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American Morning

Do Terrorists Still Present a Nuclear Threat?

Aired March 04, 2002 - 07:08   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: All right, on to the question of terrorism. Do terrorists still present a nuclear threat?

Shortly after 9-11, while Americans were being told to resume their normal lives, U.S. intelligence officials were getting ready for the worst. A frightening report in this week's "Time" magazine says the Bush administration in October was investigating a claim that a 10 kiloton nuclear bomb was missing from Russia's stockpile and that terrorists were planning to detonate the device right here in New York City.

Although the plot was deemed not credible, the report raises questions about just how vulnerable we could be to a nuclear terror threat.

Joining us now from Washington is the "Time" magazine reporter who broke the story, Massimo Calabresi. Good to see you, Massimo.

MASSIMO CALABRESI, "TIME" MAGAZINE: Good to be here.

ZAHN: When did you find out about this plan?

CALABRESI: The last month or so, speaking with a few different sources here in Washington.

ZAHN: And how is it that this was something that apparently the U.S. officials learned about back in October and we're just finding out about it now? Does that surprise you?

CALABRESI: Well, not much. They got it, they looked into it. They were very, very alarmed by it initially. When they got through checking it and failed to find any evidence backing it up, they determined that the original report had been wrong. So that kind of thing tends to, tends to get buried away, buried away here in Washington.

ZAHN: And while they were trying to figure out the authenticity of the report, FBI made no warnings, right, to Americans of this potential threat?

CALABRESI: That's right. You have to remember this was three, four, maybe five weeks after September 11 and the mood in the country was a lot different where it is now where it's amazing that in six months we've all settled back into our regular lives. But thinking back, everyone can probably remember just how jittery the country was at the time.

ZAHN: Was there any active consideration given, during that period of time when the U.S. government was trying to figure out whether the threat was real or not, about warning us about it?

CALABRESI: There were discussions. Several different sources talked about what they were, what the discussions were, how they thought they should react, whether or not they should call family members. This kind of thing is very difficult for people in government to deal with, especially when it's, as they described this, the information from this source as of undetermined credibility.

ZAHN: So their concern was if they went with a warning they would cause tremendous panic?

CALABRESI: Well, it's partly that but it's also what do you get if you do warn? There's not, it's not entirely clear that New York has the capacity to deal with that, the kind of evacuation that might be necessary if the information turned out to be true. And that's the larger point of the article and one I'd like to spend a little time talking about, is that for that kind of threat, there really isn't a lot that the U.S. is ready to do, either to diminish the casualties from it or to prevent against it.

There really is sort of a new era of threat that started in the, you know, in the wake of the post cold, in the wake of the cold war.

ZAHN: What else did this, did you learn from this investigation, in terms of like you've just said, the U.S.'s inability, basically, to stop this stuff from happening? Is it because of the lack of human intelligence that you've arrived at that conclusion?

CALABRESI: Well, there's a lot of different things that the U.S. could do to better defend against this new kind of threat, and it's worth being a little specific about that. The entire national security system that we have is designed to do one thing -- fight the Soviets. That means we have a lot of stuff that's very good at counting missile silos in Siberia, a lot of stuff that's good at telling us how fast their jets are, whether their tanks are going to come through the Fulda Gap into Germany.

We don't, we don't have a system that's designed to pick up small, discrete cells of terrorists working their way into the country. Part of the, part of what you can do to fight against that is improve human intelligence, old-fashioned spying, things like that. You can diminish your reliance on very expensive technical gadgetry that does less to penetrate that kind of threat. They also, the government could do more to share information more smoothly. Also, the effort to improve homeland defense is still very much slow starting. So...

ZAHN: Well, the report is frightening, at the same time fascinating. And in it you say if people had been able to successfully smuggle one of these nuclear weapons into the country it might have potentially killed 100,000 people and irradiated up to 700,000. But you'll have to pick up the latest copy of "Time" magazine for all of the other tales.

Massimo, thank you very much for your time this morning. Appreciate your dropping by.

CALABRESI: My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

ZAHN: Thank you.

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