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Analysis: America's 'Gravest Danger'

Council on Foreign Relations

March 31, 2006
Author: Eben Kaplan

In launching his preemption doctrine, President Bush announced, "The gravest danger our nation faces lies at the crossroads of radicalism and technology." At the center of U.S. concerns is the prospect of terrorists acquiring nuclear weapons. CFR Fellow Charles Ferguson explains in a new Special Report that while there are broad efforts to keep nuclear materials out of the hands of terrorists, gaps in the international response remain.

The United States has a multilayered strategy for preventing nuclear terrorism which includes a National Military Strategy to Combat Weapons of Mass Destruction. Other U.S. efforts include attempts to monitor, disrupt, and dismantle terrorist cells, detect nuclear materials entering the United States, and prevent terrorists from gaining access to nuclear materials. President Bush's newly revised National Security Strategy, says the best way to block aspiring nuclear terrorists is to "deny them access to the essential ingredient of fissile material." This is why so much focus has been put on halting the nuclear programs in Iran and North Korea. It is also among the aims of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and the UN convention on the prevention of nuclear terrorism (PDF). A report from the Nuclear Threat Initiative describes efforts to secure the bomb, and a CFR Backgound Q&A examines terrorists' nuclear capabilities.

Reducing stockpiles of highly enriched uranium (Arms Control Today) is another way to ensure nuclear materials stay out of terrorists' hands. This is one of the primary goals of the U.S.-led Global Threat Reduction Initiative, but the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists reports that Bush's new Energy Policy Act hampers this by loosening restrictions on highly enriched uranium exports.

Read the rest of this article on the cfr.org website.

Copyright 2006 by the Council on Foreign Relations. This material is republished on GlobalSecurity.org with specific permission from the cfr.org. Reprint and republication queries for this article should be directed to cfr.org.