An Inadequate
Response to Nuclear Terrorism
By JONATHAN POWER
VIENNA, Austria--The fuss over
Iran--the major investment by the French oil company, Total,
and the alleged indirect support of Russia for Iran's
nuclear bomb program--is taking our eyes off the real ball.
It was the same three years ago when CIA leaks about North
Korea's bomb ambitions were part of an effort to steamroller
President Bill Clinton into ordering the bombing of North
Korea's nuclear installations.
The real issue in terms of imminent
danger both then and now is the Russian mafia. "The director
of the FBI, Louis Freeh, has warned that Russian organized
crime networks pose a menace to U.S. national security and
has asserted that there is now greater danger of a nuclear
attack by some outlaw group than there was by the Soviet
Union during the Cold War," reported the Washington Post
last week.
In conversation, Munir Ahmed Khan, the
former chairman of the world's nuclear watchdog body, the
International Atomic Energy Agency, confirms that opinion
here is moving in the same direction as Mr. Freeh's. Mr.
Khan, commenting on the recent allegations made by the
former Russian general and national security advisor,
Alexander Lebed, that the mafia have stolen Soviet-era
nuclear suitcase bombs, says that if this is true they would
be useable, contrary to statements made by President Boris
Yeltsin's government. "Competent nuclear scientists of which
there are many out of work and in economic difficulties
could be hired to keep them operational." Mr. Khan knows a
thing or two about undercover bomb work. He masterminded,
against all the odds, the clandestine manufacture of
Pakistan's nuclear bomb.
Iran, even if it is trying to develop
a nuclear bomb, North Korea, if it has ever been, are both
unlikely to ever use them. "Rogues" they may be. Suicidal
they are not. Both live in neighborhoods where a move to
deploy such weapons would be met with a totally debilitating
blitzkrieg. As Pakistan does, these countries would keep
their nukes in the background, partly deterrent, partly
prestige item.
The Russian mafia--and the people they
do business with--are another matter. If they do trade in
nuclear weapons the danger will not be with governments with
a fixed address where Washington, Moscow, London, Paris or
even Beijing know where to retaliate, it will be a
free-lance terrorist group of no fixed abode, determined to
use blackmail to secure a particular objective. It could be
to force the withdrawal of the Turkish army from Kurdish
areas, Israel from its settlements in Palestine or to demand
the release from prison of Colombian drug barons.
Mr. Freeh promised "drastic steps to
prevent and detect" nuclear weapons falling into the hands
of Russian criminal gangs. Yet at the same time he admitted
that the Russian syndicates with former KGB officers in the
hierarchy run the most sophisticated criminal operations
ever seen in the U.S.
What "drastic steps" does Mr. Freeh
have up his sleeve? The former CIA director John Deutch in
the new issue of Foreign Policy, commenting on the statement
that "the U.S. government is effectively organized to
address the terrorist threat," said two words: "Ha, ha."
Every policy-maker should read this
article. It makes the plain obvious--America is wide open to
nuclear terrorist blackmail. Nevertheless, the White House
is being very careful to keep the lid on the debate, for
fear it could unnerve and alarm public opinion.
Their caution and reticence is
understandable. For decades Washington justified the
possession of nuclear weapons as creating a stable balance
of power. All through the Cold War years it paid little or
no attention to the now known dangers of atmospheric testing
or to those who warned that nuclear weapons were a Faustian
bargain and would inevitably fall into the wrong hands or,
as General George Lee Butler, the former head of U.S.
Strategic Command warned in January, be used by
accident.
Moreover, Washington, London, Paris,
Bonn, Rome, Ottawa and Tokyo (the G7) missed the historic
opportunity of the century to put Russia the right way up
when they refused to provide the financial wherewithall to
enable Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev to make what could
have been a relatively smooth transition from rigid
communism to a more liberal set up, something short of
today's present wild west capitalism. They repeated their
mistake when they, led by president George Bush, refused the
Russian president, Boris Yeltsin, help in late 1991,
Washington sending as the sole emissary a Treasury
under-secretary whose job was to insist to the new Russian
government that they honor the old Soviet debt. Only 2% of
NATO defense spending would have done the job and avoided
nearly eight years of economic turmoil and, not least, the
emergence of the mafia that now threatens us.
No doubt Washington would like to deal
with this grave crisis without having to throw into relief
its past errors. Common sense suggests the White House is
working with Moscow to try and quietly buy off the would-be
nuclear terrorists. One wishes the authorities well, for if
they fail it will be the greatest tragedy to befall humanity
since Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
October 8, 1997,
VIENNA
Copyright © 1997 By JONATHAN POWER
Note: I can be reached by phone +44 385 351172
and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
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