Quick Links to Speakers
Sen. Richard
G. Lugar
Dr. Chung Hwan
Kwak
Amb.
Bill Richardson
Arnaud
de Borchgrave
Matthew A.
Levitt
Dr. Shibley
Telhami
Dr. Graham Allison
Lawrence
S. Eagleburger
Bill Gertz
Amb. Philip
S. Kaplan
Dr. Timothy
Charles Brown
Dr. Daniel
Pipes
Dr. Muazzam
Gill
Faiz Rehman
Robert Baer
John O'
Sullivan
Hafez
Al-Mirazi
Georgie Anne
Geyer
Dimitri K.
Simes
Dr. Frank
Kaufmann
Amb.
Phillip V. Sanchez
Martin
Walker
Douglas D.M.
Joo
DR. GRAHAM ALLISON
Director, Harvard's Center for Science and International Affairs
PLENARY SESSION I
“The Causes of the 9/11 Attacks and the Scope
of the Threats”
Thank you very much. I think we’ve had two excellent presentations. I won’t stop at this point to say what I agree with and disagree with in each, as there’s some disagreement among them. But the way we divided the labor today is that they would talk somewhat about the causes of 9/11 and I would, as the announcement says, talk about the scope of the threat. At the risk of wandering back and forth between the platform and the overhead projector, I have a few slides for you that will help put this in perspective. Then I’ll come back and do my thing and occasionally go back and forth.
The topic here is the scope of the threat. In one line the question is, is the worst yet to come? To keep you thinking as we go along, I’m going to start with a puzzle, what I call the nuclear puzzle. Imagine a nuclear 9/11 tomorrow. As you were driving to your bureau or getting ready to think about your coverage, two questions would come to the top of your mind. First, who did it? Second, where did they acquire this weapon (or the material from which the weapon was made), and are they therefore likely to have more?
Just to make it a little more vivid here in trying to think about a nuclear terrorist incident, here’s a chart I made back in 1995 as I wrote a book called Avoiding Nuclear Anarchy. In this, I imagined that Mr. Youssef, whom Mr. Levitt has already spoken of, the fellow who parked the minivan in the World Trade Center in 1993 in the hopes of felling it, had had in that minivan not fertilizer-based explosives but a crude nuclear weapon made from highly enriched uranium, of which 40 pounds would be enough, and materials otherwise available off the shelf. The star here [on the projection screen] is the site of the World Trade Center. In that case everything inside this first red circle would disappear: all of Wall Street, all of the financial district, all of the tip of Manhattan. Inside the blue line, all the buildings would look rather like the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. So while 3,000 people died on 9/11 and we were rightly, deeply shocked, in this event easily 300,000 people would die—indeed, one could imagine even several million people perishing.
Now for those of you for whom New York is too far away, since I know we’re in Washington, let me give you another chart. In this instance one imagines that same minivan parked at the White House. Right now you couldn’t park it at the White House so you’d have to go to the Mall, but this one is done for the White House. Inside the red circle, gone. Inside the blue circle, like the Murrah Federal Building.
Actually, where we are today at this conference is outside the blue circle. We would feel a dramatic event, but it would be likely that the building would remain standing. We might be caught by fire. With the fallout we could get a few extra rems that could have some effect on our long-term health, but we would likely survive this event.
Let me go back to the puzzle, which I hope you will keep in mind here. At the end of my 20 minutes, we’ll answer the questions: who did it, and where did they get the weapons?
I know that you’ve heard many presentations today, and I notice more and more not only from my students but for myself that the bandwidth of attention shrinks all the time. So to telescope where I’m going in this presentation, I’m going to give you a summary here at the beginning that gives short answers to three questions. The first question: for terrorism post 9/11, is the worst yet to come? Second question: Was 9/11 essentially a 100-year flood, something you’re going to see once in your lifetime but not again? Or alternatively, was it a wake-up call to the new world of the 21st century? The third question: Is nuclear mega-terrorism inevitable?
I’m not going to hold you in suspense on my answers to these questions. Harvard professors are known for being subtle or ambiguous, but I’ll try my best to be clear. “Is the worst yet to come?” My answer: Bet on it. Yes.
What about 9/11—a 100-year flood or introduction to the world to come? Nobody knows. You can place your bets. But my bet is 9/11 was a striking and dramatic but actually modest introduction to what we will come to know as a grave new world.
Third question, is this challenge too much, too overwhelming, essentially insurmountable? For example, in a celebrated New York Times piece this spring Bill Keller argued, “The problem is not so much that we’re not doing enough to prevent a terrorist from turning our atomic knowledge against us,” although he realizes we’re not; “the problem is there may be no such thing as enough.” And the message of that piece was essentially doom and gloom. I told him I liked the first half, which was to remind us it was a genuine danger, but the defeatism he seemed to accept in the piece is in my view mistaken. My answer to the third question, is this insurmountable, is no, quite to the contrary. Nuclear terrorism is the ultimate preventable disaster if we are serious about preventing it.
So that’s the thrust of my remarks. Maybe I should just stop now, but I’m going to take the rest of my time here to develop the argument briefly and then I’ll come back to the initial questions.
How to think about this problem. How can one think about such a staggering set of issues? It actually is psychologically debilitating to envisage such a horrific event. Political science or national security studies have developed no good way for thinking about unprecedented events that are somewhat unlikely but that have such great disutility. So for want of a better methodology, I would suggest that both for commonsense thinking and actually for sophisticated analysts, we might take a page out of Sherlock Holmes’ book. When Sherlock Holmes investigated a crime, or potential crime, he used a method that he called MMO: motive, means, and opportunity. So if a party did not have motive or did not have means or did not have opportunity, Holmes eliminated him from the suspect list. But in cases like Murder on the Nile, if you go to Agatha Christie as another example, where motives, means, and opportunities were plentiful, the likelihood of such events increased significantly.
Let me start with motives in the case of a nuclear 9/11. Is there anyone out there who hates enough, as Professor Telhami has mentioned, to want to do such a thing? Well, it used to be well known among people who studied terrorism that terrorists only wanted an audience but didn’t want to kill so many people that they would turn off that audience. That was before 9/11. Actually, people who have been studying this for the last decade have been warning, as was already explained by Mr. Levitt, that this was happening.
But what about today? Would somebody actually be motivated to conduct a nuclear terrorist attack on the U.S., horrific as that would be? It seems almost inconceivable. But I would say anybody who looks at the objective evidence about al-Qaeda and Mr. bin Laden would have to conclude that the answer is almost surely yes. For more than a decade, as the evidence has now become clear for all to see, bin Laden and al-Qaeda have had serious nuclear ambitions. If you just read the newspapers, you’ll see that the CIA actually intercepted an al-Qaeda communication last year warning—boasting, indeed—of a “Hiroshima” against America.
If you read the trial transcripts of the trial of the folks who bombed the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, the FBI in charging these people said, “At various times from at least early 1993” —that’s almost a decade ago—“Osama bin Laden and others, known and unknown, made efforts to obtain the components of nuclear weapons.” This included an attempt to buy highly enriched uranium out of South Africa, which had a nuclear weapons program under the previous government. It also included investigation of access to nuclear material in three Central Asian countries, including Kazakhstan, where until 1994 and 1995 there were more than 20 nuclear weapons’ worth of nuclear material left in Almaty, material that when I was in the government, the U.S. actually bought and brought here to the U.S. That material is in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, today, and we don’t have any doubt that from that material you could make 20 nuclear weapons.
In 1998 Osama bin Laden issued a statement that he called “the nuclear bomb of Islam.” As Bernard Lewis, who’s already been quoted here a couple of times today, says, read what bin Laden writes or listen to what he says and you can get many clues as to what he’s thinking about. He said in that statement, “It is the duty of Muslims to prepare as much force as possible to terrorize the enemies of God.”
Indeed, Mr. bin Laden’s press spokesman, his Ari Fleischer, a Mr. Ghaith, has said “al-Qaeda has the right to kill 4 million Americans, including 1 million children, double that figure and injure and cripple hundreds of thousands” in response to what he says are the casualties inflicted on Muslims by the U.S. and U.S. policy. So does somebody have a motive? I would say the answer is clearly yes.
Second, means. What about means? Suppose somebody were motivated. Could he actually acquire a nuclear device that might be the stuff by which you could kill 4 million Americans? Well, this is a painful subject. The good news is that, to the best of our knowledge, no terrorist group has yet acquired a nuclear weapon or sufficient material from which a weapon could be made. But as Secretary Rumsfeld is fond of saying, the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence. So how would Mr. bin Laden and al-Qaeda attempt to get a nuclear weapon? How are they attempting to get a nuclear weapon? There are basically three ways. First, make a nuclear weapon. Second, buy (or steal) a nuclear weapon. Third, buy highly enriched uranium or plutonium from which with material otherwise available off the shelf you can make a crude nuclear weapon. Three ways.
Make a nuclear weapon. Fortunately, technology is on our side there. To make a nuclear weapon is a big, complicated, expensive, lengthy, visible process. To manufacture highly enriched uranium or plutonium—there are only two fissile substances, highly enriched uranium and plutonium—is a major endeavor. So only states have heretofore succeeded in doing this. The states that succeeded include South Africa, North Korea, and Pakistan. So this is possible to do, but it’s big, complicated, lengthy, and expensive. That’s the first route. Is it likely that al-Qaeda or terrorists go that way? No.
A second way, buy a nuclear weapon. Who could imagine buying a nuclear weapon? Well, why not? Anybody who’s watched Russia over the period since the collapse of the Soviet Union has heard many times the statement that “everything is for sale.” There have been high levels of corruption, organized crime, and chaos. That’s a pretty good environment for purchasing things that are valuable or dangerous. There is Pakistan, which presumably has 30 or 40 nuclear weapons today. And we know for sure that two of the key nuclear scientists, including the man who was responsible for the plutonium program in Pakistan, visited twice with Mr. bin Laden.
There’s North Korea, which heretofore has been the most promiscuous seller of any technology that it acquires and has been prepared to sell to all payers. So could you imagine somebody buying a nuclear weapon? Unfortunately, I can. And, despite the non-nuclear program and a decade of effort, there remain large numbers of nuclear weapons insufficiently secured in Russia and elsewhere today.
But the third route is the most likely of all. Not to make one, not to buy a weapon, but just to buy highly enriched uranium or plutonium. How much highly enriched uranium do I need? With electronics otherwise available off the shelf and designs that are well known now for 50 years, about 40 pounds. If I have 60 pounds, it makes it easier. For plutonium I need even a much smaller amount, maybe 10 or 12 pounds. So a weapon using highly enriched uranium could be about the size of a bowling ball. A weapon of plutonium could be about the size of an orange.
How much of that is there around the world? The answer is, more than 100,000 nuclear weapons’ equivalents. This is not infinite but it’s a lot, and a lot of it is in Russia and the U.S.—about 99 percent. But 1 percent, which is still a lot, is in a number of other places. So with respect to means, the hard, sad fact is that if I get highly enriched uranium or plutonium, with technology that’s otherwise available off the shelf in electronics stores in the U.S., and designs that are well known for quite a long time—you can still actually get an implosion design off the Internet—you could imagine making a crude nuclear bomb that has a fissile explosion that might produce 15 kilotons of destruction. The consequences of that blast are illustrated on my target chart.
And now, opportunity. If bin Laden or al-Qaeda got a nuclear weapon, and if they were sufficiently motivated to conduct an attack, could they bring that weapon or nuclear material to the U.S. successfully, to a place like Washington or Los Angeles or Boston or New York? And again, I think the easy fact here for us to understand is that, despite valiant efforts since 9/11 and otherwise, American borders remain quite porous. Some of you saw the ABC special on 9/11 in which they actually conducted an exercise of bringing some depleted uranium into the U.S. through normal shipping channels through the Port of New York and had no trouble. You can watch that on TV.
Customs says that we now inspect about 10 percent of the sea-land containers that arrive in U.S. ports every day, of which about 5,000 arrive in New York. But with more than 5 million people, 11 million trucks, 2 million rail cars, 7,500 foreign flag ships making 51,000 U.S. port calls, defending against such a possibility is extraordinarily difficult. So could terrorists, if they acquired a nuclear weapon or material with which to make a weapon, bring it to the U.S. successfully and explode it in an American city? The answer is certainly yes.
Well, therefore what? Let me offer the bad news and good news. The bad news is well summarized by Howard Baker and Lloyd Cutler, two of the wisest of the Washington hands—one a Republican, one a Democrat, Baker now the U.S. ambassador to Japan—in a report card on the Department of Energy and other U.S. government programs that they issued in January 2001. (I had the good fortune to serve on this task force.) This group reviewed the U.S. programs and the threat, and Baker, a person who had not thought about this issue previously but who had been the leader of the U.S. Senate and chief of staff for President Reagan, was actually captured by it as an idea.
Let me read the Baker-Cutler report card’s conclusion: “The most urgent, unmet national security threat to the U.S. today is the danger that weapons of mass destruction or weapons-usable material in Russia could be stolen by criminals, sold to terrorists or hostile nations, and used to threaten American troops abroad or citizens here at home.” Is that true or false? I believe very deeply that it is true. The bad news is there is a clear and present danger of a nuclear terrorist attack upon Americans here at home or abroad. And if we needed any strategic threat warning, I would say we have all the evidence that we need. So that’s the bad news.
What about the good news? I would say the good news here, which is mostly not understood, is that this is a surmountable, not an insurmountable, problem. This is a difficult, challenging, but ultimately preventable disaster. How can that be? Here physics works for us. As a simple fact of physics: no highly enriched uranium or plutonium, no nuclear explosion, no nuclear terrorism. That’s a pretty tight synergism. The supplies of nuclear weapons and material are vast, but not infinite. Technologies for securing or locking down things that are very valuable or very dangerous are well developed. Indeed, we’ve been working on these for a few thousand years as a human race. Russia does not lose valuable items out of the Kremlin Armory. And the U.S. doesn’t lose gold from Fort Knox.
I would say the main message here is, it is not beyond the mind of man to think about how to prevent nuclear terrorism. Indeed, it’s not even beyond our reach in terms of means. If you want a specific program of action to that end, in the piece that I think was distributed to you by a Russian former national security adviser, Andrei Kokoshin, and myself, called “The New Containment,” which is in the current issue of National Interest, an American magazine, we lay out a program of action to that end.
So in conclusion, let me end with the questions with which we began: Who done it and where did they get it? I think if you were making the list of the perps, al-Qaeda would be at the top. They wouldn’t be the only possible perp, but they clearly come first, second, and third in my list.
The second question is a lot harder. Where did they get this weapon? Where did they get the material from which it could have been made? Well, my list, and I believe that anybody at a meeting at the Defense Department or the White House would have a similar list absent any specific evidence: Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia. The first five slots. Maybe they even deserve more, given the amount of material that’s there.
Pakistan, six and seven, with both weapons and weapons-usable material in an early stage of development and having many close relationships with al-Qaeda and the Taliban in parts of their intelligence service and military. Eight to ten would be the former Soviet Union, places like Uzbekistan, where there is highly enriched uranium today, or Soviet research reactors in other countries. Would you believe Libya? Indeed, just to make the point slightly more vivid, until August—that is, a month ago—there were three potential nuclear weapons in Belgrade, Yugoslavia. Three potential nuclear weapons were extracted from Belgrade, Yugoslavia, by a joint Russian-American action only then.
So I would say to this question, who? Pretty clear. Where? That’s my answer, and I’ll look forward to discussing your answers or addressing other questions.
