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Greenfield at Large

America's New War: Nuclear Threats

Aired November 01, 2001 - 23:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
JEFF GREENFIELD, HOST: We'd like to take your mind off some things you might have been worrying about lately and put on the table something you might not have been worried about in recent years, the threat of nuclear weapons.

There. Suddenly, opening the mail may not seem all that worrisome anymore. The fact is that while most of us have filed nuclear attack under old business, there are plenty of people who do consider it, right, now a clear and present danger.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

GREENFIELD (voice-over): This is what the nuclear threat used to look like, a nation state, the Soviet Union, squaring-off against the United States, both with enough bombs and missiles to wipe out most of humanity.

A now middle-aged generation can never forget the duck and cover drills of our school days.

But this is what the nuclear threat might look like today, a rogue state, like Saddam Hussein's Iraq, with a long standing hunger for nuclear weapons and alleged ties to terrorists who might like to use them.

And this is what the threat might look like, a story in today's "New York Times" about scientists who had helped make Pakistan a nuclear power, detained by their government for alleged links to or sympathy with the Taliban. Pakistan released them today, but the question lingers, could such scientists somehow get materials for a deliverable nuclear weapon to al Qaeda?

And this is what the nuclear threat might look like, the largely uninspected international traffic that could let a nuclear weapon into the harbor of a major city via ship, or into the streets of imagine for city by truck or even by an SUV.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

GREENFIELD: In a few moments we are going to turn to three experts for an assessment of this threat, but we want to begin first with a journalist who literally helped put this question on the national agenda, "The New Republic's" Greg Easterbrook. Mr. Easterbrook, here in the United States we are all fretting about opening the mail, driving across suspension bridges in California, the water supply, smallpox infected terrorists. Is your concern that nukes are, as you call them, the real threat, based on the sheer damage they could do? Or is there something about our vulnerability now that really does make them a present danger?

GREG EASTERBROOK, "THE NEW REPUBLIC: Well, the greatest worry about a crude atomic bomb in the hands of terrorists is that, unlike bio-weapons, which are scary, certainly, and bad, but have many restrictions and so far have harmed very few, we know that atomic weapons work. That's what's scary about them. We know they can kill people in huge numbers.

We know that radiation can kill people in huge numbers. The question marks about bioterrorism is scary and spooky, sure, but will it ever really harm us don't exist about atomic weapons. And we know that terrorist, al Qaeda included, have been seeking to obtain atomic weapons.

GREENFIELD: How urgently, in your reporting, have groups like at all al Qaeda, or for that matter the nation of Iraq -- how hungrily have they sought nuclear material, nuclear weapons?

EASTERBROOK: Well, we know this. We know that Iraq tried to obtain enriched uranium necessary to build atomic bombs in the 1980's. They built a reactor for that purpose that was destroyed by the Israelis in 1981.

Captured documents from the Gulf War showed that they had both been working on trying to obtain fissile materials, the fancy word for the kind of plutonium and uranium that can explode, on the black market. And that they had also had engineers working on designs for crude atom bombs.

Those designs that were captured looked like that they would explode. One of them weighed about a ton, and one of them weighed about 1,000 pounds, small enough that it could be hidden in an SUV, potentially, if it could be smuggled into the country.

We know that the International Atomic Energy Agency has a draft report saying that al Qaeda and other terrorists have attempted to buy, on the black market, both atomic bombs and the materials that would be used to make atomic bombs.

I don't think the terrorists have those weapons now, or they would have gone off already. But certainly they're trying to acquire them.

GREENFIELD: In your, in your reporting, is it relatively easy or relatively difficult for a nation state, such as Iraq or Pakistan, let's say, to get nuclear material or weapons to a third party? I mean, how easy is that transfer?

EASTERBROOK: Well, if you -- it's certainly difficult to build them. As we know, Pakistan spent 20 years working on its atomic bomb and Pakistani scientists are quite smart, but they did eventually solve the problem.

We know that engineering students in college have designed things that look like workable models of crude atomic bombs.

For a state like Pakistan or Iraq to make a decision to hand a bomb to a terrorist would be an extremely risky one. You don't know where that bomb is going to go offer. You don't know if it it's going to come back to hurt you, and certainly if it could be traced back to you, you could be the source of retaliation.

But if, say, the Pakistani government fell to the hands of fundamentalists, Pakistan has an estimated two dozen atomic bombs. Then there could be all hell to pay.

GREENFIELD: Now, one of the unsettling parts of your article was that you mentioned that you might not need a weapon at all to do enormous damage. That is, that radiological material in and of itself could cause enormous damage.

So, let me just raise this: if the hijackers on September 11th had managed to check a couple of suit cases full of radiological material, would it have turned those planes into radiation spewing bombs?

EASTERBROOK Well, that isn't, not to sound to ghastly, but that isn't necessarily the way that you would do it.

A radiological weapon, which we know from captured Gulf War documents Iraq has also worked on, would essentially be ground-up plutonium or enriched uranium connected to explosives in such a way that the fallout would be distributed in the air. It would not cause a blast that would flatten a city, but it would cause something similar to the fallout that followed the Hiroshima bomb.

The ideal ghastly way to distribute it would not be to put it in the luggage hold of an airplane, but the design of a radiological weapon would be simpler than the design of an explosive atomic bomb, and thus conceivably closer to the reach of terrorists.

GREENFIELD: Now, finally, Mr. Easterbrook, speaking of ghastly, should a terrorist organization be able to get a nuclear weapon into the United States or Western Europe, Eastern Europe, and blow up something and kill tens of thousands of people, what's the United States response? It's not like attacking a country that bombed us if we don't quite know who this is. What could we possibly do about that?

EASTERBROOK: Well, what held through the Cold War, when the United States and Russia had thousands of nuclear weapons pointed at each other, what held each side back was the fact that fundamentally they were rational. They knew that if they struck, they would be struck in turn.

Terrorists may not be held by this, especially suicidal terrorists, of the kind that al Qaeda is attempting to cultivate. But I think, if I could leave you with one message, it would be this: that the search for terrorist atomic weapons would be of great benefit to the Muslim peoples of the world in addition to members, to people of the United States and Western Europe, because if an atomic warhead goes off in Washington, say, in the current environment or anything like it, in the 24 hours that followed, a hundred million Muslims would die as U.S. nuclear bombs rained down on every conceivable military target in a dozen Muslim countries.

And that -- it is very much in the interest the Muslim peoples of the world that atomic weapons be kept out of the hands of Islamic terrorists, in addition to being in our interests.

GREENFIELD: "New Republic" senior editor Greg Easterbrook, thanks very much for joining us.

When we return, Taliban sympathizers hold key positions in Pakistan, a nation that has nuclear weapons. And what about Iraq, a nation that very much wants them? That when we come back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DONALD RUMSFELD, SECRETARY OF DEFENSE: We know of certain knowledge that al Qaeda has, over the years, had an appetite for acquiring weapons of mass destruction of various types, including nuclear materials.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

GREENFIELD: Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and we are also talking about the nuclear threat. My guests, Jessica Stern, a lecturer at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, author of "The Ultimate Terrorists." She's a former member of the National Security Council who was involved in U.S. attempts to deal with the nuclear arsenal of former Soviet Republics. She joins us from Boston.

In Washington, Ken Adelman, director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency under President Reagan. He is now a member of Secretary Rumsfeld's defense policy board. He is also host of DefenseCentral.com.

And also with us from Washington, John Wolfsthal. He is a nonproliferation analyst. He's an associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Ken Adelman, you heard Greg Easterbrook give a pretty unsettling account of the potential for nuclear terrorism on the part of even non-states such as al Qaeda. Does it concern you? Are you...

KEN ADELMAN, DEFENSECENTRAL.COM: Yeah. I think that Greg did a very good job presenting the case that can scare the dickens out of all of us, to tell you the truth. I think the two things that you do about it, however, Jeff, are quite clear.

Number one is, you take out the biggest area of threat for nuclear proliferation and that is the government of Iraq with Saddam Hussein, who would be delighted to share all his information and all his knowledge, all of his nuclear weapons and nuclear material, with the al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden.

And number two, you build a ballistic missile defense which would be the main means of delivery, despite all the talk about in the -- in the suitcases and all...

GREENFIELD: Forgive me, Ken...

ADELMAN: ... the main means of delivery.

GREENFIELD: Before we get to that, because I really want to concentrate on the question that I asked you, the threat that was outlined by Greg Easterbrook, with all due respect, had nothing to do with missiles. It had to do with suitcase sized bombs being transported in trucks, in SUVs and uninspected shipping. Does that concern you, on the part of...

ADELMAN: No, no. What he was talking about, Jeff, was the nuclear spread -- the spread of nuclear weapons themselves and he talked about radiological weapons at the end.

The spread of nuclear weapons has concerned all of us for the last, you know, 50 years. But, there has been less spread of nuclear weapons than we ever expected in the past. There has been a tighter, non-proliferation regime than we anticipated.

Let me just give you one fact. During the presidency of John F. Kennedy, the estimate was by the 1980's there would be 25 - 30 nuclear weapon states in the world. That's what John F. Kennedy said in the presidential speech. But we're nowhere near that amount and we are 20 years beyond what the date of prediction was.

GREENFIELD: Ken, I'm going try one more time: are you worried about the threat of a terrorist group like al Qaeda to get their hands on nuclear material and turning it into small sized nuclear weapons that could threaten the United States?

ADELMAN: Today, no.

GREENFIELD: OK. Mr. Wolfsthal, what about you? Is that scenario of, you know, of, let's say, Pakistan, the Taliban sympathizers, somehow getting material to a group like al Qaeda that can turn it into something a weapon, in one way or another? Is that something that ought to concern policy-makers?

JON WOLFSTHAL, CARNEGIE ENDOWMENT FOR INTERNATIONAL PEACE: I think it is something that concerns policy-makers. I think the Bush administration was a little slow in figuring out just how serious that threat was, but I think they've sort of caught up with the curve.

Pakistan is in an unprecedented situation. It has enough nuclear materials for 50 weapons. It has a president that is bucking the majority of his population in siding with United States against the Taliban, against Afghanistan, and the possibility exists that either nuclear materials, nuclear weapons or nuclear scientists could defect, be stolen and diverted to terrorists.

GREENFIELD: But the question is, let's assume the worst since that's what a lot of this conversation is about. Assuming that there are sympathizers within Pakistan, in the military, in the intelligence service, in the scientific community, that wanted to do this, could they?

WOLFSTHAL: Well, the problem is we simply don't know enough about how Pakistan protects its nuclear materials and how they insure the reliability of the guards of their nuclear weapons. We have approached Pakistan, both officially and unofficially, and offered assistance, and we've been told thank you, they're safer, they're secure. In fact, there's a statement today from the foreign minister that their nuclear protections are foolproof and iron-clad, which to me is folly. The United States never says that our protections are iron-clad and foolproof. There's always a threat, and we'd like to know more about how Pakistan protects their material.

GREENFIELD: Now, Ms. Stern, you were involved, when you were on the National Security Council, not -- I mean, after, I mean, as part of your other work, in Pakistan. Are you confident that they know that is, the authorities, where all their nuclear material, all their weaponry is?

JESSICA STERN, HARVARD SCHOOL OF GOVERNMENT: Well, I think it's very likely they know exactly where their material and weaponry are. But, in fact, in private conversations that I had this summer, Pakistani senior officials are asking for assistance. They have particularly stressed that they would like assistance developing a better personnel reliability program, NEST, a nuclear emergency search team. They would like assistance with material protection, control and accounting for nuclear materials. And they'd also like assistance with early warning.

So, in this project which actually Ted Turner funded in a new foundation that he's started, Nuclear Threat Initiative, the Pakistanis were very forthcoming about their desire for assistance.

GREENFIELD: But, Ms. Stern, that tells us what the authorities who you spoke to want, but the scenario that we are looking at, today's "New York Times" story about scientists who may have sympathies, the notion that the ISI, their intelligence operation, is shot through with Taliban sympathizers and probably in the military. The question is, whatever the authorities want, can they stop dissidents in Pakistan from getting their hands on this stuff and moving it to very dangerous groups?

STERN: Well, that is a major concern. The Pakistani jihadi groups -- Pakistan's been playing a dangerous game. It's been funding and facilitating jihadi groups active in Kashmir, and those groups are now so angry at Musharraf that they have declared Jihad not only on America, but also on Pakistan itself. So it is a very critical moment for that country.

GREENFIELD: Mr. Adelman, I can't help but think that you must long in some sense for the good old days, when you knew who had nuclear weapons and who was aiming it at them, and we could destroy the Soviet Union and they cold destroy us. It was a pretty clear chess board compared to this. I mean, just form what you know, am I right that back then we, the United States, pretty much knew whenever the Soviet Union tested a nuclear device, correct?

ADELMAN: That's right, and we would know today if a country would test a nuclear device too. We were still, Jeff, we were still concerned during the Cold War about the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Pakistan, India got their nuclear weapon program up and going during the Cold War.

GREENFIELD: But my point is that if, for instance, Pakistan or Iraq were to move nuclear material to a non-state group, we don't have the technical capability to track that, do we?

ADELMAN: That would be difficult to track unless we had sources right in the intelligence network of those countries. But we can certainly preclude Iraq from doing that by taking out the Iraqi regime, by having a regime change.

Let me tell you, in 1981 Israel went and attacked the Osiraq nuclear plant before it went critical. The whole world thought it was a terrible thing. The fact is the world would be a fundamentally different place if by 1985 or 1986 Iraq had gotten nuclear weapons.

GREENFIELD: Right. But, Mr. Wolfsthal, this again raises the question of the complexity of who is doing what. How does the United States threaten the government of Pakistan if the government of Pakistan wants to keep their nuclear stockpile within their country under control but dissident groups are actually undermining the government?

WOLFSTHAL: Well, I don't think threatening the government of Pakistan is the way to go. I think what we do is follow up on some of the conversations that Jessica and some of her work have shown.

There are people in Pakistan that would like a closer nuclear relationship with United States. We can help them with protecting nuclear materials, insuring personnel reliability, but if Pakistan doesn't accept that assistance or can't give the United States assurance that we are comfortable with that nuclear materials are safe, then I think we need to have contingency plans in place.

We need to ship the assets of our nuclear emergency search teams, NES teams, to the region. We need a station, equipment, detectors, in Uzbekistan. We also need to train our NES teams with commandos, because if those nuclear materials go missing, if a nuclear weapon were to get lost, if the regime were to collapse, we're going to need to act immediately, because if we don't, the Indians are going to act, because they're concerned about Islamic fundamentalists and Pakistani forces using nuclear weapons against them.

And the reason that Secretary Powell went to South Asia was not to coordinate our military strategy with Musharraf and to work out some other trading issues with the Indians. It was to tell them to keep a lid on the nuclear tensions, that the United States was not going to stand by and let things get out of control.

GREENFIELD: I want to get a break in here, then when I come back I want to pick up on this theme of, if deterrents won't protect the West the way it did during the Cold War, what might? I want to continue that conversation with our guests when we come back.

And later, why the president might be sympathizing with a certain baseball manager. A lighter note at the end.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

GREENFIELD: We're back. We are talking about the nuclear threat with Jessica Stern, with Ken Adelman and with Jon Wolfsthal.

Ms. Stern, when were you involved with the National Security Council in trying to keep nuclear weapons out of the wrong hands with former Soviet Republics, you had a pretty clear cut strategy of cooperation and maybe helping them with money. Can that same approach work in today's Pakistan?

STERN: I think it can. John Wolfsthal also worked on this, and this strategy was known as preventative defense. That was Secretary Perry's term for assisting the former Soviet Union with upgrading security of its nuclear sites.

It was a cooperative program and it's very clear to me that the current regime in Pakistan, at any rate, would very much like to have that kind of assistance, would very much like to work with the U.S. government or even private foundations, in improving its nuclear security. I think Pakistan realizes it needs help.

GREENFIELD: But if they're unable to do this for themselves, you heard what Mr. Wolfsthal suggested, you know what Ken Adelman suggested and many of us have with respect to Iraq. Can you see a future in which the United States might be compelled to take action unilateral within the nation of Pakistan, either to take that nuclear material out of the hands of the Pakistanis, to even take out some of their facilities? Is that a conceivable future?

STERN: Well, it's the not entirely inconceivable. Let's just put it that way.

GREENFIELD: Very diplomatic. What would make it more conceivable?

STERN: Right now, according a recent poll, 63 percent of Pakistanis do not support Musharraf's joining with the United States in trying to fight al Qaeda. I think for now things are relatively quiet in Pakistan, but if we continue on the ground in Afghanistan indefinitely, it is going to become harder and harder for Musharraf to keep things under control. It's a dangerous policy, actually.

GREENFIELD: You're anticipating, in other words, that Musharraf falls, and Pakistan, the government comes under control of extremists who are sympathetic to the Taliban? STERN: I don't anticipate this at all. But I do think that this is one of the possible negative repercussions. Hopefully, it will never come to past. But it is something we very much need to be aware of. The longer time we are on the ground in Afghanistan, the more that threat could be realized.

GREENFIELD: Now, Mr. Adelman, I'm sorry. Go ahead.

ADELMAN: Yeah, I don't see it exactly that way. I think the biggest threat to us is that if the Pakistani government and other governments in the region see that we're not about to win this thing.

I think if we go and give the clear impression that we are winning and will win the war against terrorism, I think they'll be on our side.

Let me say one other thing on the Pakistani government. We all know that here's problems in that region, and Jessica is absolutely right, that it could be a regime that gets overthrown, but it doesn't seem -- it seems a lot stronger than that right now.

And secondly, the Pakistani military is the most professional and the most competent organization probably in the entire country. And they have assured us over the years that their professionalism and competence is especially strong in the handling of nuclear materials.

WOLFSTHAL: Yeah, that's all fine and well, Ken, but you know, we've gotten those same assurances from Russia long before we ever started helping them with MPC&A, with protecting their nuclear materials.

You know, a country is never going to come out publicly and say, oh, my God, we can't handle this, we need your help. Especially not Musharraf. And I think what Jessica is finding is that privately the government would like to work with the United States, because publicly it's suicide. The closer they get to the United States, that number, that 63 percent, grows higher and higher, and instability grows as well.

GREENFIELD: Mr. Wolfsthal...

ADELMAN: I don't believe the 63 percent number, to tell you the truth.

GREENFIELD: Well, you know, if we can -- I'm going to put polling aside since I have my own skepticism even in the United States, much less Pakistan.

ADELMAN: Right.

GREENFIELD: Mr. Wolfsthal, let me just, because we have just a couple of minutes left. In terms of the, of the realities on the ground, I want to come back to a question I raised with Greg Easterbrook, if dissident forces in Pakistan got material to al Qaeda, I guess through Afghanistan, is that, could they actually do something with it that would endanger the United States? How easy is that, to turn that intention into reality?

WOLFSTHAL: Well, you know, the expression that we use in our field is that building a nuclear weapon is hard. The hardest part about it is getting the nuclear materials. And once you get that, the rest is engineering. And so, if nuclear materials go from Pakistan to al Qaeda or the Taliban, then you have a serious threat on your hands.

Can they smuggle it into the United States? It's possible. We can't check every shipping container we, you know, you could smuggle it in, in a bale of marijuana from Mexico. So, yeah, there is a risk there. But I don't think the risk is immense. I think it's a very low percentage risk. But the consequences are so enormous, that the government's got to be doing everything it possibly can to both prevent it from happening, and to be prepared, God forbid, it does happen.

GREENFIELD: Now, Ms. Stern, I know that you worked on the National Security Council and you were a diplomat in the former Soviet Republic areas, or at least acted diplomatically. But pick up on something Ken Adelman has now told us twice, that he would do with respect to Iraq. If you knew that Iraq was on the verge of developing nuclear capability, would you support a notion to take that capability out with military force?

STERN: I'd have to think about it a lot more. I'm always diplomatic, Jeff, and I would want to think about it a lot more.

GREENFIELD: All right, well Ken Adelman, even though he was also a diplomat, can sometimes be, I won't say undiplomatic, but let's say blunt. So, Ken, in the 30 seconds or so we have left...

ADELMAN: I wouldn't have to think about...

GREENFIELD: No, I know...

ADELMAN: ... for one minute.

GREENFIELD: I know. That's not my question. Ken...

ADELMAN: And the fact is, I look back and I say thank God Israel took it out in 1981. Can you imagine what the world would be like if it didn't?

GREENFIELD: But, Ken, in 15 seconds now, would you do the same thing to Pakistan if it became clear to you that they were on the verge, with a new government, of turning nuclear material over to bad guys?

ADELMAN: Yes.

GREENFIELD: OK. That was even less than 15 seconds.

Thank you to my guests for talking about a pretty chilling subject, I would say. Jessica Stern, Ken Adelman, Jon Wolfsthal, thank you all. And finally, this thought, a lighter note. I spent last night for CNN on special assignment, at Yankee Stadium. Is that relevant? You bet. Here's why: all evening before the game began, the sports pundits were sure that Arizona manager Bob Brenly had made a terrible mistake starting pitcher Curt Schilling on three days rest. Too hasty they said. He'll falter, they said. He never should have sent him out there, they said.

So, what happened? Pitcher Schilling went seven innings, struck out nine, allowed only one run. So, that makes Manager Brenly a genius, right? Oh, no. Because the manager took his pitcher out after seven innings, and the relief pitcher gave up two home runs to the Yankees that cost Arizona the game.

So, now the pundits had a new criticism: he never should have taken him out. I couldn't help thinking about another one-time baseball man, a former owner of the Texas Rangers, as he listens to the voices on the sidelines. Increase the bombing. Call off the bombing. Put in ground troops. Broaden the coalition. Ignore the coalition. Reach out to Syria and Iraq. Attack Syria and Iraq. I wonder if Mr. Bush sent a silent message to the manager, Brenly, I know just how you feel.

I'm Jeff Greenfield. Tomorrow night on GREENFIELD AT LARGE, seven days, our week in review. "LOU DOBBS MONEYLINE" is next. Thank you.

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