by M.J. Zuckerman

Just Because We No Longer “Duck and Cover” Doesn’t Mean We’re in the Clear


Plumb the depths of any Baby Boomer’s psyche and you will, sooner or later, come upon the “Duck and Cover” drills. Tucked into some fold or flap of paranoid, formative experience—cross-referenced to Sputnik Fear and Cuban Missile Trauma—there is the childhood recollection of this oft-repeated exercise: Without any warning, the teacher shouted “DROP!” at which point every student hit the cold, dull-brown linoleum, scrambled beneath their desk and assumed the position, curled tight into a ball, arms over head or hugging knees. In this modified fetal posture, trying desperately not to come in contact with the layer of age-hardened chewing gum lining the bottom of the desk, children were supposed to believe that they had found refuge from the onslaught of incoming ICBMs packing hundreds of kilotons of thermo-nuclear might.

Officials at the highest levels of America’s civil defense fully recognized that this exercise provided no real physical protection. Instead, according to a seminal study funded by the Federal Civil Defense Administration at the panicked-dawn of the nuclear arms race, these exercises were to serve as a psychological girder for “emotion management,” providing American youth with the nonsensical notion that they were saving themselves. There was also something vaguely patriotic about the exercise, as if everyone was doing his or her part to stare down Communism. All of this was personified in the memorable 1952 Civil Defense Administration’s Cold War classic, Duck and Cover, which featured a plucky, anthropomorphic turtle named Bert [as recalled by www.conelrad.com] who survives nuclear attacks by hunkering down in his shell:

	A "Duck and Cover" poster from the 1950s.

There was a turtle by the name of Bert and Bert the turtle was very alert; when danger threatened him he never got hurt he knew just what to do...
He ducked! [Explosion sound]
And covered!
Ducked! [Explosion sound]
And covered!

Fast forward to November 1989 and the Berlin Wall is under assault from a rag-tag collection of East Germans enthralled by the realization that their political fortunes have taken a dramatic turn; the greatest ideological competition in history ends in a fizzle rather than a mushroom cloud. Across the Atlantic, we look on, amazed and relieved.

But just as the Cold War’s “emotion management” exercises sought to provide a false sense of security, distracting from the true nature of all-out nuclear war, the end of the Cold War has lulled the general population into a worldview that the nuke threat is part of a bygone age. It isn’t. The nature of the threat has changed. It is no longer likely to take the form of sudden, mutually assured annihilation by cascading nuclear ordnance—although that too remains a possibility as long as the U.S. and Russia maintain nuclear arsenals on high alert. Today’s most commonly contemplated nuclear threat is nuclear terrorism, in which casualties would be “limited” to several hundred thousand dead and the collapse of key economic sectors in the first days after a detonation, followed by broader economic implications and, depending which scenario plays out, localized nuclear reprisals or regional conflicts in which millions more could die. In this article we focus on understanding the threat.

The Doomsday Clock of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is currently set at seven minutes to midnight. Courtesy the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

The Doomsday Clock, created in 1947 by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists as an indicator of nuclear threat should not be looked upon as a relic. For nearly 60 years, the hands of the clock have moved closer to or shifted away from midnight, “to reflect the global level of nuclear danger and the state of international security.” The worst was two minutes to midnight, in 1953, when the U.S. and the Soviets, while not on speaking terms, each detonated thermonuclear tests within nine months of each other; the best was 17 minutes to midnight, in 1991, when the U.S. and Russia were unilaterally disengaging tactical nuclear weapons. Today, however, the clock stands at a disconcerting seven minutes to midnight.

That is not a narrow reflection of informed opinion. President Bush and Senator John Kerry agreed during their 2004 presidential debates that nuclear terrorism—and, more broadly, nuclear proliferation as it makes weapons of mass destruction (WMD) available to terrorists—was the single “gravest danger” and the “greatest threat” facing the United States. Russia’s President Putin expresses an equally urgent view. And yet, almost inexplicably, progress is measured in decades or stalled entirely on bureaucratic matters such as U.S. demands for unfettered access to Russian nuke sites where American taxpayers aided security.

Among those most worried about this lack of progress is Sam Nunn, Co-Chairman of the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI) and, since his years in the Senate, one of the foremost policy experts on nuclear nonproliferation. He rates the U.S and Russian leaders’ progress by saying, “On a scale of one-to-ten, in terms of words, I’d give them a ten; in terms of deeds, about a three.”

The recurrent theme one hears when speaking to Nunn is the need for leadership, accountability, responsibility and transparency. But mostly leadership. While he applauds U.S.-Russian nuclear control initiatives reached at the July 2006 G-8 meeting in St. Petersburg, Russia, as he explained in a New York Times op-ed, the record of follow-through and achievement “is not great.” Nunn argues that the U.S. and Russian presidents each need to appoint a senior aid with full-time responsibility for WMD controls, able to engage the presidents’ attention to resolve thorny bureaucratic disputes. Then, there needs to be oversight, either internally or externally, probably both, rating the performance of these efforts. He adds, “Only Bush and Putin can ride herd and say, ‘Listen, we meant it when we said it, so let’s get it done.’ But that doesn’t seem to be happening and I can’t understand, particularly after President Bush keeps saying this is the most serious problem we have, keeping weapons of mass destruction out of the hands of terrorist groups. President Putin said it too, but it’s not treated as the highest priority.”

“The threat posed by terrorists getting their hands on WMD is an underlying theme of most of the grantmaking in the Corporation’s International Peace and Security Program,” explains program Chair Stephen Del Rosso. “Building on the Corporation’s long legacy in the peace and security field, we support a range of work—from nuclear nonproliferation, to biosecurity, to post-conflict state building—that addresses what we consider the most serious dimensions of the terrorist threat.”

Richard L. Garwin—a nuclear scientist present at the creation of the nuclear age, a member of the Manhattan Project, who today includes in his voluminous portfolio advising the Pentagon as well as the Pugwash Conferences (which bring together international leaders and scholars seeking cooperative solutions for global problems, particularly armed conflict)—postulates that there stands a fifty percent chance of a nuclear attack on an American city within the next five years. Former Secretary of Defense William J. Perry has offered a similar prediction.

At the other end of the spectrum is Robin Frost, a Canadian government analyst, who has stirred something of a hornets’ nest with his argument in an International Institute for Strategic Studies “Adelphi Paper” that the likelihood of any nuclear terrorist attack on the West is somewhere between slight and none.

Yet what Frost, Garwin and seemingly everyone else agree upon is that the potential of even a modestly successful nuclear terrorist detonation is so horrific that even if the likelihood is less than one in a thousand, the consequences are so awful that there remains an urgent need for cautious threat management to reduce that risk toward zero. Remarkably, despite the efforts of the United Nations, G-8 and other political, scientific,academic and philanthropic entities, the United States demonstrates no sense of urgency to address what Graham Allison, former Assistant Secretary of Defense and founding dean of Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, writes in his book Nuclear Terrorism (Henry Holt and Company, 2005) is “the ultimate preventable catastrophe.”

According to a 2001 nonpartisan Department of Energy advisory panel report, the world’s most at-risk stockpiles of fissile materials—the single toughest hurdle for terrorists interested in a nuclear device—could be secured for $30 billion over eight-to-ten years. The advisory panel’s recommendations were never adopted by Congress or the White House. By comparison, the United States spent $430 billion for wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in less than five years, according to the Congressional Research Service.

Arguably, we would be more secure if we were more fearful—perhaps if we thought more in terms of “Duck and Cover.” As Intel founder Andrew S. Grove observed about the nature of competitive forces: “Only the paranoid survive.”

But that does not mean hiding under a desk.

Defining the Threat
What we should be doing, many experts say, is defining the threat and securing against it. We no longer face the monolithic threat of two superpowers incinerating civilization as they struggle for hegemony. Today’s most likely nuclear threats are numerous, more subtle and complex.

It is estimated that some 27,000 nuclear weapons are divided among eight nations, five of which (the United Kingdom, the United States, France, India and Israel) are regarded as stable, democratic allies. The other three—China, Russia and Pakistan—are regarded with some uncertainty. The ninth member of the Nuclear Club is almost certainly North Korea and Iran is likely to join in the next few years. The newer members pose the continuing threat of destabilizing regional or global politics.

In terms of nuclear threats to the United States:

It is widely agreed that the Bush administration’s 2002 National Strategy to Combat Weapons of Mass Destruction, which clearly “reserves the right to respond with overwhelming force” (READ: massive nuclear reprisal) against any WMD attack on the United States, is sufficient to deter any nation—even regimes like North Korea’s—from targeting American territory, its possessions or interests.

Of greater concern is an unintended attack on the United States, either through an accidental launch, theft of a device or rogue officials providing a weapon.

The focus of gravest concern is that terrorists could build a bomb. The toughest obstacle to achieving this goal is obtaining between forty and one hundred pounds of fissile material (either Highly Enriched Uranium or plutonium) from more than four million pounds stockpiled by forty nations (ninety-five percent of it in the U.S. and Russia), where security frequently consists of “no more than a night watchman and a chain link fence,” according to a Harvard University report commissioned by NTI.

These threats should not be confused with lesser, more easily executed radiological terrorist opportunities, such as a “dirty bomb” (explosives packed with low-radiation material) or an attack on a nuclear power plant (which could cause some contamination, but no explosion). Either of these falls into the category of Weapons of Mass Distraction, which would pale in comparison to 9/11.

“We shouldn’t be lulled into a false sense of security because there haven’t been any mass-casualty terrorist attacks in the U.S. since 9/11,” observes Del Rosso. “If it is true, as reported, that al-Qaeda aborted its planned lethal gas attack on the New York City subway system because it didn’t consider it to be a dramatic enough sequel, then we have to come to terms with a persistent threat that very well might include WMD.”

We probably can’t guarantee absolute security from such events taking place, “but we can surely get to very much lower risk than we’re at today,” says Matthew Bunn, Senior Research Associate at Harvard’s Project on Managing the Atom, and co-author of the annual NTI report, Securing the Bomb.

The traditional view, that only nations possess the wealth and resources necessary to mount a nuclear weapons program, remains true for one step in the process: The infrastructure necessary for creating fissile material is a vast undertaking, measured in decades, billions of dollars and hundreds of trained experts. The threat of nuclear terrorism, then, arises almost solely when nations fail to exercise strategic security over fissile material or a completed nuclear weapon. “The most crucial element of such a strategy is to lock down every nuclear weapon and every kilogram of potential nuclear bomb material everywhere,” says the NTI report.

In an era when terrorism requires that we assess the source of nuclear dangers in new and nontraditional ways, it’s necessary to understand the unique issues presented by each nuclear nation.

Next page: The most crucial element of any day program designed to prevent nuclear weapon ans every kilogram of nuclear bomb material everywhere.

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