Panel: Secret Nuclear Attacks Possible

A Pentagon panel recently concluded an attacker could easily smuggle a nuclear weapon into the United States and detonate it. The panel did not prescribe a specific strategy to thwart this threat but recommended an open-ended, multibillion-dollar program starting with upgrading U.S. intelligence, interdiction, and nuclear-weapon detection capabilities.

Warning that “nuclear weapons are oozing out of control,” a task force of the Pentagon’s Defense Science Board, a group of civilian advisers to the secretary of defense, said that greater action is needed to guard against a nuclear weapon being snuck into and used inside the United States. “Little has actually been done against the threat of clandestine nuclear attack,” the task force found in a report released mid-September.

Addressing this threat requires “attention that is as serious as that devoted to missile defense,” the report asserted. The Bush administration has devoted roughly $35 billion to developing missile defenses.

The U.S. intelligence community reported in December 2001 that a nuclear attack against U.S. territory would more likely be carried out via nonmissile delivery means than by missiles because such alternatives would be “less costly, easier to acquire, and more reliable and accurate.” Missile defense critics in Congress and outside government have seized on this finding to condemn the administration’s long-range missile defense system as misplaced. However, the task force did not weigh in on whether a missile strike or another type of attack was more likely and did not suggest that missile defense spending be diverted to protecting against nuclear weapons smuggled by ship, train, or truck.

Rather, the task force counseled that Washington launch a “multi-element, layered, global, civil/military complex of systems” to reduce the possibility that a nuclear weapon could be slipped into the United States. Part of this effort would require improving knowledge and monitoring on the whereabouts of all nuclear weapons and materials worldwide. In addition, the task force recommended that the United States bolster its military capabilities to uncover and eliminate threats overseas. Another step would involve deploying a “few hundred thousand sensors” across America and abroad to detect radiation given off by nuclear weapons. The task force projected that implementing such a plan would cost at least tens of billions of dollars.

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