Time and time again, politicians, pundits, and security experts have painted the terrifying picture of a mushroom cloud looming over the vaporized remains of an American city.  If you look at the budget for missile defense (DoD has requested approximately $10 billion for FY 2011) you’d think that the most likely attack on the United States would come via a ballistic missile, given that what the U.S. spends on missile defense greatly exceeds combined spending on domestic and international maritime and port of entry interdiction efforts and nuclear detection activities.

The dirty little secret of domestic nuclear defense, however, is that should the US ever come under nuclear attack, odds are that it will not come from a missile launch.  Instead, a nuclear device or dirty bomb is likely to be delivered from a non-missile source, such as a container entering a U.S. port..  On June 30, witnesses at a hearing of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs revealed that the US remains woefully vulnerable to this kind of threat…

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Nukes on a Blog, Security Matters, nuclear weapons, border security, missile defense, nuclear terrorism (all tags)

The latest Bunn Bible was released today to coincide with the Nuclear Security Summit. Bunn places great emphasis on the need for sustainable, lasting security upgrades and protection for vulnerable nuclear materials. This is a point worth remembering as the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction program approaches its 20th birthday. The United States needs to make sure not only that all the remaining unsecured material worldwide gets locked down soon, but also that the already-secured material remains “effectively and lastingly protected,” as Bunn writes.

His key conclusions include:

--Today, the world is not yet on track to succeed in achieving effective security for all stockpiles of nuclear weapons and weapons-usable nuclear materials within four years.

--There have been over 18 documented cases of theft or loss of plutonium or highly enriched uranium (HEU), the essential ingredients of nuclear weapons.

--To date, the United States has helped remove all the HEU from more than 47 facilities in countries around the world.

--During FY2009, security and accounting upgrades were completed at 29 additional weapons-usable nuclear material buildings in Russia, bringing the total for such buildings upgraded in Russia and the Eurasian states to 210, only 19 short of the target of 229 buildings to be completed through FY2012.

--[T]he highest risks of nuclear theft today are in: Pakistan, Russia, and HEU-fueled research reactors.

--But serious risks remain, as evidenced by recent incidents at nuclear sites and ongoing cases of theft or loss of weapons-usable nuclear material. Upgraded security systems will not last forever unless states provide the resources to sustain them and write and enforce rules that require sites and transporters to maintain effective security and accounting systems. Strong security cultures—in which all relevant staff take security seriously, every day—are also an essential component of effective nuclear security.

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Nukes on a Blog, Russia, Nuclear Terrorism (all tags)

Jason Sigger skillfully critiques Elaine Grossman’s recent story on Pentagon counter-WMD efforts. His closing argument about the value of the military’s role is spot on. Yet I question whether elevating nuclear terrorism’s prominence in U.S. defense white papers and making the corresponding alterations to operational programs ought to be labeled “wasting assets” simply because we all agree that nuclear terrorism is less likely than other threats. It’s important to differentiate between the rhetorical flourishes of national security commentators (“Give me what I want on any issue under the sun or NUCLEAR TERRORISM!!!”), which understandably irk, and the actual allocation of resources (only two-tenths of one percent of U.S. security spending goes toward helping foreign governments stop the theft of nuclear materials). Is two-tenths of one percent wasted on protecting against a contingency that, were it to occur, would produce catastrophic consequences?

Max Bergmann bonks the notion that New START ratification can be de-politicized. Learn it, live it, love it: “[I]t makes little sense to pursue a ratification strategy that seeks to ‘de-politicize’ treaty ratification, when it is clear that treaty opponents will in fact aggressively politicize treaty ratification,” writes Bergman. Not to say that winning in Box #1 will be easy, of course.

The Stimson Center last week released its analysis of the FY 2011 international affairs budget request. There are big increases across the board.

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Nukes on a Blog, Table Scraps, Nuclear Terrorism, FY2011 Budget Request (all tags)

How to guide

I’ve written some version of this sentence about 10 bazillion times: “The United States must prepare itself to overcome the new threats of the 21st century, including nuclear terrorism.” But is the threat of nuclear terrorism actually new?

Because transnational terrorist organizations today are more prevalent, more organized, more determined, and more lethal than ever before, the threat of nuclear terrorism in the 21st century can indeed be described as new or unprecedented.

Since the dawn of the Atomic Age, however, analysts have recognized that the mere existence of these weapons made catastrophic terrorist-style attacks possible. This was made clear to me today as I read One World or None.

This short volume, which originally appeared in 1946 but was reissued in 2007, contains more prescience per page than anything I’ve ever read on nuclear issues. Why did the contributors, who were mostly scientists, see the nuclear future so much more clearly than other policymakers at the time? “The answer is surprising in its simplicity,” Richard Rhodes notes in the preface. “The scientists had done the numbers. They understood, as the statesmen and generals did not, that nuclear energy represented a vast change of scale.”

In his chapter titled “The New Technique of Private War,” Edward U. Condon evaluated what nuclear energy’s vast scale meant in the context of possible sabotage. If one were to change “special agent” to “terrorist”, Condon’s passage below could have made a rather eloquent appearance in the 2010 QDR:

In the age of atomic explosives the special agent has not been freed from the traditional restriction of his profession—his physical means must still be small. But no longer does this connote small destruction.

Expanding upon Robert Oppenheimer’s impish observation that only a screwdriver could detect atomic devices smuggled into the United States, Condon powerfully described the nation’s vulnerability to a terrorist-style nuclear attack. Remember, this was written in 1946:

We must accept the fact that in any room where a file case can be stored, in any district of a great city, near any key building or installation, a determined effort can secrete a bomb capable of killing a hundred thousand people and laying waste every ordinary structure within a mile. And we cannot detect this bomb except by stumbling over it, by touching it in the course of our detailed inspection of everything within a box or case or enclosure the size of a large radio cabinet, everywhere in every room of every house, every office building, and every factory of every city, and every town of our country.

Parts of One World or None certainly show their age. Yet Condon’s words demonstrate that although we have successfully prevented all-out nuclear war, we have yet to protect ourselves against another fundamental threat in the Atomic Age: the nearly unstoppable power nuclear weapons can provide to individuals hell-bent on inflicting catastrophic death and destruction.  

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Nukes on a Blog, Nuclear Posture Review, Read This, Nuclear Terrorism (all tags)