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CNN Live At Daybreak
Next U.S. Threat -- Nuclear Weapons
Aired October 24, 2001 - 07:30 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.
PAULA ZAHN, CNN ANCHOR: As America fights terrorism at home and abroad, some experts are expressing concern that terrorists could obtain nuclear weapons.
CNN's David Ensor reports on the reasons for this concern.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
DAVID ENSOR, CNN NATIONAL SECURITY CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): When General Alexander Lebed was Russia's national security chief under then President Yeltsin, he worried Chechen separatists might try to get their hands on a nuclear weapon and ordered an inventory of what he said were hundreds of nuclear warheads small enough to fit into a briefcase.
BRUCE BLAIR, CENTER FOR DEFENSE INFORMATION: And so they tried to do an inventory of them and Lebed came up short by somewhere between 50 and 100 nuclear suitcases, and no one really has really persuasively explained the discrepancy between Lebed's count and what the Russian government said which was that don't worry, nothing's missing.
ENSOR: No U.S. official has ever actually seen a Russian tactical briefcase bomb, and Russian officials insist their inventory of nuclear weapons is meticulous, not one is missing.
Nuclear material is another matter. In 1995, Chechen separatists put a canister in a Moscow park containing cesium-137, a highly radioactive byproduct of nuclear fission. They then called the media. It was a stunt to show how unprotected Moscow was and still is. So, some experts say, is the United States.
Even more serious, some experts fear instability in Pakistan over the government's decision to back the U.S. campaign against bin Laden and the Taliban could lead to a coup in a nation that only recently became a nuclear power.
JOSEPH CIRINCIONE, CARNEGIE ENDOWMENT: The military fractures and some elements sympathetic to fundamentalism, sympathetic to the Taliban actually seize control of those nuclear weapons and the nuclear weapons go out of Pakistan control and spread into Afghanistan or perhaps to a third country entirely.
ENSOR: A terrifying scenario, certainly, though most experts on Pakistan say an unlikely one given that President Musharraf has his most trusted forces in charge of his nuclear weapons.
(on camera): These nuclear terrorist scenarios are highly unlikely in the view of many experts, but they say the nation should prepare to deal with them anyway. With the events of the last six weeks in mind, they say highly unlikely does not mean impossible.
David Ensor, CNN, Washington.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
ZAHN: How real is the threat of nuclear weapons being used against the U.S., its troops, its citizens? We're joined again this morning by former United Weapons Chief Weapons Inspector Ambassador Richard Butler -- good morning.
RICHARD BUTLER, FORMER UNITED NATIONS CHIEF WEAPONS INSPECTOR: Good morning, Paula.
ZAHN: How real is this threat?
BUTLER: Very real.
ZAHN: Why?
BUTLER: I'm so pleased that we're now talking about this. Anthrax is a serious problem, no doubt biological weapons are, but, Paula, the underlying major threat to our security continues to be nuclear weapons, OK. Comes in a couple of categories, you know the big stuff that Russia and the United States have. Then the next level of nuclear weapons countries with a smaller arsenal, one of which is undeclared, that's Israel, but we all know it has nuclear weapons. But the third layer is the one that frightens the hell out of me.
ZAHN: And that is?
BUTLER: That is that nuclear weapons may have been obtained by terrorist groups. Now why do I say that as those reports just indicated?
ZAHN: And the salient word there is may have been obtained.
BUTLER: We don't know. We don't know. I know of reports that Osama bin Laden has been seeking to acquire nuclear weapons.
I know with utter certainty that Iraq was months away from having nuclear weapons when we stopped them in '90-'91. One of the key defectors from Iraq to the West, a man who was in charge of elements of Saddam's bomb program, actually says that he's already made one -- that Saddam has already put together a crude nuclear weapon.
But the piece that is -- as I said, worries the hell out of me is what happened to Russia's nuclear weapons and nuclear materials.
ZAHN: Well we know they had scientists...
BUTLER: They had so many of them... ZAHN: Right.
BUTLER: ... and the Soviet Union broke down, and, Paula, we don't know where they all are. We don't have an inventory, including weapons that could be carried in a suitcase. So bottom line for me is that if there is another terrorist action in the future, and please God this won't be true, it could be with a nuclear weapon.
ZAHN: Let's talk more about what we do know. We know that some 7,000 scientists in Russia are -- who were then a part of the Soviet Union, were doing work on this program.
BUTLER: Right.
ZAHN: They've scattered all over the world.
BUTLER: That's right.
ZAHN: Do we know where any of them are today definitively? Some of them are here, right, in the Untied States?
BUTLER: Well, I know for -- I know personally some of them, and some of them are fully committed to keeping the world safe, but we don't know where all of them are. We do know that the scientific infrastructure broke down, they lost their jobs. Some of them, you know, have no money at all. They have knowledge in their heads of how to make nuclear weapons of various kinds. We don't know where they are.
Also, we don't know -- this is -- this is a real bedrock that, you know, sustains this concern I have. We don't know, and I don't even believe the Russians know, how much special fissionable material they made. That is the stuff that is the core of a nuclear weapon. I don't think they even know how much of it they made. And I know that a man like Saddam Hussein will pay breathtaking sums of money for such material.
ZAHN: And we know he has the money.
BUTLER: Material the size of a cantaloupe, that's it.
ZAHN: Wow.
BUTLER: That's it. That's the core, the pit of a nuclear weapon, and he would pay millions and millions of dollars for that. It's a problem.
ZAHN: Let's come back to Russia for a moment. There's been a lot of attention focused on this new relationship that's being forged between...
BUTLER: Right.
ZAHN: ... President Putin and President Bush.
BUTLER: Right. ZAHN: You said we're not even clear what the inventory is in Russia right now.
BUTLER: Right.
ZAHN: Are you confident that this -- at a time when the ABM Treaty is being, you know, debated that these two men will move the process far enough along that we will know how many of those types of bombs are in the Russian arsenal?
BUTLER: Confident. I hope they do address that. They're sensible and I suspect they will.
I've written a book about this, which will be coming out in a few weeks' time. And what I argue there and I hope both of these men start to do this is that the first step that has to be taken is to greatly reduce the number of nuclear weapons out there, to get a clear inventory and to take those that are on hair-trigger alert off alert then talk about missile defense. I hope they do that.
ZAHN: And we will continue to talk with you about a whole range of issues.
BUTLER: OK.
ZAHN: Ambassador Butler, again, thanks for dropping by.
BUTLER: Good to see you.
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