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Terrorism has altered the nuclear equation forever
Terrorism has altered the nuclear equation forever
'Atoms for Peace'
By Bennett Ramberg (IHT)
Wednesday, December 10, 2003
LOS ANGELES: Fifty years ago this month President
Dwight Eisenhower delivered his Atoms for Peace
proposal at the United Nations. This seminal event laid
the groundwork for much of the nuclear enterprise that
we see around the world today. It also generated a
nuclear Trojan horse.
Countries around the world greeted the prospects of the
atom with glee: nuclear power plants would be too cheap
to meter and nuclear isotopes would generate a
renaissance in science, medicine and industry. While
the atom contributed to some of these laudable
objectives, it unwittingly booby-trapped the landscape
with nuclear mines that terrorists can now set off.
The world is littered with possibilities. Dirty-bomb
ingredients are ubiquitous. They are in hospitals and
industry. They are transported through cities as
nuclear waste to storage sites. They cannot just
disappear. Nuclear power plants are vulnerable to
terrorist attacks. Nuclear weapons derived from the
peaceful atom reside in such unstable countries as
Pakistan and North Korea. In more stable regions,
countries insist on recycling weapons useable plutonium
which can be diverted.
Booby-trapping the world certainly was not Eisenhower's
intention. Anguished by the accelerating nuclear arms
race with the Soviet Union, he sought a way out. His
solution was to reduce the capacity of the superpowers
to produce nuclear weapons by conveying their "normal
uranium and fissionable materials" to an atomic energy
agency. The new organization would house and distribute
the stocks for peaceful purposes.
While an international "bank of fissionable material"
never came about, the Atoms for Peace address broke the
American inhibition against spreading nuclear knowledge
and technology to the rest of the world. In 1955,
Washington initiated the United Nations Conference on
the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy. Twenty-five
thousand scientists descended on Geneva to take
advantage of the declassification of documents that
held many of the secrets of the nuclear age.
Washington did not proceed down this road naïvely. It
knew that Atoms for Peace was not risk-free. But it
faced a conundrum: if the United States did not promote
the atom, it could not control it either. Knowledge is
universal; inevitably, the rest of the world would
catch up. The challenge was to build dikes to curtail
the negative implications of the spread of nuclear
technology. In 1957, the International Atomic Energy
Agency was created to promote and monitor global
nuclear markets. The 1968 Nuclear Nonproliferation
Treaty sought to halt the ambitions of nations to get
the bomb in return for the peaceful nuclear assistance.
Domestic and international controls over nuclear and
dual-use exports followed. Most recently, Washington
gathered several nations together in a Proliferation
Security Initiative to intercept nuclear contraband.
The dikes were not enough to prevent seepage. Israel
used the "peaceful" atom provided by a French research
reactor to develop the bomb. India, Pakistan, North
Korea, Iraq and South Africa followed. At the same
time, the United States beat back the temptations of
Argentina, Brazil, South Korea, West Germany and
Taiwan. When regimes changed in Belarus, Ukraine, South
Africa and now Iraq, nuclear weapons programs were
abandoned.
As the international community reinforced its dikes
against proliferation, it continued to build its
peaceful nuclear infrastructure oblivious to another
risk: nuclear terrorism. During the early nuclear era,
terrorism as we know it today had not raised its ugly
head. When it did emerge in the 1970's, terrorists
seemed mindful about the political costs of taking too
many innocent lives.
Nonetheless, even from the beginning of the nuclear
age, the creators speculated on the risks of nuclear
terrorism. In 1944, scientists at University of Chicago
working on the Manhattan Project conjectured that a
political group could unleash a nuclear blitzkrieg by
smuggling an atomic weapon into the United States on a
commercial aircraft. The terrorism of the 1970's
prompted public policy groups, many driven by a phobia
of all things nuclear, to demand that weapons-useable
plutonium and highly enriched uranium no longer fuel
nuclear power and research reactors. The Europeans,
Russians and Japanese resisted. America wavered. Then,
many of these same groups began asking questions about
the vulnerability of nuclear plants to terrorist
attack. American officials took umbrage.
As the 20th century ended, the absence of any serious
act of nuclear violence convinced officials that
nuclear terror would remain to province of fiction
writers. Then the Sept. 11 attacks occurred. President
George W. Bush announced that in the caves of
Afghanistan, U.S. forces had uncovered plots to attack
nuclear power plants. But eliminating the risks in the
short run was impossible. Enhancing protection, while
imperfect, remained the only option.
As we map our nuclear future we should be mindful of
the closing remarks of Eisenhower's Atoms for Peace
speech: "The United States pledges before you - and
therefore before the world - its determination to help
solve the fearful atomic dilemma - to devote its entire
heart and mind to find the way by which the miraculous
inventiveness of man shall not be dedicated to his
death, but consecrated to his life."
In the post-Sept. 11 world, solving "the fearful atomic
dilemma" requires not more but less Atoms for Peace.
The risk of nuclear terrorism, coupled to the
environmental and proliferation burdens the initiative
gave rise to, now requires that we roll back
Eisenhower's vision and try to put the nuclear genie
back in the bottle.
The writer, who served in the State Department's Bureau
of Politico-Military Affairs during the first Bush
administration, is author of "Nuclear Power Plants as
Weapons for the Enemy."
http://www.iht.com/ihtsearch.php?id=120834&owner=(IHT)&date=20031210125431
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