Securing the Bomb 2006
Urgent actions are needed to prevent a nuclear 9/11. Terrorists are actively seeking nuclear weapons and the materials to make them. With the needed nuclear materials in hand, making at least a crude nuclear bomb, capable of turning the heart of any modern city into a smoking ruin,is potentially within the capabilities of a sophisticated terrorist group. Yet scores of sites where the essential ingredients of nuclear weapons exist, in dozens of countries around the world, are clearly not well enough secured to defeat the kinds of threats that terrorists and criminals have demonstrated they can pose.
Wherever an insecure cache of potential nuclear bomb material continues to exist, there is a threat to U.S. homeland security and to the security of the world that must be addressed as quickly as possible. Keeping nuclear weapons or materials from being stolen in the first place is the most direct and reliable tool for preventing nuclear terrorism, for once such items have disappeared, the problem of finding them or stopping terrorists from using them multiplies enormously.
A dangerous gap remains between the urgency of the threat of nuclear terrorism and the scope and pace of the U.S. and world response. That gap has been narrowed in recent years, with actions such as the accord on nuclear security between U.S. President George Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin at their 2005 summit in Bratislava, Slovakia, and the launch of the Global Threat Reduction Initiative (GTRI) in early 2004. But much more needs to be done. |
