Experts Predict a Possible Terrorist Strike with a Nuke in the US by 2013 -- What Can We Do to Stop It?

By Alexander Zaitchik, AlterNet. Posted December 16, 2008.

The challenge of the next four years is to find a way to convey the force of this reality, while at the same time explaining that the answer, however counterintuitive it may seem, is the exact opposite of the right-wing prescription of missile defenses, 20th century-style deterrence and the occasional pre-emptive war. Fully justified nuclear fears, harnessed by intelligent leadership, leads in one direction only: down a path of international cooperation and arms control, terminating in nuclear disarmament before 2050. The WMD commission is just the latest group to add its voice to a growing chorus calling for a strengthening of international treaty regimes and the dawning of a new day in arms control. This half of the equation gets less attention than the bleak percentages of an American Hiroshima, but it is to this part of the equation that requires better and more regular explanation and advocacy.

Barack Obama is the right president to lead this effort. Not only can he correctly pronounce the word "nuclear," he moves to the White House from the same Southside Chicago neighborhood where the Doomsday Clock is maintained by the board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. He fully understands the interrelationships between proliferation, arms control and nuclear terrorism.

"As president, I will lead a global effort to secure all nuclear weapons materials at vulnerable sites within four years," Obama told Arms Control Today before the election. "[I will also] convene a summit on preventing nuclear terrorism [and] make the goal of eliminating nuclear weapons worldwide a central element of U.S. nuclear policy."

The incoming administration will find ever-widening support for a bold arms control agenda in the policy community in Washington. The sea change first gained attention in 2006, when Henry Kissinger, Sam Nunn, William Perry and George Shultz penned an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal calling for the abolition of nuclear weapons. In so doing, the statesmen were following in the footsteps of other doyens of Cold War foreign policy, such as Robert McNamara and Paul Nitze, who also came to realize the balance of terror could not maintain its balance in the new century. In the most recent issue of Foreign Affairs, Ivo Daalder of the Brookings Institute and Jan Lodal, former president of the Atlantic Council, set out the challenges and imperatives of fulfilling the "logic of zero." The basic vision, they write, "has been endorsed by no less than two-thirds of all living former secretaries of state, former secretaries of defense and former national security advisers. Both Barack Obama and John McCain have expressed support for it, as well. Given this remarkable bipartisan consensus, the next president will have an opportunity to make the elimination of all nuclear weapons the organizing principle of U.S. nuclear policy."

It isn't just in Washington that a new anti-nuclear wind is beginning to blow. Last Wednesday in Paris, an international group of high-level ex-officials from nuclear and non-nuclear states launched the Global Zero project (with funding by Richard Branson) to free the world of nuclear weapons within 25 years. As with the WMD commission and the IAEA, the group urges the public to understand the link between arms control and nuclear terrorism: "In recent months, the threat of proliferation and nuclear terrorism has led to a growing chorus of world leaders calling for the elimination of all nuclear weapons," the group said in a release. "It is urgent that we begin now."

No one who looks honestly at 21st century nuclear threats could disagree. Confronting the dangers of the second nuclear age will be scary, and it will be difficult. But facing our nuclear fears is necessary if we are to move beyond them and accomplish the historic task sitting between now and any future worth having.

See more stories tagged with: nuclear weapons, barack obama, arms control

Alexander Zaitchik is a freelance journalist.

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