Nuclear Terror Would Strain Bomb Sleuths
June 14, 2009 by national
Filed under Homeland Security News
If the unthinkable happened, would we be left on the day after, as radioactive dust settled, with the unknowable?
If a terrorist nuclear bomb destroyed the heart of a great city, how would we know who did it, with what? Mideast fanatics with a device improvised from stolen uranium? A weapon smuggled in by a rogue regime? A hijacked U.S. bomb?
Where do you strike back? How do you head off another attack?
President Barack Obama calls nuclear terrorism “the most immediate and extreme threat to global security.” It’s an unthinkable that’s being thought about daily in classified corners of world capitals.
But knowledgeable scientists and the investigators behind a new U.S. government report say the American nuclear establishment needs more specialists and more background data on possible bomb sources to do the detective job that awaits on that day after.
“I don’t believe the intelligence community is ready for the challenge,” said Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, who worked for years as a U.S. intelligence leader on weapons of mass destruction.
