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August 11, 2004

AN AMERICAN HIROSHIMA

By Nicholas D. Kristof

Aspen, Colo. -- If a 10-kiloton nuclear weapon, a midget even smaller
than the one that destroyed Hiroshima, exploded in Times Square, the
fireball would reach tens of millions of degrees Fahrenheit.

It would vaporize or destroy the theater district, Madison Square
Garden, the Empire State Building, Grand Central Terminal and Carnegie
Hall (along with me and my building). The blast would partly destroy a
much larger area, including the United Nations. On a weekday some
500,000 people would be killed.

Could this happen?

Unfortunately, it could -- and many experts believe that such an
attack, somewhere, is likely. The Aspen Strategy Group, a bipartisan
assortment of policy mavens, focused on nuclear risks at its annual
meeting here last week, and the consensus was twofold: the danger of
nuclear terrorism is much greater than the public believes, and our
government hasn't done nearly enough to reduce it.

Graham Allison, a Harvard professor whose terrifying new book,
"Nuclear Terrorism," offers the example cited above, notes that he did
not pluck it from thin air. He writes that on Oct. 11, 2001, exactly a
month after 9/11, aides told President Bush that a C.I.A. source
code-named Dragonfire had reported that Al Qaeda had obtained a
10-kiloton nuclear weapon and smuggled it into New York City.

The C.I.A. found the report plausible. The weapon had supposedly been
stolen from Russia, which indeed has many 10-kiloton weapons. Russia
is reported to have lost some of its nuclear materials, and Al Qaeda
has mounted a determined effort to get or make such a weapon. And the
C.I.A. had picked up Al Qaeda chatter about an "American Hiroshima."

President Bush dispatched nuclear experts to New York to search for
the weapon and sent Dick Cheney and other officials out of town to
ensure the continuity of government in case a weapon exploded in
Washington instead. But to avoid panic, the White House told no one in
New York City, not even Mayor Rudy Giuliani.

Dragonfire's report was wrong, but similar reports -- that Al Qaeda has
its hands on a nuclear weapon from the former Soviet Union -- have
regularly surfaced in the intelligence community, even though such a
report has never been confirmed. We do know several troubling things:
Al Qaeda negotiated for a $1.5 million purchase of uranium (apparently
of South African origin) from a retired Sudanese cabinet minister; its
envoys traveled repeatedly to Central Asia to buy weapons-grade
nuclear materials; and Osama bin Laden's top deputy, Ayman
al-Zawahiri, boasted, "We sent our people to Moscow, to Tashkent, to
other Central Asian states, and they negotiated, and we purchased some
suitcase [nuclear] bombs."

Professor Allison offers a standing bet at 51-to-49 odds that, barring
radical new antiproliferation steps, a terrorist nuclear strike will
occur somewhere in the world in the next 10 years. So I took his bet.
If there is no such nuclear attack by August 2014, he owes me $5.10.
If there is an attack, I owe him $4.90.

I took the bet because I don't think the odds of nuclear terror are
quite as great as he does. If I were guessing wildly, I would say a 20
percent risk over 10 years. In any case, if I lose the bet, then I'll
probably be vaporized and won't have much use for money.

Unfortunately, plenty of smart people think I've made a bad bet.
William Perry, the former secretary of defense, says there is an even
chance of a nuclear terror strike within this decade -- that is, in the
next six years.

"We're racing toward unprecedented catastrophe," Mr. Perry warns.
"This is preventable, but we're not doing the things that could
prevent it."

That is what I find baffling: an utter failure of the political
process. The Bush administration responded aggressively on military
fronts after 9/11, and in November 2003, Mr. Bush observed, "The
greatest threat of our age is nuclear, chemical or biological weapons
in the hands of terrorists, and the dictators who aid them." But the
White House has insisted on tackling the most peripheral elements of
the W.M.D. threat, like Iraq, while largely ignoring the central
threat, nuclear proliferation. The upshot is that the risk that a
nuclear explosion will devastate an American city is greater now than
it was during the cold war, and it's growing.

In my next column, I'll explain how we can reduce the risk of an
American Hiroshima.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company