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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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