Duncan Black and Graham Allison discuss nuclear terrorism.

The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe.

... DUNCAN BLACK: Tell us about Dragonfire . That was actually news to me. Remember after September 11th, Vice President Cheney went to his famous or infamous ‘undisclosed location’, and we never really were given a clear reason why that happened or what purpose that would serve aside from general security concerns. But in your book you talked about this Dragonfire , can you tell us what that was about?

GRAHAM ALLISON: Well, this was an actual incident, and as you say it motivated the President to decide to have Cheney evacuate Washington and with him almost a thousand people from various agencies of the U.S. government on the proposition that the U.S. government thought Al Qaeda may, might have succeeded in acquiring a nuclear bomb out of the former Soviet arsenal and might have that bomb in the U.S. already. The Dragonfire story goes like this. It was actually coincidental. One month to the day after the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Tenet, the director of CIA, George Tenet walks into the Oval Office for the president’s morning daily intelligence briefing and informs President Bush that Dragonfire , a CIA agent, has reported that Al Qaeda has gotten a small nuclear bomb out of the former Soviet arsenal and now has that bomb in New York City. So there’s a couple of minutes …

DUNCAN BLACK: Of panic.

GRAHAM ALLISON: … to catch your breath and then actually a very good interrogatory that goes something like the following. Did the former Soviet arsenal include weapons of that description, what Dragonfire had said? Yes. Were all those weapons adequately accounted for? Tenet’s answer: No. Could Al Qaeda have acquired one of these weapons? Yes. Could Al Qaeda have brought that weapon to New York and have it now ready to detonate in New York City without our otherwise knowing anything about it? Answer: Yes. So, bottom line from that interrogation was no basis for dismissing Dragonfire’s report that there was now a live nuclear bomb in New York City about to be exploded. So Bush I think rightly said, Wait a minute, well, it could be in Washington. They could have two bombs. So Cheney and this group of people left and they were gone from Washington for quite a lot of time, if you remember back, you know, after 9/11. Actually the nuclear NEST teams, which are a group of nuclear ninjas or experts from the labs were dispatched to New York City to look for any sign of radioactivity, and I tell in the story Giuliani was not informed about any of this, so he was an unhappy camper, you know, after, I mean, after a week it was determined that this was most likely a false alarm, because some of the other things that Dragonfire had reported about the way that bomb had been brought to the U.S. turned out not to be confirmed. But in any case I think the reason for us to take this into account is that there was no basis, and there is no basis, in science or technology or logic for dismissing a report if we got a good intelligence report today that Al Qaeda had a nuclear bomb in New York or DC or LA or Boston.

DUNCAN BLACK: All right, so this was a completely plausible scenario, given the fact that these weapons exist, they are not all accounted for, and they are relatively easily transportable.

GRAHAM ALLISON: Right, it kind of worked, and that we know that there’s somebody who seems pretty motivated.

DUNCAN BLACK: Right.

GRAHAM ALLISON: Especially after 9/11, if you had any doubts before that, to kill a lot of Americans...

DUNCAN BLACK: So, I mean about how many of these roughly sized warheads, you know, the suitcase nukes or their equivalents, I mean, how many of them exist and how many of them have rather poor security guarding them?

GRAHAM ALLISON: Well, it’s a complicated story, and the answer is we don’t really know. In fact I quote in the book the testimony of a director of CIA who says, “It’s not what I know that worries me so much, it’s what I know that I don’t know”. So here, to give the broad picture, there were created in the high cold war some 50 or 60 thousand nuclear warheads, the U.S. about half, the Soviet Union about half. From that peak, both parties have come down, been demobilizing and even abolishing a significant number of these weapons. So as today you would think that there are probably 40 or 45 thousand nuclear warheads globally.

DUNCAN BLACK: Okay.

GRAHAM ALLISON: Of those warheads, about half would be strategic and about half would be tactical. And tactical weapons go from something like an artillery shell, which is only this big, to something that would be a tactical nuclear warhead that would go in a rocket launcher, that could be this big. All right? So they go in various sizes. And then in addition there’s the kind of miniature versions, and the miniature versions, referred to sometimes in the past as backpack or suitcase nuclear bombs, were mainly designed to be small, have a pretty substantial blast, and as I mentioned before, they were to be used by a group of two men who would parachute in behind enemy lines to try to blow up, you know, the command and control structures or to blow up an airport, or to blow up a bridge, or otherwise. And both the U.S. and Russia, or the Soviet Union, had such weapons, and indeed had such weapons that were to be deployed by special forces or intelligence operatives. So it was a mission for doing something that looks rather like blowing up a building or blowing up a, you know, a city, parts of a city, or blowing up a political leader, and there was a means for doing that. That was these nuclear bombs. Now, there then comes to be a long story about what happened to all these weapons.

DUNCAN BLACK: Right.

GRAHAM ALLISON: And I try to advance that story a little bit in the book on nuclear terrorism. Basically I would say at this stage that we don’t, we never pinned it down adequately. The Russians currently say that all those weapons – first they said no such weapons ever existed. Then they said all of them had been destroyed. Then they said all of them were under control. So there’s been a kind of series of, Well, I didn’t do it, I wasn’t there, Well, I didn’t hit her that hard, or you know, all these inconsistent stories. But they, my current thought about it is that there is no question, 100% in my view that they had such weapons...