Partnership for a Secure America on WMD Threat

Matthew Rojansky of the Partnership for a Secure America and the Stimson Center's Brian Finlay will be online Tuesday, Sept. 9 at 2 p.m. ET to take your questions about the current threat the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction pose for the United States.

A transcript follows.

From the Post: In WMD Report, U.S. Gets a C: Group of Ex-Officials Says Terrorism Threat Remains (Post, Sept. 9)

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Fairfax, VA: What specific strategies make sense to curb the proliferation of nuclear and biological weapons worldwide? How do we verify that nations are cooperating/complying?

What are we doing now to anticipate and prepare for the evolution of future WMD weapons likely to emerge from advances in science and technology in 2015?

Brian Finlay: Thanks for your question. Our Report will be available tomorrow online and it does outline some very specific strategies to address the continued threat of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons terrorism. However, in short, we call for a layered strategy that includes:

1) an expansion of the suite of existing preventive efforts to secure (for example) nuclear materials at their source. This means helping countries tighten their own security around weapons, materials and the know-how to turn the latter into the former;

2) aggressive efforts to detect and stop the movement of materials that may elude our efforts to prevent their movement from the outset; to

3) political strategies to leverage the full capacity of the US government to build global buy-in regarding these efforts and ensure that all countries around the world have the means and the interest to prevent terrorists from obtaining dangerous weapons, materials and know-how.

Matthew Rojansky: Barry Kellman, our bioweapons expert, says: "In truth, we can't verify nonproliferation of bioweapons with the same degree of accuracy that we can verify nonproliferation of nuclear or even chemical weapons. However, there is much that we can do to improve our knowledge of what research, development, and production activities are going on in labs around the world. Furthermore, there are widespread `confidence-building measures' that could be put in place to build trust that nations are cooperating.

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Washington DC: Gentlemen, thank you for your sobering report. A year ago, Congress passed and the President signed into law a bill to implement the recommendations of the 9-11 Commission and create a director of nonproliferation at the White House. Why, months later, has that position not been filled?

Matthew Rojansky: That's a great question. Our focus at this point is largely on the next Administration and Congress. Clearly, appointing a coordinator at the White House level is something that will have to happen very shortly after the next President takes office, or we risk a repetition of precisely the current problem of lack of coordination. I would say that the WMD coordinator should be named, and should be explicitly given his or her authority vis-a-vis the other relevant federal agencies at the same time that other key national security appointments are made--i.e. if not day one, very soon after.

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Freising, Germany: After 9/11, my impression is that any nuclear bombs or radioactive material that could have been smuggled into the U.S. would have originated from the former Soviet Union. Now, however, due to efforts from the Cooperative Nonproliferation Program and due to Russia's newfound oil wealth, this source has probably dried up.

But what about new sources? Is the Cooperative Nonproliferation Program intending to have a voice in the internationally backed nuclear accord for India? And what about the Hermit Kingdom (North Korea), the Chaos Kingdom (Pakistan) and the Denial Kingdom (Iran)? Is there any chance to gain some oversight amongst these latter nations?

Brian Finlay: This is a great question. Given Russia's newfound wealth, I often hear that either: a) the sources in that country may have dried up because the motivation to proliferate no longer exists, or b) that Russia no longer needs US financial support to prevent proliferation. Nothing could be further from the truth, and here's why: Looking more closely at who is benefiting from high oil prices in Russia suggests a widening gap between the ultra-wealthy and the very poor. It's the latter that have the motivation and often the means to access storage facilities etc. Just last year, Slovak authorities arrested two Hungarians and a Ukranian after they tried to sell what was thought to be bomb-grade material on the black market. Furthermore, the Russian government's security concerns are different than our own. As a result, there is not a willingness to conform to the security standards that the US government would like. Absent US investments, it is more likely that dangerous materials and know-how could fall into the wrong hands--which is definitely not in our best interest. To your last question, your are absolutely right--these efforts need to be global. We're getting there, but we have a lot of work to do in the three countries you mentioned, as well as in dozens of others you didn't.

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Prescott, Ariz.: I have lived in small Western towns all my life. Needless to say, I think my biggest terrorism threat is from the right-wing domestic terrorists like the Oklahoma City bombers, Operation Rescue, etc. I get the feeling, and perhaps you can fill me in on this, that over the last 8 years these right-wing terrorists got a pass; time to shore up their standing and stockpile weapons for whatever sort of end-time or standoff they are itching for.

If we get a President Obama, am I right to be afraid of these terrorists streaming out of the woodwork? Those meth-head assassins in Denver certainly make me think this is the case.

Matthew Rojansky: I don't think it's accurate to say that home-grown terrorists or potential terrorists have "gotten a pass," however it's right that we haven't done all we could to prevent any radical group here or abroad from getting a hold of the materials to construct a mass casualty weapon. One particular problem, noted in the chemical terror section of our report, is the vulnerability of US chemical facilities and transport systems to direct attack. That is the kind of operation that home-grown terror cells could plan and execute with a minimum of special skills or materials.

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SAGA Foundation (Redwood City, CA): Could you tell what is the key difference between the two Presidential candidates with regard to nuclear nonproliferation and nuclear security?

Matthew Rojansky: Thanks for your question, and for full disclosure, SAGA has been one of our supporters on work on this issue. Both candidates agree that preventing a WMD terror attack is the top national security priority. But that's no different from where President Bush and Senator Kerry were in 2004. It would be hard to find a politician not committed to doing everything possible to prevent a nuclear (or other mass destruction) 9/11. The key is to transform that resolve into results. Both campaigns have been relatively vague about the steps they would take, but both have supported re-engagement with the Nuclear non-proliferation treaty, including an eventual goal of eliminating all nuclear weapons, in part because that is a tool that can help prevent new states from proliferating nuclear weapons and technologies to terrorists. As far as I know, neither has committed to fully implementing the 2007 Act, which calls for the creation of a coordinator position. As I said previously, if the next President creates this position, it will have to be very early on, or it will come as an unwelcome imposition on the agencies it is intended to oversee.

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Arlington, Va.: Can you talk about the role of scientists in the nonproliferation equation? How has the US scientific community helped to ensure that WMD scientists globally work with the US in minimizing proliferation of these weapons? What more can be done?

Matthew Rojansky: Barry Kellman, our bioweapons expert, says: "Biological scientists in the United States have been actively engaged in thinking about the dangerous applications of emerging scientific discoveries. Furthermore, bioscientists are regularly advising the State Dept., Defense Dept., Homeland Security, and the intelligence community. Finally, bioscientists are actively engaged in promoting global codes of conduct for scientists everywhere to monitor against research that might lead to bioweapons proliferation or escalation.

Matthew Rojansky: With regard to what more can be done, scientists can be far more actively engaged in developing knowledge-gathering and analytical systems for detecting where bioweapons are being developed. Also, they can be developing systems for disease surveillance and rapid response by delivering vaccines and other medicines. Finally, U.S. scientists can, even more than they are now, establish networks with scientists around the world to ensure oversight of research and laboratory activity.

Brian Finlay: This is a very important question -- and one that is consistently undervalued by the US government. The number of individuals around the world with the capacity to use their knowledge to support the development of these weapons is growing exponentially -- far faster than is the capacity of our government to monitor them. At the same time, US scientific capacity is the envy of the world -- everyone wants to collaborate and learn from the US scientific community. Our government has systematically failed to engage American scientists as advocates of nonproliferation. There is so much more we could be doing by working with the private sector and scientists to spread good will and gain insights into who is doing what, and where.

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Baltimore, MD: Would you agree with me that:

- the world's overall safety is directly related to the number of nations with the ability to launch a nuclear missile?

- that once a nation has a nuclear strike capability, there's no real way to eliminate it?

- in the grand scheme of things, those briefcase nuclear "dirty bombs" aren't very dangerous?

Brian Finlay: I wouldn't. Although we can never say definitively that no nation would launch a nuclear missile at the United States, the US Government seems to agree that that is far less likely than a terrorist using such device against us. The rationale is simple: a missile is launched with a clear return address and any government that is responsible would pay a very high price. On the other hand, a terrorist group could covertly obtain and even use a weapon of mass destruction without a clear signature. At present, tracing it back to the individuals or group responsible would be challenging and perhaps even impossible. I agree with the intelligence community on this -- a much more likely threat and one that therefore deserves a greater share of our attention.

Matthew Rojansky: Barry Kellman, our bioweapons expert, says: "A far greater danger than States launching a nuclear missile is the danger that someone (terrorist, criminal) will release a contagious biological agent and set off a pandemic. The `good' news with regard to nuclear missiles is that their launch is easily detected, and the U.S. would respond with devastating force. In this context, deterrence works. By contrast, with regard to biological agents, it is essentially impossible to know when or where those agents are being released (until long after), and the people who would do such a thing are not likely deterrable. Moreover, it's so much easier to make a biological weapon than a nuclear weapon, it's far more likely that a terrorist would turn to bioweapons. It's not that a biological weapon is inherently more dangerous than a nuclear weapon; it's that biological weapons are easier and cheaper to produce and far less detectable and traceable -- deterrence doesn't work."

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Washington, DC: How worried should an average person be about WMDs? I live in the shadow of the Capitol, but I can't help but think that I have a statistically greater chance of being injured crossing the street than being the victim of a terrorist attack. I am sick of living in this post 9/11 culture of fear and really don't think we are served by obsessing about something which even experts admit is a highly unlikely possibility.

Brian Finlay: I feel your pain on this one - and what's more, you're right. The likelihood that any of us will be struck down in traffic is greater than any chance of becoming the victim of a terrorist incident. The difference is this: one of us being struck by a car will not threaten the fabric of American society. A nuclear weapon detonated in the heart of one of our cities would. And the chances of that happening, while not as likely as an auto accident, are far from zero. As such, it would be irresponsible for our government not to be doing everything in its power to prevent that possibility -- and based upon the findings of our report, that is not the case today.

Matthew Rojansky: Barry Kellman adds his agreement that a biological attack would threaten the fabric of American society, the security of its government, and a number of nasty consequences for global security.

I would add that among the most disturbing consequences of a WMD attack, especially one whose source was not immediately clear, would be the pressure on the US government to react, potentially in self-destructive ways, and at great expense to Americans' civil liberties.

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Pittsburgh: According to Hsu's Post article, your recommendation is three-fold: 1. appointing a WH advisor with power to make funding decisions for counter-proliferation programs,

2. coordinating all programs under a strategic plan,

and 3. strengthening international cooperation.

I have two questions that will help me explain your ideas to my international security graduate class.

1. How would creating a new WH official with or without budget authority square with existing government officials with WMD responsibilities? Would this duplicate other efforts or replace existing WMD portfolios with DoD, State, DHS, and with the intelligence community?

2. How would such a strategic plan for preventing WMD attack and combating WMD proliferation you recommend differ from the strategic planning already extant in the National Strategy to Combat WMD/National Military Strategy to Combat WMD and NSPD-17/HSPD-4? Thanks!

Matthew Rojansky: Thank you for your question, and for addressing this important issue with your students. Right now, the government has more than a dozen offices and agencies working on the problem, ranging from Defense and State to Homeland Security, Commerce, HHS and the intelligence community. The problem we are seeing with these programs is not lack of overall commitment to combating WMD proliferation, or even lack of overall funding commitment, but a failure to coordinate among multiple related efforts. So in short, creating a position to do that coordination, with some authority to control budget allocation, and with the president's ear, would not duplicate anything--it's not being done at all now.

We've had a lot of strategies, but we haven't had a strategic plan. Strategies like the NSPD and HSPD set lofty goals, and are communicated to high level officials, but have generally been left lacking when it comes to implementation, precisely because there hasn't been a central decision-maker setting priorities across all agencies and programs. So, clearly the strategic plan is going to draw on elements of what we've seen in previous strategies, but the key difference is the ability to implement at a coordinated, interagency level.

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Baltimore: How confident is the US in its ability to detect and monitor WMD programs around the world? Syria's nuke program seems to have popped out of nowhere. Iran's program was invisible until key personnel defected. Nuke programs seem to require a lot of infrastructure and imported technology. If country X wants to develop a program (chem, bio or otherwise) that can threaten million of people is it an easy thing to hide?

Matthew Rojansky: Barry Kellman, our biological expert, says this: "The U.S. has, of course, extensive intelligence gathering capabilities, and these capabilities might stumble upon a covert bioweapons program. However, we have no systematic capabilities to search out and discover where bioweapons might be produced. Furthermore, we have huge gaps in knowledge about where are dangerous pathogens, where are labs where they could be weaponized, and where pathogens might be moving."

Brian Finlay: A few years ago I sat in the office of a world class physicist at the University of Maryland. He told me that with even crude "shielding" (paraffin wax and lead filings), a terrorist could conceal a nuclear weapon from even our most sensitive detection equipment -- even if it were in the next office. The point is, we have a long way to go to be able to detect individual weapons. It's less likely, but not impossible, that a country could conceal a developed nuclear program. When UN weapons inspectors entered Iraq after the first Gulf War in 1991, they were amazed at how far Saddam Hussein had managed to progress in developing his nuclear weapons program -- completely unbeknownst to the outside world.

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Alexandria, Va.: In your report, you mention the need to control the "movement of these materials." By movement, do you also mean the knowledge of how to create them--that is, the risks posed by the scientists and engineers who know how to create weapons of mass destruction?

Brian Finlay: Our report references both of these as "threats" that must be addressed. The clear and present danger here is that the composite materials necessary to build a nuclear weapon could fall into the hands of an ill-intentioned individual or group. We know how to stop this, but we simply aren't moving aggressively enough. The movement of know-how and technologies is also a massive problem. Here however, the strategy to prevent this is far less clear. Globalization, privatization, instant communication, global economic development and so on is pushing capacities and know-how into more and more hands. Unfortunately, the US government hasn't done enough to think this problem through and develop a reasonable strategy to help build some preventive walls -- mainly because it's really tough.

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Dallas: In 2004, both presidential candidates cited nuclear terrorism as the gravest threat facing the country.

Yet the response to this threat continues to be very low key.

What we need is a crash program to lock up the fuel and secure the nuclear weapons to the highest degree as fast as possible.

Do you know what this might cost and how quickly it could be accomplished?

Brian Finlay: Thanks for your question. A Blue-Ribbon panel convened by the then Secretary of Energy at the end of the Clinton Administration did such a study and concluded that to prevent the threat of nuclear terrorism would require an investment of about $30 billion over a 10 year period. Unfortunately, since then, there has been no government-wide effort to step back and look at the threat in its totality, look at what needs to be done, and build a coordinated series of programs with a defined price tag address that threat. This is a central recommendation emerging from our report.

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Washington, D.C.: Would increasing reliance on nuclear power (for instance the possibility of more nuclear plants worldwide) increase the likelihood of a nuclear bomb or radiological device being used by terrorists?

Matthew Rojansky: That's a great question. Obviously, in the public eye the term "nuclear" connotes both weapons and civilian power systems, and indeed in the policy sphere, the two are regulated by related instruments (the best example being the NPT, which promises nuclear power technology to all signatories in exchange for forswearing weapons proliferation).

However, the technologies themselves are not exactly the same. Nuclear power plants pose a potential proliferation threat insofar as some produce plutonium waste, which can be weaponized, and insofar as uranium must be at least lightly enriched to be used as reactor fuel in some plants. The concern there is that uranium enrichment can always be scaled up to produce the highly enriched variety (HEU) used in nuclear weapons. Indeed, there are some plants that run on HEU altogether. So that's the danger.

Proponents of thorium reactors say that there is no proliferation risk to that type of power generation, because neither uranium not plutonium are involved at any stage in the process. Similarly, several states have proposed international regulation of nuclear power production such that a state could produce nuclear power on its own territory fuel and spent fuel would be kept abroad. This was part of Russia's proposal to resolve the Iranian nuclear crisis--Russia would produce the uranium fuel for Iranian reactors, and would collect the spent fuel and account to the international community for every ounce, so nothing could be diverted to make a weapon.

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Bethesda, Md.: What are our protections against weapons of mass destruction? How well or poorly are we able to detect their locations? If they are used, what are our limitations on protecting ourselves?

Matthew Rojansky: Barry Kellman, our bioweapons expert, says: "With regard to detection of biological weapons, we are essentially in the dark. We don't know where they might be released or even when. Once a release happens, it won't likely be detected for days until sick people pile into emergency rooms. Indeed, at first, it might look like a natural disease outbreak -- only later will it be obvious that we've been attacked. Finally, the attacker can attack at numerous locations at different times, causing massive confusion about the nature of the attack itself.

The U.S. government has, in the last few years, substantially increased our stockpiles of vaccines and antidotes for some of the prominent biological agents. If one of those agents is used, we likely have a public health capacity to minimize the consequences. However, if the attack involves an agent for which we do not have a vaccine or antidote, then we are essentially defenseless. Moreover, a contagious disease could be released outside the U.S. where public health capacities are minimal, and a pandemic could be started that would work it's way to the U.S., destroying U.S. partners and interests along the way."

Brian Finlay: The US government has been investing heavily in these technologies since 9/11. For instance, the Stimson Center is undertaking a study (and collaborating with the Department of Energy) on an initiative that seeks to redirect some of the capabilities of our nuclear weapons laboratories in this country into new missions -- such as detecting WMD. While we've made significant progress, we're far from close to having anything close to a perfect detection capability.

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Santa Fe, NM: Another White House czar? Oh, please.

I realize that this is the conventional think-tank response to practically everything, but the history is that these so-called coordinators never have the power to do anything, much less solve the problem that they were nominally placed to address.

But it does open up a new position for folks who are in think-tanks.

Snark aside, when are you guys going to come up with a new idea? Like involving the public more? Oh, you say that would be hard. Well, maybe not. We've got a distributed two-way information system called the internet. How about some innovative ways to use that?

Matthew Rojansky: Thanks for the nomination. I'll be happy to serve as WMD coordinator if the President wants me.

Seriously, our recommendations go well beyond the need for high level coordination, though. I think one of the more innovative approaches to stopping WMD proliferation in the long term is to engage the private sector. Nowadays, critical nuclear, chemical, biological and manufacturing technologies are not limited to the US and the top few industrial powers. We're dealing with a situation where companies and researchers in numerous other, smaller countries are developing literally all the pieces necessary to construct the most dangerous weapons. It's not going to be enough for governments to agree to stop proliferation, when companies can simply sell the pieces to well-heeled anonymous buyers.

So, what to do? Brian has co-written a great paper on the subject, which you can find on the Stimson Center website. The basic idea is to create incentives and mechanisms for the private sector to a) figure out what's going on so somebody in a company knows what it means when they get an order for X widgets from a certain source, and then b) get that information into a pool accessible to law enforcement and intelligence folks so they can analyze patterns and start to figure out where, when and how terrorists might try to strike.

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Washington DC: Your forthcoming report says the United States remains "dangerously vulnerable" to chemical, biological and nuclear attacks seven years after 9/11. My question: Is it conceivable, in this world, that the US won't ALWAYS be "dangerously vulnerable to such attacks?

Brian Finlay: Regretably, we'll always be vulnerable as there is no silver bullet to prevent WMD terrorism. But that cannot mean that we shouldn't be doing everything we can to ensure we are not "dangerously" vulnerable. The current state of affairs is unacceptable.

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Matthew Rojansky: Thanks for all your questions. Former 9/11 Commissioners Lee Hamilton and Slade Gorton will be available to speak to this Report Card tomorrow at 11 am at our office:

1111 19th St, NW, 12th Floor

Washington, DC 20036

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