Kerry has plans to remove this threat Bush won't do anything till after another attack!

Sunday, October 24, 2004

Bush policies against terror fail to cover home base

By TOM THOMPSON
GUEST COLUMNIST

The threat we face from Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida, made so savagely real by the 9/11 attacks, has mostly been followed, under President Bush, by "taking the battle to the enemy" policies abroad that have missed their mark in making us any safer here in Seattle and throughout the United States.

We have diverted our initial focus on Afghanistan, and we are mainly losing the war in Iraq. In the process, the invasions and occupations of both of those countries -- our most aggressive response to 9/11 -- has made homeland defense the frightening, soft underbelly of the security of our nation as we know it.

The quagmire abroad has left us exposed to the growing grass roots of Muslim anger in a breeding ground for even more terrorism, perhaps this time with a nuclear component. Here in Seattle, as is the case throughout the country, we continue to receive a steady diet of "stay-calm" pronouncements that we are winning the war on terror. The threat-warning indicator is illustrated by way of a tacky and confusing traffic-light-looking device. As if to comfort children who don't know any better, we are told to buy "disaster supply kits" that include duct tape and plastic sheeting to make our homes WMD-proof fortresses.

Fortresses they are not, as evidenced by the knowledge that terrorists are striving to acquire and then use nuclear weapons against us. The battlefield realities, which include Seattle realities, are too chilling to ignore. We know, for example, that Seattle landmarks are on the top-10 target list of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who masterminded the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. We know that some of these landmarks, including the ferry system, have been under suspicious surveillance. And we have a number of documents discovered in Afghanistan that have clearly revealed al-Qaida's detailed knowledge of nuclear weaponry.

Literally nobody doubts that a small group of perhaps four or five expert scientists with adequate design and specifications expertise might be able to build a crude nuclear bomb if they could acquire enough essential fissile material, either highly enriched uranium (HEU) or plutonium.

Acquiring fissile material is the hard part of nuclear weapons construction. Creating material from naturally occurring or reactor-grade materials is a complicated, expensive process. When a nation, for example, wants a completely indigenous, self-sustaining system to build a nuclear arsenal, the enrichment process is crucial and difficult to develop in secret.

But because only a relatively small amount of HEU or plutonium is needed to build a bomb, terrorists such as al-Qaida could feasibly steal or buy enough material to build a weapon. A crude nuclear device might use a hundred pounds of HEU. A more sophisticated design would require less than half that much HEU or maybe just 10 pounds of plutonium. For a device to be finally assembled within U.S. borders, these would hardly be cumbersome packages.

A terrorist doesn't really need the best "weapons grade" material. Building a ballistic missile warhead with limited payload weights would not be the goal. The final product might even "fizzle" and yield a smaller-than-expected blast. The terrorist with limited resources certainly isn't going to mind.

It needs to be said that we are talking about high-risk/low-probability nuclear terror. But aren't we ignoring a straightforward CIA estimate last year that a terrorist nuclear weapon is far more likely to arrive in a cargo container than on the tip of a missile? We live in an area where, of the 3.2 million ocean containers coming through the Ports of Seattle and Tacoma each year, at least 3 million are arriving without screening or content verification.

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Aside from our enemies, we seem to have plenty to fear from our allies -- Pakistan, for example, where it was discovered late last year that A.Q. Khan, the founder of Pakistan's nuclear weapons program, had been selling nuclear technology and services on the black market. The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency called Khan's efforts the equivalent of a "Wal-Mart of private sector proliferation," a decades-old illicit market in nuclear materials, designs, technologies and consulting services, and it was all run out of Pakistan.

Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf has tried to bury the whole affair. But nobody denies that Pakistan's nuclear genie is out of the bottle. We just need to identify the now-unknown extent of the metastasis. Even after Musharraf decided to support the war against bin Laden and the Taliban, we do not know how many secret Jihadi supporters are operating inside the shadows of Pakistan's military intelligence agencies.

It is, of course, the unknowns in the scenario of nuclear terrorism that are so frightening. What is known is that our guard at home is down. We are exposed, and we are tempting targets for people who believe that it is their "religious duty" to use nuclear weapons against us. It is certainly not a time when our armed forces should be organized only abroad for what also appears to be a long and deadly struggle at home.