Nuclear terror attack on US 'inevitable'

By ANDREW GUMBEL in Los Angeles

The Bush Administration insists its top priority is keeping weapons of mass destruction out of terrorists' hands.

But in a withering new book, one of America's foremost nuclear weapons experts argues that the White House has been heedless of the threat and nuclear armageddon in one or more United States cities is now "more likely than not" over the next decade.

Graham Allison, a defence official under both Republican and Democratic Administrations and now a leading Harvard researcher, describes the Bush Administration as "reckless" for its failure to secure fissile materials around the world and its apparent lack of interest in preventing North Korea and Iran becoming nuclear powers.

His book Nuclear Terrorism: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe, lays out a series of measures to minimise the risk of al Qaeda or another group building or buying a nuclear weapon and smuggling it into the US.

Allison demonstrates that the Bush White House, for all its bullish rhetoric, has taken none of them.

Al Qaeda is known to have tried to obtain nuclear weapons since 1992.

"On the current course," Allison concludes, "nuclear terrorism is inevitable."

The most likely scenario, say security experts, is that terrorists would buy or steal fissile material and build their own bomb, using science that has been in the public domain for 30 years.

Hence the urgent need to secure the world's relatively restricted stockpiles of that fissile material - either highly enriched uranium or plutonium.

However, a programme for securing nuclear materials in the former Soviet Union, pioneered by US Senators Sam Nunn and Richard Lugar, is so poorly funded that it will take 13 more years to finish at today's pace.

"The incandescent and incontestable fact is that in the two years after September 11, fewer potential nuclear weapons' worth of highly enriched uranium and plutonium were secured than in the two years before September 11," Allison told the Independent.

If North Korea developed a full nuclear production line it would be "the greatest failure of American diplomacy in all our history".

An effective "war on nuclear terrorism", Allison argued, would cost around US$5 billion a year - out of a budget "that devotes more than US$500 billion to defence and the war in Iraq."

- INDEPENDENT