Annihilation from Within

two-person team would be sufficient to deploy and detonate a couple of nuclear weapons. America’s vast intelligence systems focus largely on individual evildoers to track down collaborators, conspirators, and supporters of Al Qaeda or other terrorist organizations. This people-centered approach might easily miss a couple of perpetrators who do their deed alone and know how to avoid telephone calls and other careless ways of revealing themselves. Hence, intelligence gathering needs to be complemented with effective technologies that can detect a nuclear weapon before it is delivered to its target.
■   Second, our enemies may acquire weapons of mass destruction via procedures for which we have no ready response. Although nuclear weapons will be more difficult to acquire than biological ones, it cannot be ruled out that an anarchist cult might motivate a couple of nuclear scientists to build a relatively low-yield nuclear bomb with stolen high-enriched uranium. In 1966 nuclear physicist Theodore Taylor wrote (in the memorandum cited in the previous chapter): “The knowledge necessary for the construction of transportable fission explosives is rapidly becoming understood by increasing numbers of people all over the world.” Forty years later, this danger surely has not gone away.
■   Third, if the attack has been properly planned and carried out, the U.S. Government may not know for some time who caused it. The intelligence services will presumably be unable to identify either the individuals who deployed the weapon, or the organization—if any—that supported them, or the foreign sources that may have supplied the weapon, knowingly or otherwise. These massive uncertainties could wreak political havoc.
■   Fourth, the very nature of the attack, and the possibility of follow-on attacks, will demand instant responses by the surviving government officials. The legitimacy of our post-attack government will be at stake in this response, since signs of uncertainty could trigger a downward spiral of political disintegration.
■   Fifth on this list is a wild card. There is no law of physics requiring that weapons of mass destruction be nuclear, or chemical, or biological. In the coming decades, other technologies will be developed or rediscovered that can be misused to cause novel types of mass destruction.
These are some of the problems the Ultimate Emergency Plan has to address. Providing a full description of the Plan with all its component measures would take me way beyond the scope of this book. But several specific examples will illustrate the kinds of measures needing to be tackled now.
1. DETECTING NUCLEAR BOMBS Those who attempt to annihilate a nation from within by employing a few nuclear bombs must ensure that their bombs remain concealed until they have been detonated. This obvious fact holds true whether the bombs have been acquired abroad by a tyrant planning a power grab, smuggled into the country by one of the contemporary terrorist organizations, or manufactured at home by an anarchist cult like Aum Shinrikyo, which made its poison gas within earshot of the Japanese police. A top priority for the Ultimate Emergency Plan is the development of sensors and other technologies to detect concealed nuclear bombs.
Against nuclear weapons or fissile material smuggled from abroad, one of our first lines of defense is the Nunn-Lugar program for safeguarding the Soviet nuclear detritus (see chapter 3). Another is the multinational Proliferation Security Initiative of the Bush administration, which aims to intercept weapons of mass destruction that are being smuggled on ships. These efforts abroad would benefit greatly from better detection systems; and for the last line of defense at home, powerful new detection technology is essential. Although specific measures to respond to this priority have been recommended repeatedly, their implementation has proceeded at a snail’s pace. In 1995 and 1997, the Pentagon’s Defense Science Board conducted studies that explained in plain terms the need for better sensor technologies. Dr. Lowell Wood, a brilliant innovator who is a Senior Scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, was one of the participating experts and contributed creative ideas for detecting nuclear bombs.2 As a participant in the 1997 study, I naively expected that a research effort on nuclear sensors would be started forthwith.
During the next five years, essentially nothing was done. In 2002, at last, the Defense Science Board established a new task force that issued the report “Preventing and Defending Against Clandestine Nuclear Attack” (published in 2004 and readable at www.acq.osd.mil/dsb/reports/2004). Dr. Richard Wagner, a senior nuclear scientist with Los Alamos National Laboratory, chaired this task force, of which I was a member. When our report was completed, Wagner and I agreed that now, indeed, it was time to get serious. So we embarked on a campaign to convince appropriate officials throughout the U.S. Government of the urgent need for a project that could give us some real solutions. By “real solutions” we did not mean endless interagency meetings and spiral-bound reports. A cavalcade of reports will not protect the country.3
To find the solutions we desperately need, the U.S. Government should have established a generously funded, well-focused national project, run by a highly competent manager who would be given the authority to enlist and empower the best scientists at the national nuclear laboratories and universities. Over the years, successful projects of this kind have included the Manhattan Project and the Apollo Project. Richard Wagner and I were not alone in our self-chosen mission to convince senior U.S. officials of the need for this project. We were joined by Dr. John Foster (former director of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory), Ambassador David Abshire (a leader of think tanks and advisor to many presidents), Norman Augustine (former chairman of the Lockheed Corporation), and other luminaries. We talked to numerous senior officials, from Vice President Cheney on down. None of them disagreed with us that it was time for a serious R&D project on nuclear-detection technology. Yet sadly, it took another three years to get a rather dilatory project started.
No single malfeasance in the U.S. Government can be blamed for the delay in starting this project, but weaknesses in leadership and flawed procedures help explain it. The