Previous IFPA-Fletcher Conferences

National Security Strategy and Policy:
Planning for and Responding to Threats to the U.S. Homeland

October 28-29, 2004
Ronald Reagan Building
and International Trade Center
Washington, D.C.

Dr. Graham T. Allison, Jr., Douglas Dillon Professor of Government and Director, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University

Introduction By: Dr. Robert L. Pfaltzgraff, Jr.

Dr. Graham Allison, Jr.: Thanks very much, Bob. It’s a great pleasure for me to be here. I’ll try to make my comments within the timeframe to try to give an overview of a topic. The piece that I'm going to focus on is nuclear terrorism. The whole topic is a great topic, and I have some thoughts about the other pieces, too, but what I'm going to do is focus on nuclear terrorism for my chunk.

I think this is a relevant topic, obviously not only because it's the top of the destructive pyramid, but also it is the item that both President Bush and Senator Kerry identified in their debate as the “single-most serious threat to the national security of the United States today.” Indeed, as a reviewer in the Philadelphia Inquirer wrote last week, reviewing my book on nuclear terrorism, it starts off as follows: “The two most disagreeable men in America (at least with each other) agreed on something terribly important when they met last month for their first debate. John Kerry and President Bush both asserted that the single greatest danger facing the United States is nuclear terrorism. Their synchronized skating on this issue excited even the unexcitable moderator, Jim Lehrer, so much that he even paused to confirm it.” As you recall the debate, that’s indeed what they said.

Vice President has been out on the stump the last two weeks making the following argument: That the task for us now is, as he says, to get our mind around the concept of a nuclear bomb going off in an American city. And as he said in Ohio just last week, “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 been used against us before; indeed, even nuclear weapons threatening the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans.”

That’s the ultimate threat, he says? For us to have a strategy that’s capable of defeating that threat, you’ve got to “get your mind around that concept.” So if I were to have a little title for this session, it is “Getting Our Mind Around That Concept.” And I’ll make five points very briefly.

First, how serious is the threat of terrorists bringing nuclear bombs to American cities? And I would say President Bush and Senator Kerry have it exactly right. This is indeed the “single greatest threat to the national security of the United States.” One’s only got to try to contemplate the consequences of a nuclear bomb exploding in an American city and try to tell the story of America after such an event to try to appreciate the consequences, and then we’ve got to think about the probability of such an event, and as I lay out in this book, Nuclear Terrorism: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe, if you go through the who, what, how, when, where of a nuclear bomb going off in an American city, all the factors are strongly positive. There are people that want to do it, there are things they can do it with, and the ways of getting them here are multiple. And they could indeed have such a weapon today.

So in the book, let me see if I can get back to the slides here for a second, I give you a website. You can go to nuclearterrorism.org, you can put in the zip code that’s interesting to you and see what a ten-kiloton bomb, which was a bomb that a CIA agent code named Dragon Fire reported was in New York City one month after 9/11 in what turned out to be a false alarm, but nonetheless what the consequences would be. This would be at the White House, basically a third of a mile from ground zero everything disappears, and out to a mile the buildings look like the federal office building in Oklahoma City. So that’s at nuclearterrorism.org.

Point two. Against the single-most serious threat to American national security, strategically speaking, what level of effort is appropriate and on what timetable? I believe if you think about it in a national security strategy or defense planning framework, what level of effort is appropriate against the single-most serious threat? Everything that’s technically feasible to do, without otherwise compromising some equivalently important value. And on what timetable? The answer is ASAP, as fast as humanly possible.

Third question: What is this like, for those of us who have been in the national security business for a long time? I would say this is like what we used to, when I worked as Special Advisor to Secretary Weinberger in the Reagan Administration, we talked about so-called zero infinity paradox. The zero infinity paradox recognizes that risk is defined as probability times consequences. But if the probability of an event is very low, nearly zero, and the consequences are negative infinity, infinitely negative, how do you think about that as a planning problem? That was the problem of nuclear war. And Ronald Reagan, whose building we are in today, had a good bumper sticker for it that embodied a good part of American policy, in which he said, “A nuclear war can never be won and must therefore never be fought.”

So the proposition then with respect to that very low probability, but very, very, almost infinitely negative disutility event, namely a general nuclear war in which all Americans might die, was we would lose if we fought a nuclear war, and so everything possible had to be done to prevent a nuclear war. That didn’t mean surrendering, but it meant doing everything that was technically feasible. And at what level of effort? At whatever level of effort it took.

So I think we should think about this issue of a nuclear bomb going off in an American city a little bit like the question of nuclear war itself as we thought of it previously; that is, we simply cannot allow this to happen if there’s anything humanly and technically feasible to do to prevent it. So that’s my point three, what is this like, the zero infinity paradox.

Point four. How are we doing with respect to this single-most serious threat to American national security, as President Bush says. And I would say, in a word, poorly. Now, this is a long argument, and in my book I have a chapter called, “Through the Lens of 9/11,” in which I have to say are we doing it today, the things that we need to do, but I think the answer is no, and let me give you a few items.

One, in the two years after 9/11, the US in its working relationship with Russia secured fewer vulnerable potential nuclear weapons that could get into the hands of terrorists and come to an American city, fewer in the two years after 9/11 than in the two years before 9/11. So 9/11, we get a wake-up call, but you track the record of the evidence from DOE and you find fewer potential nuclear bombs that would, in the hands of terrorists, become this ultimate catastrophe for us.

Secondly, North Korea. What’s happened in North Korea since January 2003? And most of us who track the topic are familiar. North Korea withdrew from the Non-Proliferation Treaty, kicked out the IAEA inspectors, turned off the video cams that were 24 hours a day watching 8,000 fuel rods that contain enough plutonium for six bombs, put those fuel rods on their trucks and trucked them away to factories, and has been reprocessing them to produce plutonium for six more bombs. So the event about five weeks ago, the mysterious explosion in North Korea, CIA thought could conceivably be a nuclear weapons test, because they might have finished their reprocessing, and therefore might have enough plutonium for eight nuclear weapons.

What do we know about North Korea? The most promiscuous proliferators on earth, in the business essentially Missiles R Us; they sell missiles to whoever pays, including Yemen just in the run-up to the war with Iraq. Their cash crops, as far as I can see, are missiles, illegal drugs, which they run in diplomatic pouches and counterfeit $100 bills. They may have a fourth product line shortly, if they're successful with respect to what they're currently trying to do, namely nuclear weapons material, or indeed, God forbid, even nuclear weapons.

So that’s the North Korean. That’s gotten much, much more dangerous today than it was in January 2003.

Thirdly, Iran. We watch that one in the paper. What’s happened in the case of Iran? They were about years away, several years away from completing their nuclear weapons infrastructure program, which is a very substantial building program that will allow them to produce uranium and plutonium. They're now some months away from that conclusion.

So I would go through 16 more items, but if I looked at the biggies, where terrorists are going to get nuclear weapons that they bring to a place like Washington or Chicago or LA, to explode it, the potential sources of supply and the security of those sources is a more worrisome issue today than it was four years ago. So here we are with a problem that’s getting worse, not better.

Finally, point five, what should we be doing about this? The subtitle of this book, Nuclear Terrorism, which is the most important part of the book, the subtitle, is The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe. And I lay out in the book the argument for why with respect to this, the worst form of terrorism, in which hundreds of thousands of Americans could die in a single event, we have a fortunate fact that there’s a strategic narrow to the problem, a kind of chokepoint, which if we choked it hard enough, we could reduce the likelihood of this to nearly zero. And that chokepoint comes from the happy syllogism of physics: no fissile material, no fission explosion, which is the vast release of energy that produces the mushroom cloud, no nuclear terrorism.

So all we have to do, it’s a lot, but all we have to do is prevent terrorists acquiring highly enriched uranium or plutonium to prevent them creating a fission event, to prevent them conducting a nuclear terrorist attack. So the supply side of this issue, fortunately, offers us a great opportunity that doesn’t exist in the case of a bio-terrorist attack or others.

In the book, I lay out a strategy for trying to organize a campaign for preventing terrorists ever acquiring a nuclear weapon or the material from which they can make it under a doctrine of Three No’s: no loose nukes, which would lock down all weapons and material to a gold standard; secondly, no new nascent nukes, no new national production of highly enriched uranium and plutonium, and specifically a strategy for no Iranian production of uranium and plutonium; and thirdly, no new nuclear weapon states, which requires dealing with North Korea, where I also outline a strategy to that end.

But I would say with respect to prevention of nuclear terrorism, as Sam Nunn has rightly said, the strategic insight relevant to this panel is the best place for us is at the source. Go to the source, attack the source. The opportunities for the defenders are best at the source and worst for the terrorists. Every mile away from the source, it gets harder for the defender and easier for the terrorist. And by the time they get to our borders, as Steve is going to tell you, or indeed not necessarily going through a port, just going through Mexico or Canada, the way illegal things come to the US every day, or by the time they get to a city like Washington or LA, the chances of finding it are very, very slim.

So in addition to a concerted war on terrorism that takes down the perps and the breeding grounds for perps, wherever they are, working with respect to nuclear terrorism means working hard the supply side of this issue and that’s something we’re currently failing to do.

Questions and Answers

EDWARD BILPUCH: I’m Edward Bilpuch from Duke University. A comment first. I believe that the energy source of the future is a nuclear power plant, and there’s a recent report by MIT, John Deutch and Ernie Moniz, that says by the year 2050 we’ll have 1,000 to 1,500 reactors in the world. Shouldn’t we be thinking about an international reprocessing plant for all these fuel rods?

__: Thank you very much for your deliveries. I'm ... (inaudible) from the Embassy of Nigeria. On the issue of nuclear reactors, some nations are of the opinion also that they need to develop these for peaceful purpose, but how do you differentiate between developing a nuclear technology in a country for peaceful purpose and for war purpose? Or should we just abolish nuclear reactors all over the world, including in the US, and go for more friendly source of energy?

DR. ALLISON: There were two questions about nuclear items, so let me try to take them very briefly. I think the Ambassador from Nigeria mentioned that if one becomes sufficiently worried about this, maybe we should just get out of the business of civilian nuclear power plants. And there was a second question about whether the recycling of spent fuels should be internationalized.

I would say that the general proposition that we should look at the whole nuclear business through the lens of 9/11 is correct. That is, we should start with the concept of a nuclear bomb going off in an American city, and then we ought to back from that to everything that could plausibly cause that to happen, and then if those items can be addressed, we need to look at it that way. So lots of things that may have looked okay before 9/11 or before we thought about that issue may look differently.

I discussed this at some length in the book on nuclear terrorism, and I’ll just take away three points. First, for nuclear power plants per se, they present very, very little risks of providing the stuff that’s a nuclear bomb that blows up an American city. So these are small risks, and I think the Deutch/Moniz study at MIT that was referred to is a good, solid study, which makes a good argument that a sensible country would have more nuclear power plants, and the world would have more nuclear power plants as helping provide the supply of energy that we’re going to need going forward. So that’s the first point.

Second point, what is very dangerous is the capacity to enrich uranium or reprocess plutonium, because if you can make uranium or you can make plutonium, you’re 95% of the way there to having a nuclear bomb. Whereas previously we didn’t appreciate the extent of the risk that’s involved there, I say we should think about the capacity to make highly enriched uranium or plutonium, or that stuff itself, as nascent nukes. Those are nuclear bombs just about to hatch. And we don’t want anymore such production lines; indeed, I would be happy to have no working production lines. But in any case, there should be no new national production lines, and that’s where we’re at the rub with Iran today, because under the current non-proliferation treaty, as it’s been interpreted, Iran is legally able to build an enrichment or reprocessing facility. That was a mistake in terms of our understanding previously, and if we look at it at through the lens of 9/11, we would say that’s not something that should happen.

Thirdly, I would say that the issue then of thinking about the whole nuclear cycle, about all things nuclear in terms of the ways in which they have positive or negative effects on the risk of a nuclear bomb going off in an American city is a right way to work the problem, and I'd say that fortunately most of what’s the nuclear fuel cycle, if appropriately secured and appropriately monitored, perhaps in some instances even internationalized, is possible without running undue risks of people acquiring a nuclear bomb that they would bring to an American city.