How to Keep the Bomb From Terrorists

The only thing that can keep nuclear bombs out of the hands of terrorists is a brand-new science of nuclear forensics.

by Graham Allison, Newsweek, 14/03/2008

In 2007, at the very moment Washington was sitting at the negotiating table with Pyong-Yang to hammer out a nuclear deal, North Korean officials were supplying know-how, equipment and nuclear material to Syria to build a weapons-grade reactor only a few miles from Israel's border. When the news came to light, diplomats and nuclear experts were shocked at Kim Jong Il's duplicity. Israel bombed the Syrian site later that year.

What is Kim Jong Il doing now? The question is foremost on the minds of U.S. national-security officials. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, when asked recently what keeps him awake at nights, said, "It's the thought of a terrorist ending up with a weapon of mass destruction, especially nuclear." What if Osama bin Laden offered to pay Kim Jong Il $10 million, say, for a nuclear bomb to be exploded in New York City and $20 million for a second bomb destined for Tel Aviv?

U.S. security officials are now convinced that the only effective way to stop Kim Jong Il is to put in place an effective deterrence against such a foolish action, and that the task is urgent. On the bottom-line question of whether a successful nuclear terrorist attack is more or less likely than it was when George W. Bush entered office, just last month the bipartisan Commission on the Prevention of WMD Proliferation and Terrorism offered a unanimous judgment: "Our margin of safety is shrinking, not growing." The key to a new deterrent is coming up with some way of tracing the nuclear material backward from the explosion in New York City to the Pyongan reactors that forged the fissile material, even to the mines in Sunchon-Wolbingson that yielded the original uranium ore.

The idea behind this type of nuclear forensics would be to put doubt in the minds of North Korean officials. The scenario that U.S. intelligence officials imagine is a debate between two North Korean national-security advisers over the merits of a bin Laden offer—let's call them Hawk and Chicken Hawk—in the presence of their leader, Kim Jong Il.

Here's how the debate might go:
"We should do the deal," says Hawk. "Under your enlightened leadership, Dear Leader, we have expanded our arsenal to 10 bombs. If we sold two, we'd still have eight bombs left, which is more than enough to deter the United States or South Korea from invading our country to overthrow our regime. And besides, we need the cash."

The prospect makes Chicken Hawk shudder. "If Al Qaeda successfully detonates a nuclear bomb in midtown Manhattan and kills half a million people, don't you think that when the United States discovers the source of the material it will erase North Korea from the map?"

Hawk leans back in his chair and smiles like Dr. Strangelove. "The Americans will not know where Osama got his bomb," he says. "It could just as well have come from Pakistan, where bin Laden is now headquartered."

As things stand now, Hawk might prevail. What U.S. security officials want to do is give Chicken Hawk the upper hand.

Holding nations accountable for their fissile material offers the best prospect available for creating the conditions for a standoff—like the Cold War standoff between the Soviet Union and the United States, in which fear of retaliation prevented each nation from launching its missiles against the other. This "mutually assured destruction" held the peace for decades in large part because missiles have an unambiguous return address. Discovering the origin of a shipping container of black-market plutonium is more challenging, but by no means impossible. Scientists are beginning to figure out just how to do it.

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