The bomb was in the back of a Mini.
The car was parked in the lot on the edge of the Refecting Pool, just across from the Jefferson Memorial, where locals and tourists parked to stroll through the cherry blossoms. Between the trees on the path around the calm waters, you can sometimes see the Truman Balcony of the White House, just off the president's living quarters.
The weapon the terrorists had put together was remarkably simple. The basic design was Los Alamos circa 1944, similar to the one sketched out by Manhattan Project scientists. It was relatively straightforward, two small hemispheres of highly enriched uranium sitting inside either end of an old artillery tube. When smashed together, the hemispheres would initiate a nuclear reaction, a smaller and more primitive version of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.1
The detonation system was Baghdad circa 2006, the same kind of remote-triggering via cell phones, that made it so easy for militants to plant and detonate roadside IEDs.
It took two years and considerable stealth and sophisticated bribery schemes to put together enough chunks of highly enriched uranium—30 kilograms in all— to make the bomb. In the end, sleeper agents in Pakistan's weapons labs made all the difference.2 By comparison, getting the components into the United States was a breeze. The uranium was shipped in a few kilos at a time, heavily shielded, mixed in with old industrial parts; the terrorists were betting that the technology the Bush administration had deployed in the days after 9/11 for domestic nuclear detection was fundamentally useless for detecting weapons fuel. Their assumption was correct. Once the various shipments made it inside the United States—one across an obscure back road through the open border between Maine and Canada, another through one of the busiest crossings on the Mexican border-UPS handled the rest of delivery, bringing the boxes one by one to a suburban house in New Jersey. The “gun-type” device was assembled in the basement, put tenderly into a crate, and driven to Washington.
Scouts had surveyed the city and determined that parking near the White House was too risky. The Secret Service had a heavy presence, and a fully loaded nuclear detection truck was permanently parked at one end of West Executive Avenue, its sensors arrayed on the roof.
Instead the terrorists settled on the parking lot near the Jefferson Memorial, where the images of devastation would be dramatic. This was, in the end, more about creating televised chaos than about causing casualties. It was early April, and the cherry blossoms were in full bloom, drawing tourists, joggers, lovers, and hot-dog vendors to the pathways around the Tidal Basin. The trees were a gift from the Japanese early in the twentieth century, and survived efforts during World War II to have them chopped down. They were a symbol of friendship, survivors of a challenge to American power that had started with the surprise attack at Pearl Harbor and ended, three and a half years later, with the only two detonations of nuclear weapons on civilian populations. Until now.
When it went off it was nothing like Hiroshima or Nagasaki. Like the North Korean nuclear test in 2006, it was half explosion, half fizzle. But the North Koreans conducted their test deep in a cave. This one happened within view of the blue Oval Room in the White House, where tourists making their way through public rooms saw the flash outside the windows. They survived, at least the initial explosion, because the deadly radiation ring stopped just short of the South Lawn. But in milliseconds the Reflecting Pool was gone, and there was no sign of the tourists, the hot-dog vendors, or the black-barked cherry trees. The memorial was blackened but half standing; the statue of Jefferson was melted on one side.
The president was out of town. Just like President Bush on the morning of 9/11, his successor had a difficult time getting reliable, real-time information. The only thing he knew for sure was that a thousand miles away, the capital of the United States was burning for the first time since the British invaded in 1812. The city's residents had not been instructed to find out which way the wind was blowing—the most important single piece of information for determining whether people should flee or seek shelter for two or three days in their basements or the subways. So they jumped in their vehicles, triggering deadly traffic jams as the fallout began to descend. Everything ground to a halt; parents were unable to get to their children at school; emergency vehicles were immobilized.
The newly built Continuity of Government center, off Route 66 in Virginia, became the new capital. Inside that underground facility officials watched helplessly as a single square mile of devastation—a horror, but a contained horror-created a global panic in major cities and in world financial markets.
As images of the National Mall engulfed in flames were being broadcast around the world, Al Jazeera began playing a tape that had mysteriously appeared at the network's headquarters. In it, a young round-faced, bearded man, describing himself as the leader of an obscure militant group, began ticking off a long list of America's alleged offenses. Then he added, “This was our first weapon, but not our last. Tomorrow afternoon, a similar bomb will go off in Los Angeles. If Americans have not left Afghanistan by the weekend and swear never again to enter the tribal lands of our ancestors, New York will suffer the same fate. If you attack us, know that we have planted more devices, in Atlanta, Chicago, and Dallas. Our fellow martyrs are living among you, and they know what to do.”
A bluff? Probably. Getting enough nuclear material for a single bomb is incredibly difficult, and the early indications were that this was a “subkiloton” explosion, a fraction of what went off at Hiroshima or Nagasaki. The national security adviser told the president that the intelligence community doubted that the terrorists had enough fuel for a second bomb.
But such estimates didn't matter. In America's biggest cities, the panicked exodus began. While a parade of officials—most never before seen by Americans—urged calm, and warned that more people would be killed evacuating the cities than died in the initial attack, no one listened. Even the president was unconvincing as he urged everyone to stay home. After all, he wasn't home, so why should they be?
The explosion wasn't intended to wipe out Washington. It was designed to create a chain reaction of terror and economic meltdown. The terrorists’ investment in the device, bribes included, was $525,000. As world markets plummeted and credit markets froze, they knew that the cost to the West would be measured in the trillions of dollars.
Within hours a white-suited “nuclear attribution” unit from the Pentagon headed into the new Ground Zero to gather radioactive samples that might indicate where the bomb originated—an urgent issue if the government had any hope of stopping a second attack. The scientists conducting the investigation knew that testing could take days or weeks, though the White House was demanding answers now, and on Fox News, two commentators were declaring that the president must order the annihilation of whichever country was responsible for providing the bomb material, wittingly or not.
The Russian and Pakistani governments had already sent assurances that all their nuclear material was accounted for, along with offers of help. Their truthfulness was hard to assess. But the White House would need their help urgently in coming days to determine if the terrorists’ claim that they posessed more weapons was plausible.
“You know,” the president said to his national security adviser, “during the Cuban Missile Crisis, at least Kennedy knew who to threaten. Would one of you geniuses tell me who I'm supposed to talk to? Or how you bomb a country that probably didn't know its nukes were missing?”
THE MAN with the job of keeping this horror—and twenty easily imagined variants of it—from ever being realized sits in an office in downtown Washington, D.C., that is, by his own admission, within the blast zone.
“What's even more hilarious,” says Vayl Oxford, a trim, fifty-six-year-old former Air Force officer with short-cropped hair and a bit of a twinkle in his eye, “is that our evacuation plan for this building calls for everyone to go that way…” He gestured out the window, toward the nearest subway stop. “We head toward the White House,” he said with a tight smile. “We may need to revamp our plans.”
That is not the only plan Vayl Oxford has tried—with only limited success—to revamp since he settled into his office on the twelfth floor of a bland glass office building whose other occupants include lobbyists and trade associations. If you wandered in off the elevators and looked around the Department of Homeland Security's Domestic Nuclear Detection Office, you might think the employees were selling insurance. It doesn't look like the place created by the Bush administration to prevent a nuclear 9/11.
The truth is that things are not going very well in the Armageddon-prevention business. Oxford is selling a form of insurance; he oversees the construction of the last line of defense against the entry of a bomb—or the fuel for one—into the United States. The employees in the cubicles are in charge of designing, testing, purchasing, and deploying the detectors that are supposed to ring the alarm if a truck coming into Manhattan through the Lincoln Tunnel is carrying a nuclear weapon. They are setting up the “portals” that scan containers at the giant port at Long Beach, California, and in the cargo hold at Kennedy Airport. They don't have much margin for error. If a weapon makes it as far as their detectors, it means the “layered defense” system that the Bush administration designed in 9/11's aftermath has already failed, probably more than once.
The first layer belongs to the intelligence agencies, which are monitoring phone calls and e-mails around the world and paying informants, in hopes of getting some warning of a pending plot. Cargo headed to the United States, and elsewhere, is supposed to be scanned before it leaves ports in Europe and Asia. Manifests are supposed to be checked, with special attention to anything that wasn't packed by a “trusted carrier.” The detectors at the ports and in the tunnels are the last layer. If they fail to sound the alarm, the bomb is in a basement—or a parked car.
That's the plan, anyway. The reality is a little different.
In September 2008—as Capitol Hill was consumed with designing the bailout bill to save reeling financial institutions—Oxford had to acknowledge to a Senate subcommittee that the government's detection programs had gone seriously awry. The aging technology that the Bush administration rushed into place after 9/11 to provide some measure of reassurance was based on 1980s designs and was never intended to detect a nuclear weapon.
The current detectors are, as Oxford puts it, “basically big Geiger counters” built for industries that need to make sure that irradiated scrap metal does not make it into factories. He describes those outdated detectors with care because their shortcomings are classified so that potential terrorists don't understand what is detectable and what is not. But Oxford notes, “if you had HEU [highly enriched uranium] in traditional cargo, the current system would have great difficulty in detecting the amount of material we are told we would have to identify.” Put more simply, the old detectors simply can't pick up a few kilograms of the most common bomb fuel that terrorists would likely employ. When pressed, Oxford concedes that if you put Little Boy—the atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima in 1945—through one of the existing radiation detectors, it probably wouldn't set off alarms. The casing of the bomb itself would probably create enough shielding. I went to another nuclear expert who does not work for the government—but once did—to ask him if this could be true. He stopped for a moment, and said: “Five ‘Little Boys’ wouldn't register with the junk we've put at the ports.”
That is not to say the system is useless. There are cargoes that do set off the current detectors. Giant loads of bananas coming into the United States from Latin America trigger alarms all the time; the high potassium levels give off trace amounts of radiation. Slabs of granite, imported to remodel kitchens from Scarsdale to Beverly Hills, frequently emit a radioactive signature. So do porcelain toilets. Kitty litter makes the needle on the big detectors hop, and so does wood from trees that grew downwind from Chernobyl. It should be no surprise that at the port of Los Angeles/Long Beach, there are 400 to 600 false alarms a day—115,000 a year. In fact, the sensors currently deployed will pick up almost anything that is radioactive, except for an atom bomb.
“You can't change the laws of physics,” said Lisa Gordon-Hagerty, who tackled this problem for both the Clinton and Bush administrations. “The reality is that a real weapon doesn't create much of a radioactive signature.” It is one of those inconvenient facts that President Bush neglected to mention when he, and other members of the administration, boasted that 98 percent of the 11 million cargo containers that enter the United States are now “screened.” It was a carefully worded claim—one deliberately designed to leave Americans (and terrorists) with the impression that in the post-9/11 age, we've solved the problem of detecting a nuclear device or fuel hidden in a cargo container. We haven't—but if someone attempts to attack America with kitchen countertops, the Department of Homeland Security has us covered.
Technology problems aside, there are many other obstacles to detecting nuclear material—starting with the first line of defense, which is overseas. The Bush administration made much of its “Megaports” initiative, which is supposed to scan cargo as it is being loaded onto ships bound for the United States. The plan makes a lot of sense, because by the time the cargo pulls into the port of Long Beach, it may be too late to stop the attack.
But it turns out that many countries don't want U.S. Customs inspectors on their territory, and working at their ports. Shippers don't want to slow the process of loading the ships—time is money, and inspections take time. And of course the scanning equipment we are installing around the world doesn't pierce containers any better than the scanning equipment we are installing at home.
Just as the Bush administration was winding down in October 2008, Michael Chertoff, the secretary of homeland security, told Congress that it was impossible—and maybe even unwise—to fulfill the legislative mandate to make sure all cargo is scanned for radioactivity while it is still abroad. Instead, he said the focus should be on improving the “trusted shipper” program and the review of manifests detailing the contents of every container. And just as most people worry more about street crime in rough neighborhoods than in leafy suburbs, Chertoff seemed more worried about loose nukes in some parts of the world than in others. “I'm not terribly concerned someone's going to build a nuclear bomb in England” and smuggle it into the United States, he said. “But I might be more concerned about South Asia.”3
Somehow, Chertoff's reassuring words didn't make me sleep much better. Anyone smart enough to make a bomb is probably smart enough to figure out that you don't want to ship it directly out of Pyongyang or Natanz. The containers transporting the centrifuges A. Q. Khan built for the Libyans (in Malaysia, not a place Mr. Chertoff might worry about very much) were transferred at least once, from one freighter to another, in Dubai.
So in 2012, the year Congress mandated this effort be complete, the “layered defense” envisioned by the Bush administration will still be as porous as a coffee filter. But there has been some progress. New York City—recognizing that it is target number one—has roughly 1,000 officers a day moving around the five boroughs with mobile detection units and radiation wands. Greeting parties are sent out to cargo ships when they enter New York Harbor—and are still far from the city—to inspect incoming ships. “It works better than you might think,” said Richard Falkenrath, who was a homeland defense official inside the White House before he took command of the effort for the New York City Police Department. He had praise for Oxford's operation. “You hear a lot of horror stories about the Department of Homeland Security, but the domestic nuclear detection guys do a pretty good job.”
Oxford's office now spends $500 million a year struggling to find solutions to the myriad problems with detection. Considering the importance of the mission, it's worth questioning whether that budget is woefully inadequate. In 2008, we were spending $12 billion a month in Iraq, a war that was originally justified as a way to keep a nuclear 9/11 from happening on our soil.4 If you asked most Americans whether they think that even a twentieth of that amount might be better spent on detectors that had a chance of telling the difference between Little Boy and kitty litter, I suspect I know how they would answer.
The closest thing to a solution is a new generation of detectors, called Advanced Spectroscopic Portal monitors, or ASPs, in acronym-crazed Washington. They are not just big Geiger counters. The ASP was designed to solve the banana and kitty litter problem by discriminating between harmless sources of radiation and potentially dangerous ones.
Similar detectors have been operating at the White House for several years, as I once discovered after making the mistake of taking a medical test involving a radioactive isotope and then going to an appointment in the West Wing. I got no farther than just inside the main doors when alarms started blasting, and a Secret Service agent moved in on me. With one phone call to a command center—and one eye on my briefcase—the agent learned exactly which isotope had triggered the alarm, and knew that it was one used for medical purposes. Everyone relaxed, save for the fact that they couldn't figure out how to turn off the sirens.
The good news is that Oxford wants to protect America's cities with the kind of technology that safeguards the West Wing against radioactive journalists. The bad news is that even the newest detectors have many of the same problems when it comes to finding a well-shielded lump of highly enriched uranium. Like the old detectors, the ASPs can be fooled. As Thomas Cochran, a scientist with the Natural Resources Defense Council and a critic of the administration's efforts, told Congress, a terrorist who knew what he was doing could “defeat these systems almost 100 percent of the time.” Fortunately, most terrorists don't know what they are doing. But that was not exactly the kind of reassuring message the Bush administration wanted to advertise.
If, by a stroke of good luck, the ASPs do find a radioactive shipment, they should be able to tell the difference between the granite countertop you just ordered from Home Depot and a 10-kiloton bomb. Yet by the time Bush left office, seven years after 9/11, there was a raging argument over whether the ASP technology was worth the price. Not a single next-generation detector had been deployed in an American port. A couple of them were being tested. A backup system, designed to X-ray cargo to determine if part of a shipment has been shielded to defeat the radiation detectors, was shelved as too expensive, too inaccurate, and too slow. The bottom line is that at America's borders, it is probably as easy to ship a few kilograms of HEU into the country as it is to ship in a few kilograms of heroin. “Failure is not an acceptable option,” Senator Joseph Lieber-man warned Oxford during a hearing in 2008. “I want to know what's transpired over the last two years which has left us basically where we were two years ago.”5
OXFORD BEGAN looking at America's post-Cold War nuclear defenses when he was in the White House in the panicky years after the 9/11 attacks. “It was a mess,” he told me one day in his office. “Here we knew there was a low-probability chance of a truly catastrophic event, and there was no real government plan.”
Today there is a semblance of a plan. But as Oxford is the first to volunteer, “there is more to be done than just scanning containers,” or even meeting ships before they enter New York Harbor. “We are not even close” to managing the threat, he says.
When I went to see Oxford, he had just spent the preceding few days examining one of the many holes in the net of defenses. He asked what if someone flew a nuclear weapon into the United States on a private plane—and detonated it in the air over a major city, rather than landing at an airport? No one had a reassuring answer to his question. “My worry is that you wouldn't even have to land the jet,” Oxford noted.
America's domestic detection infrastructure, he pointed out, depends on trying to keep track of shipments before they leave a foreign port and then inspecting them once they arrive. But as any pilot of a private jet—and many passengers—will tell you, most countries make assumptions about the safety of private aviation that they would never make about the commercial sector. (The White House press corps can testify to this fact. Although our baggage and cameras were always searched before we went aboard Air Force One, at the airport closest to the president's ranch we walked aboard our chartered jet without ever passing through a metal detector.) Oxford, ever the pragmatist, soon began focusing on a program to screen private jets that take off from abroad before they depart for the States. Of course, the plan requires tremendous confidence in the skills and focus of foreign inspectors.
THE PROBLEM of defending the homeland is complicated by the fact that many departments in the U.S. government seem to have a piece of the Armageddon business. Yet no one really runs the show.
The Department of Homeland Security and the FBI are supposed to deal with threats inside the United States—tracking down terrorists and detecting, finding, and disabling weapons. But the Energy Department has most of the expertise in these matters, including the nuclear-emergency response teams that are the stuff of so many movie dramas, and the “render safe” teams, meant to defuse weapons, described to me by one Energy Department official as “one of those jobs that make it hard for you to buy life insurance.”
While the Pentagon is responsible for thinking about how to reduce the threat, the intelligence agencies have created a new “counterproliferation center,” part think tank, part “action tank,” where officials can cull all of their knowledge about how to stop terrorists from obtaining the most powerful weapons in the world. Ken Brill, the lanky diplomat who runs the center, tries to put together the government's many pockets of expertise—at the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency, inside the Energy Department and the National Laboratories, at the largely defunct Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, and at the State Department—as they try to come up with new ways of defeating rogue states and terrorists.
Brill used to be America's representative to the IAEA, meaning he understands the limitations of inspections of countries determined to hide their weapons programs. “I'd rather not rely on that,” he said to me. “We have to develop our own ways to find out. That's what intelligence agencies are all about.”
Who puts all these different elements together to avoid the kind of turf battles that contributed to the failure to find and thwart the 9/11 plotters? No one. Bush signed more than thirty presidential directives that dealt with some aspect of combating WMD, but many of them were overlapping, inconsistent, or integrated with the previous directives. One of the main conclusions of the 9/11 Commission was that the United States desperately needed a single senior official, inside the White House, with the president's ear, who has the responsibility of ensuring that everything is being done to prevent a devastating attack on the country— and who has thought at length about how the United States should respond if a bomb does go off. President Bush signed the legislation to create the job in August 2007. As his term approached its last two months, he had yet to appoint someone to the post.
“It's incredible to me,” said Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, the Energy Department's intelligence chief, who met with Bush many times during the nuclear terror scares of the first term. “You want somebody right by the president's elbow who knows this stuff. Because it's more likely to happen now than it was in the Cold War.”
WHEN GEORGE BUSH was running for president in 2000, he made clear he was thinking about the evolving nature of nuclear weapons. In a speech in May of that year in Washington, he declared that “the emerging security threats to the United States … now come from rogue states, terrorist groups, and other adversaries seeking weapons of mass destruction, and the means to deliver them. Threats also come from insecure nuclear stockpiles and the proliferation of dangerous technologies.”6 He sounded as if he was preparing to remake American nuclear strategy as soon as he took office. “The Cold War logic that led to the creation of massive stockpiles on both sides is now outdated.” Bush proclaimed, “We should not keep weapons that our military planners do not need. These unneeded weapons are the expensive relics of dead conflicts. And they do nothing to make us more secure.”
Eight years later, after a war fought against one of the only rogue states not driving toward a weapon, and after more than a few panic attacks about terrorists with bombs, it's worth assessing how Bush performed on his own set of goals. The answer is that, as in so many things in his presidency, he got off to a fast start and then forgot what he was trying to accomplish.
Bush's first step was to abandon the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, angering the Russians and displaying the administration's contempt for international agreements. Though this decision led to predictions of disaster, it did not result in the antimissile arms race that Bush's many critics anticipated. Bush let Powell quickly negotiate a major arms reduction agreement with Putin, the Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty, which the two presidents signed inside the Kremlin with considerable fanfare. Both men hailed the agreement as a simpler, faster, more cordial model for dispensing with the problem. Nuclear weapons were no longer the centerpiece of Washington's relations with Moscow. It was the right move, and it had the potential to be a great start to reshaping the relationship.
But almost as soon as the treaty was signed, all the energy went out of the effort. Both countries shrank their arsenals, but they never had the follow-on talks that might have allowed them to get down toward a truly minimum deterrent. They never fully engaged with the Chinese, the one major power that is beginning to increase the size and sophistication of its arsenal and a player that clearly needs to be part of any larger agreement to reduce the nuclear threat. The failure to follow up was a huge mistake. As Russia became richer and more nationalistic, its relations with Washington became frostier. By the end of Bush's presidency, Russia had resumed occasional “bomber patrols”—one of the most memorable symbols of the Cold War—and, in 2008, began giving speeches about building a more potent nuclear arsenal. Whatever momentum Bush had created was lost.
Putin's aggressiveness was matched by Bush's seeming indifference to the issue after the Moscow Treaty was signed. One might think that when four serious cold warriors—Henry A. Kissinger, George P. Shultz, Sam Nunn, and William Perry—come together to argue that the United States can now safely begin to negotiate its way down to an arsenal of zero weapons, eliminating the weapons all four helped to amass, the president of the United States might be interested in hearing out their logic. Instead, Bush barely engaged with them and never publicly addressed their central argument: that if the United States is going to get other nations to give up nuclear ambitions, it is going to have to move in the direction of deep reductions. There are legitimate counterarguments to be made, but Bush never articulated them. He was simply absent from the debate.
That became clear in the winter of 2007, when a group of Russians and Americans, Nunn included, went to see Bush at the White House as part of an annual high-level exchange program between the two countries.
“The Russians started talking about this effort, and then Nunn explained briefly the elements of the plan,” one participant in the conversation told me later. Nunn noted that the president himself had often pointed out that the threat America faces had changed and he had embraced the goals of deeper arms reductions. He noted Bush's call for a halt on new countries going into the enrichment business and had expanded American efforts to lock down weapons and fuel around the world. (That program is named for Nunn and Senator Richard Lugar, who created the effort immediately after the end of the Cold War.) A courtly Southerner, Nunn was very diplomatic, but he made it clear that Bush and other world leaders had failed to follow through on their grand pronouncements. With the exception of the program to speed up the securing of nuclear material in Russia, there was no schedule, no diplomatic push, no leadership on the issue. And this was Bush's signature goal—making sure weapons and nuclear fuel were kept out of the hands of terrorists.
“It was really astonishing—here we were, sitting in the Roosevelt Room, yards from the Oval Office, and we were talking about how we could dismantle the threat that hung over our lives for seventy years,” an observer to the conversation noted. And Bush, he said, “couldn't have shown less interest. He jotted a few notes, looked up over his glasses—and then he asked a question about something else.” (Nunn had a different memory, saying that he thought the president had listened.)
Perhaps Bush's failure to lead the charge to drive down the size of the American and Russian arsenals grew out of his belief that America could never let another country become a “peer competitor” that could challenge American power. Inside the Bush White House, Hadley and other aides argued that retaining American supremacy meant keeping upward of 1,200 to 1,500 nuclear weapons in our arsenals. “Do you really want the Chinese to feel they have equivalent power?” one of Bush's aides asked me one afternoon. “Do you really want the Iranians to think, ‘Gee, if we get to three hundred, we can be a superpower too?’” Bush, another official said, respected Kissinger and Shultz, two lions of the Republican foreign policy establishment, “but on this one, he thinks they don't understand what we're up against.”
THOUGH HE WAS suspicious of arms control treaties, Bush deserves credit for making progress in one area: counterproliferation. In the years after 9/11, the White House feverishly churned out new strategies to combat weapons of mass destruction, and the president signed new, classified “National Security Directives” to move the bureaucracy into action. The Proliferation Security Initiative, which joined countries together to interdict weapons on the high seas or in the air, was so innovative that both Senator Obama and Senator McCain praised the project and promised to continue it. With U.S. pressure there was a UN resolution requiring all countries to lock down their loose nuclear material (few have complied). Congress agreed to pay for radiation portals at key land crossings around the world, many concentrated in Eastern Europe, where the bulk of the more than 1,000 cases of illegal trafficking in nuclear materials have occurred over the past fifteen years. The detectors, of course, suffer from the same limitations as the technology used in the United States. But they are better than nothing. Bush also created another program, the “Global Threat Reduction Initiative,” a project designed to reduce and protect vulnerable nuclear material at civilian sites worldwide, and joined up with Russia to create a “Global Initiative to Combat Nuclear Terrorism,” building the capacity of partner nations to improve accounting, control, and security of nuclear materials.
Astoundingly, Bush did little to prepare the country for the need for this new kind of nuclear deterrence. After A. Q. Khan's arrest, Bush gave a major speech describing a series of sensible ways to keep new countries from adding to the world's oversupply of nuclear material, including international “fuel banks” that would sell the fuel to any country that wanted to build nuclear power plants— and would take back the waste product to make sure it isn't turned into bombs. But he put little effort into the diplomacy to make the plan work, and it was quietly shelved by the allies.
As the Bush administration prepared to leave office, it assembled a sizable inventory of these and other projects to hand off to its successors. “It's a good list,” Hadley told me one day in September 2008.
Yet the programs were wildly underfunded. One member of an independent commission that examined the programs noted that “the Global Threat Reduction Initiative, which provides a detailed list of the world's nuclear sites and weapons, so that the most vulnerable could be locked down first, has less federal manpower than a light infantry rifle company.”7 In 2008—seven years after President Bush told the country, “our highest priority is to keep terrorists from acquiring weapons of mass destruction”—Congress was informed that the list of places those terrorists could steal the weapons or fuel from was still being compiled.
As with so many projects in the Bush administration, ideology became the enemy of practical solutions. Making lists of vulnerable sites seemed a lot less urgent than invading Iraq to prevent Saddam Hussein from reconstituting a nuclear program the IAEA had largely dismantled.
At the end of his presidency, one big nuclear initiative seemed to catch Bush's interest: a plan to put missile defense in Poland and the Czech Republic, even at the cost of outraging the Russians. The system—referred to as “Rumsfeld's Revenge” inside the Pentagon-was supposed to deter the Iranians in case they ever developed a nuclear warhead to fit atop their long-range missiles, which could reach Israel or Europe. Bush sold the effort as an insurance policy— despite the fact that it was designed to counter a threat that does not yet exist, with a technology that may not work.
Not surprisingly the Russians were convinced the missile defenses were secretly aimed at them. So when Putin visited Bush at Kennebunkport, the summer home of the president's parents, the Russian leader offered to have the missile defenses installed on Russian territory, jointly manned and operated by American and Russian personnel. “It was a serious offer,” one of Bush's senior aides, who was present for the meeting, told me later. “But the president never really considered it seriously, because there was a caveat.” The condition: the United States could not build missile defenses on Russia's borders, particularly in Poland and the Czech Republic. The missile defenses could be inside Russia pointing out, but not outside Russia pointing in.
The Bush administration's excuse for rejecting Putin's offer out of hand was that Rumsfeld had already made a commitment to Poland and the Czech Republic. It was a thin argument—and a major mistake. Though Bush spent roughly $10 billion a year on missile defense—or about twenty times more than the government has dedicated to deploying domestic radiation detectors—the antimissile technology envisioned for Europe will not be deployed for years. It is simply not ready. Yet a deal with Putin would have put Washington and Moscow on the same side of the effort to contain Iran's nuclear ambitions. Suddenly, the two Cold War rivals would have been partners in designing a defense for Europe. Given what happened twelve months later—the Russian attack on Georgia—it's doubtful that Bush's successor will have a similar opportunity.
IN FEBRUARY2008 Hadley revealed that Bush had quietly rewritten American deterrence policy but hadn't told anybody, including the terrorists he was seeking to deter. After a year and a half of debate inside the White House, Bush had decided that the threat he had made against North Korea—that he would hold North Korea “fully accountable” if it was found to be the source of a terrorist weapon—would now be expanded to the rest of the world.
“The president has approved a new declaratory policy to help deter terrorists from using weapons of mass destruction against the United States, our friends, and allies,” Hadley told a small group at Stanford University. Under the president's new directive, he said, “the United States will hold any state, terrorist group, or other non-state actor fully accountable for supporting or enabling terrorist efforts to obtain or use weapons of mass destruction.”8 Back in the days of the Cold War, “fully accountable” suggested the United States reserved the right to use nuclear weapons in response. With this new policy, not only would states be held responsible, but in the aftermath of the revelations about A. Q. Khan, individuals would be held accountable as well. Their actions would justify retaliation on a grand scale if they assisted a terrorist group in obtaining a weapon of mass destruction. The directive invited a question that the White House declined to discuss: How do you threaten devastating retaliation against a group with no territory of its own, one that might be working out of a basement, armed with little more than a laptop? And what does it mean to be held “fully accountable” after North Korea shipped nuclear technology to Syria and has never been held accountable?
Few news organizations noted Hadley's declaration, which he repeated a few months later at a meeting in Washington on halting nuclear proliferation. Curiously, Bush himself never announced his decision, although it constituted one of the largest changes in American nuclear policy since the end of the Cold War. This was “declaratory policy” without a declaration. For a while there was talk of having the president give a speech on the subject, but his days in the White House were waning, and the country—and much of the world—had stopped listening to him. Markets were melting down. With Pakistan in chaos and relations with Russia slipping back toward open hostility, some feared he might seem to be pouring oil on a burning world.
When I asked the White House for a copy of the new policy, I was told that if it existed anywhere, it was probably classified. That's great, I said, but wasn't the whole point to have the president make a declaration that the world would notice—and heed? I was told I could dig up Hadley's speech on the White House website. A few days before the 2008 presidential election, the White House asked Robert Gates to amplify Hadley's declaration, and he did—finally generating some headlines. But Bush himself never issued the warning.
Imagine that. Five years ago, Bush talked incessantly about grave threats in the runup to a war against a dictator who did not possess weapons of mass destruction. He left office facing several countries that had these weapons or were building them, and said little about it. Perhaps there was no more vivid evidence of how Bush's credibility— and America's leverage—had diminished.
ON A BRILLIANT April day in 2007, when those cherry blossoms around the Jefferson Memorial were near their brilliant peak, about fifty of the top military, Homeland Security, and intelligence officials of the United States gathered in Washington to think anew about the unthinkable.
During the Cold War, Pentagon officials and civil defense analysts used to meet all the time to discuss what a full-scale nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union would look like. Fortunately, no one ever had to discover how accurate these forecasts were. But the challenges posed the day after a small nuclear device is detonated in an American city—an event everyone in the room said they thought was now far more likely than a nuclear exchange during the Cold War—were entirely different. The bombing itself would be horrible, everyone agreed, though not as horrible as a single Soviet weapon would have been.9 But as the participants talked about how they or their organizations would react, it became evident that the government needed to think this one through again.
One Homeland Security official discussed the contingency plans for immediately putting some of their top officials on television or radio to give instructions about where the wind was blowing, who should stay in place, and who should flee the radioactive plume. “You realize,” one of the participants said, “as soon as you guys go on television instead of the president, everyone's going to assume the president is dead?” From the response, it appeared that no one had thought much about that.
But the biggest discovery arose from the fact that the government's plans all focused on a single place and event into which emergency help would be poured—a new Ground Zero. “They thought it was going to be like Hurricane Katrina,” said Ashton Carter, who helped organize the event. “And it won't. It will feel like it's an attack everywhere, because if San Francisco is hit, the next question will be whether to evacuate Washington.”
“The terrorist who says he's got another weapon will have enormous credibility” even if it's a bluff, Carter noted. The financial impact will be instantaneous—and calamitous.
And more than ever, the United States will need its allies—and maybe even some enemies—to figure out whether additional weapons or fuel are missing, and where they might be. Threatening retaliation, Cold War-style, may be the first instinct for angry talking heads on television. But instant retaliation may not help us survive the worst moments of the Second Nuclear Age.