Nuclear Terrorism - Book Response

Nuclear Terrorism - Book Response BOOK RESPONSE Nuclear Terrorism: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe. (2004) by Graham Allison Graham Allison is a political scientist and terrorism expert whose past accomplishments include serving both President Reagan and President Bill Clinton as Special Advisor to the Secretary of Defense and as Assistant Secretary of Defense for Policy and Plans, respectively. In the Clinton administration, he coordinated DOD strategy and policy towards Russia, Ukraine, and the other states of the former Soviet Union.

The current Director of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and Douglas Dillon Professor of Government at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, Dr. Allison was twice awarded the Department of Defense's highest civilian award, the Distinguished Public Service Medal.

In 2004, Nuclear Terrorism: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe, was selected by the New York Times as one of its "100 most notable books of 2004." According to Allison, the risk of nuclear terrorism on American soil is much more likely than commonly believed; in fact, Allison expects that such an attack is actually much more likely to be perpetrated sooner, (i.e. within the next decade) than later.

That is primarily because the technology necessary to design and construct a crude nuclear device similar in explosive yield to the first weapons employed 1945 to end World War II is fully within the technical abilities of any graduate physics student. Second, the chances of detecting and interdicting the amount of weapons-grade uranium before it crosses U.S. borders are infinitesimally small because the 25 pounds or so of fissile material required for such a device are easily shielded from radiation detectors.

In that regard, Allison also reminds us that tons of marijuana are successfully smuggled across U.S. borders annually and that marijuana bales are much larger than the softball-sized mass of uranium necessary for a terrorist weapon more powerful than one of the bombs dropped over Hiroshima. Acquiring fissile uranium is, therefore, the only real obstacle to the ability of terrorists like Osama bin Laden or al Qaeda to smuggle all the elements necessary for atomic weapons of terror and detonate it within an American city.

As a matter of fact, that is precisely what bin Laden has pledged to do in an operation he calls the "American Hiroshima." Except that bin Laden's dream consists of detonating nuclear devices in six or seven major American cities like New York, Chicago, Las Vegas, Washington, and Los Angeles simultaneously. Allison explains that this is the real danger to the U.S.

posed by Iranian intentions to start enriching uranium to weapons grade in their reactor facilities, which they will soon be able to do unless they accept the trade concessions and other incentives offered by the West to suspend such ambitions and allow regular inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Whereas Iranian missile technology is far less advanced than necessary to threaten the U.S. directly, it could easily furnish enough weapons-grade uranium to make bin Laden's dream a real possibility within a matter of only a few years.

Even worse, anti-American.