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Unthinkable?

"An attack on an American city by terrorists armed with a small nuclear device is an even bet within a decade, some experts say"

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2004/11/21/BURRESS.TMP

Imagine a relatively small nuclear bomb of 10 kilotons exploding in San Francisco's Union Square. "Everything to the Museum of Modern Art would vaporize," writes Harvard security analyst Graham Allison in his chilling new book, "Nuclear Terrorism."

"Everything from the Transamerica building to Nob Hill would be sites of massive destruction; everything within the perimeter of Coit Tower and the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge would go up in flames."

No survivors would be found amid nearly 100 square blocks, and buildings in about 400 square blocks would be totally destroyed or left looking like the Oklahoma City federal building after it was crushed by a truck bomb.

To alert Americans to the intimate extent of the peril, Allison's book is linked to an Internet "Blast Map" showing the radius of destruction for such a nuclear device anywhere in the United States. It can be viewed by ZIP code at http://www.nuclearterror.org.

Allison and other experts agree that the most likely form of nuclear terrorism is a "dirty bomb," where radioactive material is scattered by a conventional explosive or perhaps an attack on a nuclear reactor.

But some analysts are worried more by the less likely but far more catastrophic detonation of a terrorist nuclear bomb.

"The gravest danger, however, and the one requiring the most urgent attention, is the possibility that terrorists could obtain highly enriched uranium or plutonium for use in an improvised nuclear device," according to Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind., chair of the Foreign Relations Committee, and former Sen. Sam Nunn, now head of the nonprofit Nuclear Threat Initiative.

Their warning comes in the opening pages of another sobering new book, "The Four Faces of Nuclear Terrorism," from the Center for Nonproliferation Studies in Monterey, the nation's largest nongovernmental organization focusing exclusively on nonproliferation issues. Based on a two-year study, the book says terrorist organizations are now able to build crude nuclear bombs.

This new nuclear nightmare was summoned up in the presidential campaign last month, when Vice President Dick Cheney warned in a widely reported speech:

"The biggest threat we face now as a nation is the possibility of terrorists ending up in the middle of one of our cities with deadlier weapons than have ever before been used against us -- biological agents or a nuclear weapon or a chemical weapon of some kind, to be able to threaten the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans."

The Boston Herald's story about Cheney's speech carried the headline, "Vote Kerry, get nuked, veep warns." Critics accused Cheney of election scaremongering, but analysts on both sides of the partisan divide share his assessment of the terrorist nuclear threat, even if they disagree with him about Kerry.

"Fissile material is widely available," said UC Berkeley Professor Harold Smith, a nonproliferation expert who served in the Clinton White House. "The technology is widely known. The prudent man would assume that this kind of tragedy is going to happen and should be asking himself, 'What can I do about it?' "

Fueling the alarm was an ABC News demonstration last year of how easy it would be to penetrate post-Sept. 11 security. A news team successfully sent uranium inside a shipping container from Jakarta through the Port of Los Angeles.

The shipment underscored findings of a report from the Peace Research Institute in Frankfurt, Germany, that terrorist transport of nuclear weapons by sea or by land "probably would not be detected."

The U.S. government has several approaches to reducing the danger, but critics question their adequacy. The strategies range from new radiation detectors at U.S. ports to Department of Homeland Security advice to "learn how to build a temporary fallout shelter ... even if you do not live near a potential nuclear target."

In August, San Francisco became the first port on the West Coast to receive the radiation detectors, with Oakland scheduled to be added by the end of this year.

If sufficient funding is provided, the Department of Homeland Security hopes to have the machines at all of the United States' more than 300 ports of entry -- including sea, land and air -- by the end of 2005, said Customs and Border Patrol spokesman Barry Morrissey.

Asked if the monitor would have detected the ABC News uranium shipment, Department of Homeland Security spokesman Michael Milne said, "It's designed to, yes. They should identify most sources of radiation."

UC's Smith was skeptical. "I doubt it will be very effective," he said, adding that radiation from highly enriched uranium and plutonium "is difficult to detect and easily shielded." Also, he added, the system wouldn't prevent offshore detonations inside a port harbor.

Allison welcomes the screening, but he too believes the current technology can be circumvented. "The opportunities for shielding overwhelm the current capability for finding," he said.

Allison urges that top priority be given to denying terrorists access to nuclear materials and weapons in the first place, with such steps as securing existing stockpiles and weapons, blocking production of new fissile materials, stopping more nations from acquiring nuclear arms and eliminating the nuclear black market.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., introduced legislation in April directing the president to establish a task force on removing nuclear materials from vulnerable sites around the world, but opposition turned the measure into a "sense of Congress" recommendation in this year's defense authorization bill.

Everyone agrees on one thing: A nuclear blast in a U.S. city would eclipse Sept. 11 in its horror.

"With a 10-ton nuclear weapon stolen from the former Soviet arsenal and delivered to an American city in a cargo container, al Qaeda could make 9/11 a footnote," said Allison, founding dean of Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government and a former assistant secretary of defense for policy and plans.

"And if not al Qaeda, one of its affiliates can step up, using a weapon built of (highly enriched uranium) from Pakistan or North Korea or from a research reactor in Uzbekistan," Allison wrote.

Such a bomb at noon in New York's Times Square would kill a million people in the blast itself and in collapsing buildings, fires and fallout in the following hours, he said.

"A nuclear terrorist attack is more likely than not within the next decade," he told The Chronicle. To dramatize the point, he's accepting bets, at 51-to-49 odds, on such an event.

Alarm over the prospect of a city being devastated by a terrorist nuclear bomb was sounded soon after Sept. 11, but has grown noticeably louder in recent weeks and months.

"An American Hiroshima" was the ominous title of a recent New York Times column by Nicholas Kristof. It quoted former Secretary of Defense William Perry saying there is an even chance of a nuclear terror strike in the United States in the next six years.

"We're racing toward unprecedented catastrophe," said Perry, a Stanford professor and co-director of the Stanford-Harvard Preventive Defense Project. "This is preventable, but we're not doing the things that could prevent it."

The most dangerous source of a "loose nuke" or the materials to make one, many security analysts say, are the former states of the Soviet Union, where much of the nuclear materials and weapons left over from the Cold War remain scattered and inadequately guarded.

To confront the danger, Lugar and Nunn started the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction Program, by which the U.S. government assists former Soviet states in securing nuclear materials and weapons, a program Smith implemented when he served in the White House.

That program and similar efforts, however, receive only about $1 billion a year, just a third of the amount recommended by a bipartisan presidential commission in 2001.

"Roughly two-thirds of Russia's fissile material is inadequately secured," Carl Robichaud of the Century Foundation said a critical report in August, "What the 9/11 Commission Forgot."

At the same time, fears have been fueled by mounting evidence of terrorist groups making repeated attempts to obtain nuclear materials and weapons at the same time as potential sources multiply.

Added to the stockpiles in the former Soviet Union are the contraband exports of nuclear secrets and materials from Pakistan, Iran's uranium enrichment plans and North Korean nuclear weapons development.

At Berkeley, Smith has a somber plan, not for prevention but for the harrowing days and months after such a catastrophe. He and Professor Steven Weber, director of the Institute of International Relations at UC Berkeley, propose to study what would happen if a nuclear bomb blew up in a major city somewhere in the world.

Their proposed study, for which they seek funding, would use Moscow as the hypothetical target, given the frequent terrorist strikes in Russia.

Unlike disaster-response plans already developed by the United States and other governments for a nuclear terrorist strike, the two UC researchers want to look beyond emergency response, evacuation and radiation containment.

They ask: What precautionary plans could help avert retaliation against the wrong target, mass panic, a collapse of world trade brought on by sudden closure of ports?

If Moscow were destroyed by an anonymous bomb, what could reduce the risk of Russian retaliation mistakenly launched against Chechnya or the United States?

One of their ideas is to have a team of international technical experts prepared for immediate dispatch to assess the bomb's origin by analyzing its distinctive radioactive signature, Smith and Weber said.

"A week's delay in retaliation could literally save the world," said Smith.

It's a topic so chilling that few people want to face it, Smith said. "I'm finding what I call the psychology of denial."

Yet, given al Qaeda's many efforts to acquire nuclear materials, its desire to inflict extensive casualties and the unrelenting stepping up of the scale of its attacks, the prospects of what-if must be faced, Smith and Weber said.

"I'm a great believer in having these thinking-the-unthinkable discussions up front," Weber said. "It would be irresponsible not to plan for it."