, in Miller’s opinion.

“Why don’t we want this stuff out of there yesterday?” he asks. “Why don’t we buy it as quickly as the Russians can provide it to us? The only right answer is to buy the stuff, pack it up, fly it to Oak Ridge, Tennessee (where the United States government maintains its nuclear stockpile), and put it under lock and key. Treat it like Fort Knox. From a national security perspective, that’s the only sensible answer.”

Achieving such a goal, Miller says, requires a “high-level effort to create a genuine partnership with Russia to prevent nuclear terrorism.” That partnership may be enhanced by the apparent growing relationship between President George Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin, but efforts to put the nuclear storage issue on the front burner of bilateral talks have fizzled. “Tangible progress requires real cooperation,” Miller says.

Intelligence Shift

International cooperation is seen as a growing component in the battle against global terrorism, not only in helping secure stockpiles of loose nuclear materials, but also in
the campaign to gather and share intelligence on dangerous organizations like al Qaeda that may be plotting additional attacks.

Jack Grierson, research associate with the Kennedy School’s National Security Program, has spent more than 20 years tracking terrorists while serving as a clandestine operations officer, station chief, and strategic planner for the CIA, working in such dangerous locales as Tehran, Bahrain, and Beirut. He chaired the KSG conference panel on intelligence, which focused on reforms necessary to modernize the nation’s intelligence apparatus. The hope, he says, is to transition a Cold War-era monolith into a coordinated responsive organization prepared to battle 21st century enemies.

“The problem is systematic and institutional,” he says, listing the various challenges facing the agency. “Do we have the resources available? Do we have the mind-set available? Do we have the networks available? Do we have the expertise available to bring sufficient resources to knock [terrorist networks] back?”

Change must begin on the front lines, Grierson says, with those officers recruited to gather intelligence at hot spots all over the world. “To develop a respectable corps of experts will take us 10 years, if not 20,” he writes in the panel’s final report, reflecting the thoughts of panel members. “There are large numbers of west Europeans, Russians, other former Soviet subjects, and Middle Easterners whom we could employ if we can only figure out how to vet them.”

By improving hiring and training procedures, Grierson contends, the CIA would increase its ability to disrupt terrorist organizations and, more specifically, to interrupt the flow of terrorist money around the world. But reform should not be limited to ground operations, Grierson argues, saying it must extend up the hierarchy of the intelligence community to ensure that agencies grow more sensitive to new and emerging threats.

“The grip of the Pearl Harbor paradigm could at least be loosened if community leaders exhibited attitudes like former Secretary of Defense Robert Lovett,” Grierson writes in the final report, referring to Lovett’s role as general partner of the Wall Street-based investment company Brown Brothers Harriman. “Lovett fired people for not making some wrong calls, thus ensuring an organizational culture that embraced risktaking. The (intelligence community) needs the same culture, both in operations and in analysis.”

Risktaking, Grierson believes, requires a shift in deep-
seated agency techniques and attitudes. “One of the most effective things you can do is not be reactive, not wait until the next event, but, in fact, be proactive and take the war to the enemy,” Grierson says. “We must try to stop some of this stuff, even before they think about it, but (we must also) be prepared for mistakes…because this is going to be an unpleasant, dirty war.”

Like other wars, the global war against terrorism will have many setbacks, Grierson explains, an unpleasant reality that must be accepted early on. “[These are] terribly difficult targets to get at, and even if you get at [them] you’re not going to get much,” Grierson says. “You may be 97 percent successful, but there’s still the potential of a catastrophic event.”

Such an event, Steven Miller says, could annihilate a large portion of a major U.S. city if carried out with the same precision used to plot the attacks on September 11, combined with the use of just a small amount of nuclear material absconded from the former Soviet Union.

It almost happened in 1994, when 350 grams of plutonium were smuggled on board a Lufthansa flight from Moscow to Munich. Fortunately, SWAT teams confiscated the material as soon as it arrived, but Miller believes that close call only proves his point. “It’s easy to get the stuff out of Russia because the border is so porous and everyone is so corrupt,” he says. “You can put it in your pocket and walk right down the street with it. A weapons amount of it is maybe the size of a grapefruit.”

The only viable solution, Miller contends, is to clamp down on the nuclear materials at their source — at the dozens, if not hundreds, of unsecured storage locations throughout the former Soviet Union. “If we cut loose on our side with the money and political capital needed and we get high levels of cooperation with Russia, I bet we could take care of this in a year,” he claims. “Certainly it wouldn’t take another decade.”

In the worst-case scenario, as Miller foresees, weapons-grade fissile materials in Russia will remain susceptible to theft and activation in a potentially devastating nuclear bomb. And it could happen sooner rather than later. As Miller notes, major terrorist strikes seem to be occurring about every 15 months or so. With that timetable, the next strike is on target for early next year.